Four found dead in wreck of Alaska tourist plane, 5th is presumed dead
TALKEETNA, Alaska — A National Park Service ranger hanging from a helicopter on Monday found the bodies of four people in the wreckage of a flightseeing plane that crashed Saturday near Denali.
A fifth person aboard the K2 Aviation de Havilland Beaver was not found but is presumed dead, the park service said.
It is the deadliest flightseeing crash for a Denali air service in at least 20 years.
K2 announced Monday it is suspending flightseeing tours until further notice “as we give our staff time to grieve this loss.”
The park service on Monday afternoon identified the pilot as Craig Layson of Saline, Mich. The Saline Post newspaper said Monday that Layson and his wife had spent the past two summers in Alaska.
The passengers are from Poland but their names have not been released. The park service is in contact with the Polish Consulate in Los Angeles.
Layson was able to make two calls by satellite phone after the crash and reported injuries before communication with the plane ended. It wasn’t immediately clear how many people survived the initial crash.
Rescuers took advantage of a brief window of clearing weather Monday morning to spot the wreckage for the first time since the plane went down at about 6 p.m. Saturday. Then a ranger was lowered to the scene.
The ranger who got to the plane Monday said it appeared highly unlikely people had moved around after the crash.
The plane crashed in steep terrain in a crevasse on the side of a mountain, according to Steve Erickson, the climbing ranger who confirmed that none of people in the plane survived.
Erickson, wearing a climbing harness, hung from a fixed rope attached to a helicopter. The search lasted less than 5 minutes because clouds were moving in again quickly.
Describing the mission at the Talkeetna ranger station Monday afternoon, Erickson said “quite a bit of snow” had drifted into the plane.
He found the bodies of four of the five people and detected no signs of life, Erickson said. It’s possible the fifth was inside but he just couldn’t see that person because the incoming weather limited his time in the nose of the aircraft.
No footprints or disturbances led away from the site and there were no other signs to indicate any of the occupants made it out of the plane, officials said.
The weather closed back in, making additional efforts to find the fifth person impossible for now, park service spokeswoman Katherine Belcher said.
The plane crashed at about 10,500 feet near the summit of what’s known locally as Thunder Mountain, a feature roughly 14 miles southwest of the summit of Denali in extremely technical terrain on a hanging glacier.
The National Transportation Safety Board is assigning two investigators to look into the crash “because of the issues here,” said Clint Johnson, the agency’s Alaska chief.
The investigators will head to Talkeetna from Anchorage in the next few days, Johnson said.
“Whether we’re going to the site or not, that’s to be determined,” he said. “This apparently is in a very, very precarious location.”
K2 is working with all responding agencies to cooperate fully with the investigation, the company said in a statement emailed by public relations firm Thompson & Co.