>>14279800
>https://www.alaskapublic.org/2021/08/05/searchers-looking-for-missing-plane-near-ketchikan/
>>14279808
Five passengers and a pilot have died in a flight-seeing plane crash near Ketchikan, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard, Alaska State Troopers, U. S. Forest Service, and Ketchikan Volunteer Rescue Squad reached the site of a downed de Havilland Beaver 8 miles northeast of Ketchikan Thursday afternoon. Two rescue swimmers were lowered and found no survivors the Coast Guard said.
The Associated Press is reported that the five passengers had come to Alaska on a cruise ship, the Nieuw Amsterdam, which stopped in Ketchikan Thursday. The flight-seeing company Southeast Aviation owns the plane, the AP said.
The Coast Guard got an emergency signal from the plane around 11:20 a.m., said Petty Officer Eli Teller.
Teller said the distress signal came from about 1,400-feet elevation, was northeast of Ketchikan, in the area of the Misty Fjords National Monument. Initially weather hampered the search. Rescuers reached the site just after 2:30 p.m, the Coast Guard said.
A midair collision between two sightseeing aircraft in the same area killed six people two years ago in the Misty Fjords region. In 2015, a fatal crash killed nine people. The area is popular with visitors who charter planes for aerial tours of the region.
A joint KUCB and ProPublica investigation this summer found that in recent years Alaska has made up a growing share of the country’s crashes involving small commercial aircraft.
>PLANE CRASH
>>14279825
>PLANE CRASH