Spent some time this morning looking further into the death of Loretta Fuddy, the Hawaiian Health Director who had a heart failure event in that plane crash back in 2013. It appears she and her deputy director Keith Yamamoto were taking a 10 minute jumper flight from Topside airport in Kaluapapa to the main airport on Molokai. The plane purportedly went down immediately after take off and crashed about 1/2 mile north east off the Kaluapapa peninsula.
The Kaluapapa peninsula is an interesting place. Geographically isolated by 2000 foot cliffs, it is the site of a former leper colony (Hansen's Disease) that is essentially off limits to the public. No way to reach it by motor vehicle, your choices are mule or plane. Apparently it's difficult and treacherous to reach by boat - there is an annual barge that brings supplies from a neighboring island. Even if you could get there, you are not permitted to visit without an invitation, per state law. There are only 16 remaining survivors of the disease still living there, all elderly and attended to by various department of health and national park service personnel. Since the Hawaiian department of health oversees the residents and makes an annual report to the state legislature on the status of the Island, it makes sense that Fuddy and Yamamoto would have been visiting the peninsula that day.
President Obama signed an order in early 2009 to add the peninsula to the National Park Service as a monument to the estimated 8000 people who died of the disease since say the late 1880s. The news reports made it sound like it was just to build a memorial, but it looks like the entire peninsula is now under fed national park control. It's not clear what the feds plan to do with the isolated area once the current residents have all died or been relocated to care facilities in Honolulu.
In my pre-Q days, I would have just thought this was all interesting. Now, it seems suspicious. The deep state seems to like finding remote areas out in the open in which to play. This would be a perfect spot to bring children and others, now or in the future. I wonder if there are any Hawaiianons who have looked into this and can correct or fill in this info.