founder of a Bay Area company that designed a My Space-like web site for children, was killed along with her 10-year-old son Friday when the small private jet she was piloting crashed shortly after take-off near Augusta, Maine.

Alison Rhodes, a spokeswoman for her firm, confirmed Saturday that Symons and her son, Balan, were the two who were killed in the crash. She was there to there to attend a ski camp with her son, associates said.

The 46-year-old Symons, a mother of a two children, was the founder and chief executive of Industrious Kid, a privately held company in Oakland that created Imbee, a "social networking" site for kids 8-14 years of age that shielded them from the adult content sometimes found My Space or Facebook.

Symons lived in San Francisco until about a year and a half ago, when she moved with her children to Steamboat Springs, Colo. She would commute a couple times a month to the Bay Area in her jet, which she flew herself.

She was the registered owner of the Cessna Citation C-525, which took off from Augusta State Airport at 5:45 p.m., bound for Lincoln, Nebraska. There was snow, sleet and freezing rain in the region, but investigators said it was too early to tell if weather was a factor in the crash, according to Associated Press.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jim Peters told AP that the pilot of the plane declared an emergency shortly after take-off, citing a problem with the attitude indicator, an instrument that measures whether the jet's nose is up or down in relation to the horizon, and the banking angle of the wings. The trouble apparently began when the plane was at an altitude of only 3,000 feet.

An air traffic controller was in radio contact with the plane, and tried to guide it back to the Augusta airport, but saw it drop off the radar screen. The plane went down in wooded area of West Gardiner Maine, about 10 miles from Augusta, the state capital.

Fire crews recovered two bodies from the wreckage. There were no injuries on the ground, according to police.

Tim Donovan, a co-founder and vice president of marketing for Industrious Kid, said Symons was in Maine attending a weeklong ski camp with her son. Donovan, his voice cracking after he had just heard about the crash Friday evening, said, "She has been a pilot for about 10 years. She was the only one who drove that plane."

A UCLA trained engineer, Symons was a part of several spectacularly successful Bay Area electronics firms. She was a co-founder of Alameda internet equipment maker Ascend Communications, which was purchased by Lucent Technology for $20 billion in 1999. Symons went on to co-found Zhone Technologies, an Oakland telecommunications company.

Her two children inspired her to start yet another company, Industrious Kid, which is riding the social networking phenomenon. "Think of it as Facebook with training wheels," said Donovan.

original source:sfgate.com