Alaska Plane Crash. Photo Credit Facebook AQ Aviation
The missing Bering single-engine plane has been located, tragically there are no survivors on board.
All nine passengers and the pilot have perished in the Tundra crash which happened on Thursday, February 6. There has been an ongoing rescue effort since Thursday afternoon, the plane has now been located just 34 miles out from its intended destination of Unalakleet, Alaska.
Nome Volunteer Fire Brigade representatives said last night that search parties had “located an aircraft matching the description of the missing plane approx. 34 miles southeast off of Nome.” they later said that “The Nome Search and Rescue Team is spooling up with assistance from the Alaska Air National Guard with recovery efforts. From reports we have received; the crash was not survivable. Our thoughts are with the families at this time.”
Names of some of 2 of the passengers have been released, Rhone Baumgartner and Kameron Hartvigson who were travelling by the Bering Air flight to Unalakleet to perform maintenance on a heat recovery system at the community’s water plant. For now, the identities of the rest of the passengers are unknown, although we do know they were all adults.
A routine flight turned to tragedy in the Alaskan frozen desert
The plane first lost contact with air traffic control over the Norton Sound, the last official message from the pilot had been that he was going to go into a holding pattern whilst waiting to land the plane. The whole journey should have taken just 55 minutes, but when the plane lost contact and showed no sign of landing, a rescue effort was launched.
Teams from multiple official agencies, the Coast Guard, Nome Volunteer Fire Brigade and the FBI all co-ordinated whilst looking for a plane in some of the worst weather conditions possible, with freezing temperatures hampering efforts. They are now battling the elements to retrieve the plane debris from the tundra. Jim West, chief of the Nome Volunteer Fire Department has said “The conditions out there are dynamic, so we’ve got to do it safely in the fastest way we can”.
The Coast Guard released comment on Friday to say that the plane had experienced an event which caused it to lose speed and altitude quickly, but that they could not speculate as to what that event was. Retrieval efforts are now on standby until daylight returns but will continue tomorrow.
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