Right. I had looked up information about this also, this afternoon. They have to use the control tower at the Molokai Airport. I’ve been looking up articles that have been scrubbed from the Google results and/or from the web, finding them cited in other places and learning all kinds of stuff. Mark Miller, DOH Administrator for Kalaupapa, said they were using the airport for triage. He must have been talking about the Kalaupapa Airport. From there they took people to the Molokai Medical Center or else to Honolulu. But they took Fuddy and Yamamoto to this “care center” first, where the priest gave conditional last rites to Fuddy and consoled a distraught Yamamoto. The priest said he gave conditional last rites because he didn’t know when Fuddy died but he understood she might have been dead for up to 2 hours by that time. Miller claimed that everybody was accounted for by 4:30pm, with Fuddy and a man in the Coast Guard helicopter. The man survived but they couldn’t revive Fuddy, he said.
The scrubbed articles I’m finding raise a lot of questions, to say the least. The accounts of Miller, Lang, Kawasaki, and Hollstein have a lot of discrepancies between them.
The only thing that makes sense so far is why there was no one at the Kalaupapa airport, when the helicopter pilot went back there looking for help...they close at 15.30.
Lang and Thomson were on their way to visit friends in Maui and had contacted the Moloka’i tower for clearance just before 3:30 p.m. Wednesday. They say the tower operator asked if they were able to hear an “ELT” or Emergency Locator Transmitter. They tuned into the signal, but it was faint so they say they began searching for it and scanning the area for wreckage.
The couple says they reached Kalaupapa about five minutes later and spotted something in the water off the North-West tip of the peninsula near the beginning of runway 5.
The helicopter pilot was talking to the tower at Molokai Airport, not KALAUPAPA airport, which closes at 15.30 and there was no one in attendance.
So who notified MOLOKAI there had been an accident? How did they know there was a need to identify an Emergency Locater Transmitter signal? That was the reason why the helicopter pilot went looking for the aircraft. He didn't just stumble across it...
It must have been the Pilot of the Cessna who contacted MOLOKAI TOWER, right?
JUST BEFORE 3.30 PLUS 5 MINUTES.