Medical plane broke apart before fatal crash

STAGECOACH, Nev. — A medical transport flight that crashed in a mountainous area in northern Nevada, killing all five people aboard the plane including a patient, apparently broke apart before hitting the ground, authorities said Sunday.

The National Transportation Safety Board has sent a seven-member team of investigators to the site of Friday night’s crash near Stagecoach.

“How do we know if the airplane broke up in flight? We found parts of the airplane one-half to three-quarters of a mile away” from the crash scene, NTSB vice chair Bruce Landsberg said at a news briefing in Carson City.

Landsberg said in the afternoon briefing that a team spent all day looking for pieces of the downed plane.

He added that investigators would likely be at the site for several days before the wreckage of the single-engine Pilatus PC-12 is moved so investigators can try to determine a possible cause for the crash.

The plane was built in 2002.

“Right now, we just don’t know. This is like a three-dimensional puzzle,” Landsberg said. “It’s harder when you don’t have the pieces all in one place.”

The crash occurred during a winter storm warning issued by the National Weather Service in Reno for large swaths of Nevada, including parts of Lyon County. It was snowing steadily with winds around 20 mph with gusts up to 30 mph.

Visibility was under 2 miles with a cloud ceiling about 2,000 feet aboveground when the flight left Reno for Salt Lake City and went down, according to the weather service.

Care Flight, which provides ambulance service by plane and helicopter, said the pilot, a flight nurse, a flight paramedic, a patient and a patient’s family member all died.

Robin Hays, a Stagecoach resident and former flight nurse, said she heard the sputtering plane fly over her house before it crashed behind her property.

“I knew the plane was in trouble,” Hays told the Reno Gazette Journal.

“I knew it was going to crash. I was just hoping it wasn’t going to crash into my house.”

Hays called 911 and went outside but could not see the wreckage because of the blowing snow.

The Lyon County sheriff’s office said authorities began receiving calls about the crash near Stagecoach, Nev., around 9:15 p.m. and found the wreckage two hours later.

Care Flight officials said the company was halting all flights and will work with each of its operations to determine when it will return to service.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the plane was registered to Guardian Flight, based in South Jordan, Utah. Care Flight is a service of REMSA Health in Reno and Guardian Flight.