A small passenger airplane heading to the Nome community of western Alaska crashed on Friday. Reports say that all the 10 onboard lost their lives. U.S. Coast Guard spokesman Mike Salerno said that rescuers were searching from a helicopter for the last-known position of the airplane when they saw debris. They landed two rescue swimmers to investigate. According to reports, the aircraft lost contact about an hour into the flight.
Plane flew through light snowfall and fog
According to the Alaska Department of Public Safety, the Bering Air single-engine turboprop departed Unalakleet yesterday with nine passengers and a pilot. According to the National Weather Service, David Olson, Bering Air’s director of operations, said the Cessna Caravan took off from Unalakleet at 2:37 p.m. Light snows and fog accompanied a temperature of 17 degrees (about -8.3°C). According to the airline’s description of the plane, it was already operating at maximum passenger capacity.
No signal received from the Emergency locating transmitter
Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Benjamin McIntyre-Coble said that the forensic data from radars shared by the US Civil Air Patrol showed that the airplane underwent what he called “an event” that caused it to experience a reportable loss of altitude and a very fast loss of speed around 3:18 pm on Thursday. What happened during that time, I cannot speculate. McIntyre-Coble said he was not aware of any distress signal from the plane. Planes have an emergency locating transmitter. When it gets seawater, this transmitter sends a signal to a satellite, which then returns the message to the Coast Guard saying the plane is in distress. He said the Coast Guard has not received any such message.
Bering Air caters to 32 villages in western Alaska
Bering Air is dedicated to serving 32 villages in Western Alaska through hubs in Nome, Kotzebue, and Unalakleet. It has generally scheduled flights two times daily Monday-Saturday to most destinations. Aircraft are commonly the only mode of transport over any distance in rural Alaska, especially during winter. Unalakleet is a town of about 690 people in western Alaska, about 150 miles (about 240 kilometers) southeast of Nome, and 395 miles (about 640 kilometers) northwest of Anchorage.
3 plane crashes took lives of 84 people in just eight days
Earlier, on January 29, a joint collision involving an American Airlines jet and an army helicopter took place in the US, which became a cause for 67 deaths. While, a medical transport plane crashed in Philadelphia on January 31, killing 6 of its occupants and another person on the ground. Now 10 have died in Alaska due to this plane crash. These three major air incidents in America have taken away the lives of about 84 people within eight days.
