US Coast Guard Helps Recover Plane Crash Victims From Bering Sea Ice Floe

 

The U.S. Coast Guard has found and searched the wreckage of the commuter aircraft that crashed on ice near Nome, Alaska last week. 

On Thursday, a small Cessna passenger plane en route from the village of Unalakleet to Nome went down over open water about 40 nautical miles southeast of its destination. The single-engine plane crashed on an ice floe, killing the pilot and all nine passengers aboard. 

Coast Guard search parties found the wreckage on Friday, and deployed two rescue swimmers to the surface of the ice by helicopter to investigate. They identified three victims in the wreckage; the other seven people aboard were not visible but were presumed dead because of the state of the aircraft. According to the Nome Volunteer Fire Department, the crash was not survivable. The remains of all ten victims were recovered by Monday. 

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) plans to conduct a further investigation, but accessing the wreckage is difficult. The ice is soft and unstable, and a winter storm is coming soon, part of the usual pattern of the Bering Sea's relentless weather. According to NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy, the ice floe is drifting at a rate of about five miles a day. 

Victims of the crash included two school staffmembers and two technical staff who were in Unalakleet to service a water plant. Like many of Alaska's far-flung coastal settlements, the area is roadless and accessible only by air or sea.  

The aircraft was a derivative of the Cessna 208, a commercially successful single-engine aircraft used around the world for passenger and cargo transport. About 3,000 examples have been delivered and have logged about 25 million flight hours, with about 277 lost in service over the past 40 years.