All the seven passengers, who were boarded on the plane which crashed in a lake near Nashville, are presumed dead, the authorities said.

Authorities also said that the Tarzan actor Joe Lara and his wife also had been boarded on the small business jet which had taken off from Smyrna, Tennessee airport for Palm Beach, Florida.

The plane went down into Percy Priest Lake, about 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Nashville.

The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed seven people had been aboard the plane, CNN reported.

By Saturday night, operations had switched from search and rescue to recovery efforts, RCFR incident commander Captain Joshua Sanders told a press conference.

“We are no longer in an attempt to (look) for live victims at this point so we’re now recovering as much as we can from the crash site,” he said.

On Sunday afternoon, RCFR said on Facebook that recovery operations had found “several components of the aircraft as well as human remains” in a debris field about half a mile wide.

Operations would continue until dark and resume Monday morning, RCFR wrote.