Posted on 08/01/2010 11:36:46 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
FAIRBANKS — A large multi-engine cargo-type plane crashed at Denali National Park on Sunday afternoon, bursting into a deadly fireball that sparked a wildfire.
About 3:15 p.m. Sunday, the aircraft hit the south-facing slope of Mount Healy within 1 mile of park headquarters and 200 yards north of the Denali Park Road. It is approximately 1 mile from the Parks Highway and 1.5 miles from McKinley National Park Airport.
Park spokeswoman Kris Fister said there are fatalities, but it's unclear how many because "the plane pretty much disintegrated."
George Clare of Las Vegas said he saw the plane flying very low and slowly while he was walking toward the park visitors center. He thought the plane was going to land at the nearby airstrip, so he proceeded to the visitor’s center. Within minutes, people came running in, saying a plane had crashed.
Clare said the aircraft looked like a military plane to him.
“It was a military khaki green kind of color,” he said. “It was propeller-driven. It was a fixed wing aircraft and it had kind of a flat underbelly.”
(Excerpt) Read more at newsminer.com ...
It was an older Fairchild that took off from Wolf Lake about an hour previous.
Do flight plans have to be filed for flying over the Alaskan Wilderness? Or the military had something on the plane it wants to keep secret.
Number of engines would help. Size would help too. Could be C130! but who knows, why the secrecy? Or is it legitimate lack of detail fact?
C-130?
Nope. It is a free country.
The Alaska Guard 207th runs some C-23s up here.
CASA 212? -212s are run by several air transport co up here - but it is a but south for Bering Air
C-7 Caribou? Don't know of any in service
Twin Otter (DHC-6)? The Army has a couple....
The other obvious DC-3, C-46 and so on, but that nobody recognized the a/c type is strange for normally airplane savvy Alaska. Well, I'll check in the am news cycle to see what is reported.
Has that airshow in Alaska (the one the C17 was to be at but crashed) happened yet?.. Is there some bad fuel in Alaska?
Show was sat and sun at J-BER. WX not too good, we left before the Blue Angels started. We live about a mile form the front gate, so saw most of the stuff anyway.
THe C-17 crash was unlikely to be bad fuel.
Most commercial multi-engined transports up here tend to be turbine powered.
Do you have any more details?
I know of a couple of C-119s at Palmer, but thought they were grounded....
Could this be a C-123 - sawa couple of posts about a Provider.
From another forum from a poster that is there, it was a C-123 Provider. It looks like a mini twin engined c-130. It was a private owned cargo plane carrying a generator.
Thanks for the confirmation. And as always, prayers to the familes of the air crew.
What country would that be?
“The plane that went down sunday was a C-123 J model called “Large Marge” a retired military plane from the vietnam war era, the plane was being used to haul a generator from the Mat Su Valley area to the nome area, they flew through the cantwell area to avoid increased traffic due to the air show, There where three men aboard”
could be C-123 or 130 ...both have that “flat bottom”
Maybe it’s Hale Boggs, back from a parallel universe.
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