Posted on 08/10/2010 4:00:01 AM PDT by tlb
JUNEAU, Alaska - Authorities said Tuesday that a plane believed to be carrying eight people has crashed in southwest Alaska.
Alaska National Guard spokesman Maj. Guy Hayes said the Guard was called to the area about 20 miles north of Dillingham at about 7 p.m. Monday after a passing aircraft saw the wreckage.
Hayes says there are possible fatalities. State and federal officials say severe weather has hampered the rescue operation.
Hayes says about five good Samaritans were on scene early Tuesday helping the crash victims. He says he was told by Alaska State Troopers that there were "eight or nine" people on board, though a spokeswoman for the troopers, Megan Peters, refused to comment.
The aircraft is a 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter registered to Anchorage-based communications company GCI, the Federal Aviation Administration told the Anchorage Daily News. A woman at the Regional Operations Center told The Associated Press all further information was pending notification of next of kin.
Dillingham is located in northern Bristol Bay, about 325 miles southwest of Anchorage.
According to the Anchorage Daily News, former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens was reportedly traveling to a GCI-owned lodge in the area and friends are concerned he may have been on the downed plane.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsminer.com ...
They just started talking about it on CNN. Supposedly Ted Stevens was on the plane, and half are dead and half survived, they think. MSNBC has been covering it most heavily this morning. As usual, Fox brings up the rear. I’m not sure they’ve even mentioned it yet. Fox is not so good with breaking news. They just hate to interrupt their programming.
Also, the former Chief of NASA (last name is O’Keefe) was on the plane too.
I’ve been sitting here thinking: how incredible it would be for him to survive a SECOND airplane crash.
Doesn’t it seem that a lot of famous people die in plane crashes. Maybe they just fly more, but still....
It may be old but its far from being unsafe, its probably more reliable than one that was built in the last couple of years. Alaskans will keep their equipment like aircraft in top shape due to the harsh weather and remote airfields.
I manage a concrete batch facilty and I have a fleet of 20-30 year old trucks that have been rebuilt and modified extensively, even when we do buy a new truck I have to condition it to run up here in Alaska. Special fluids, heating the engine and fuel, special tires and other things that the lower 48 will never see.
I hate Wiki people! They are already changing both Stevens and O’Keefe’s Wiki pages to say they are both dead.
In the future famous people will die in transporter accidents.
They just travel more than us common people.
Wikipedia is almost useless to me, I condemn its accuracy and its weakness to be used for political purposes.
>> Doesnt it seem that a lot of famous people die in plane crashes <<
Senator John Tower, Senator John Heinz, Senator Paul Wellstone, Senator-to-be-from-Missouri Mel Carnahan and Senator-to-be-from-Virginia Richard Obenshain.
Then there was the case of Senator Ted Kennedy, who survived both a plane crash and a car crash. No comment.
Yes. I was thinking of the old radial engine version before I read some of the other posts. The turboprop engine makes it look like an entirely different aircraft.
I hate flying on normal planes, I would freak out if I was in a small plane.
Prayers to the victims, their families, and the good Samaritans who helped out the victims.
Alaska is a beautiful piece of God's creation but the scary part is most places are only accessible by small plane due to the fact that it is so isolated.
Would be something if he survived, given that the majority on board were killed and he’s 86 years old.
I did a search on the exact same vintage plane and that is what came up. It may well be from the same resort, I didn’t
take note of that.
I apologize if you came up here on vacation and all you saw was rain, its been a terrible miserable cool wet summer up here.
That’s not unusual. There are literally thousands of 1950s-era aircraft still flying around the world, and doing it safely. Most first-world countries have strict rules about logging every hour that a plane flies and require checks, inspections, and overhauls after a certain number of hours, even for light aircraft.
}:-)4
I love Alaska; I have only been able to see it via a cruise, but would love to see more.
Fox is reviewing the bio of Stevens as if he is already dead. I guess that’s all they can say right now.
Prayers for them.
Yeah, from the firewall back, it’s the same old Otter or Beaver. But up front, typically they replace the old nine-cylinder radial with a turboprop, usually a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 of some variation. They deliver more power on less fuel with less weight, use jet fuel which is easier to find and cheaper these days than high-octane aviation gas, and parts are readily available, unlike for those 50-year-old radials.
De Havilland Canada made their reputation building bush aircraft of legendary strength and utility. The Beaver, Otter, Caribou, Twin Otter, even the four-engine DHC-7. The only planes they built that weren’t bush planes were their original design, the Chipmunk (a trainer), and the Dash-8 commuter airliner.
}:-)4
According to the CVR transcript, the last words from one of the crew (unknown which) were, “Ma, I love you.”
http://www.super70s.com/super70s/Tech/Aviation/Disasters/78-09-25%28PSA%29.asp
CVR’s are released-—just not before the final report is issued.
There are many websites that have the recordings posted, http://www.airdisaster.com/cvr/cvrwav.shtml is just one of many.
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