A small plane crashed in waters off Kodiak island in southern Alaska, killing six of the 10 people on board, authorities said.
The Piper Navajo Chieftain crashed soon after take off on Saturday afternoon in shallow waters, the Coastguard said. The pilot radioed that he would be turning the plane around, said Clint Johnson, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board.
"Just after takeoff, the pilot reported an undisclosed problem to the tower," he said. "We don't know why he tried to come back."
A private float plane from a fish processing company pulled four people from the wreckage. One person died trying to swim the roughly 300m to shore, State Troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters said.
The pilot, 50-year-old Robin Starrett of Kodiak, was killed, as were five passengers from the small community of Homer, Peters said. They are Stefan Basargin, 36; Pavel Basargin, 30; Zahary Martushev, 25; Iosif Martushev, 15, and Andrian Reutov, 22.
The charter flight operated by Kodiak-based Servant Air was headed to their town on the Kenai Peninsula, a 160km ride to the northeast.
Two of the survivors were flown to Anchorage for treatment. One has been released from the hospital in Kodiak and another remains there in good condition, said John Callahan, a spokesman for Providence Health and Services Alaska.
The aircraft is owned and operated by Servant Air, a local company that serves half a dozen communities on the large island in south-central Alaska, 360km southwest of Anchorage. The flight service started in 2003 as a one-plane operation and has grown to a fleet of seven small aircraft.
Ted Panamarioff, a spokesman for Servant Air, said the deaths were a major tragedy for the small rural communities, where air travel is a regular part of life.
"We're all family and friends here," he said by phone from Kodiak. "We knew these customers for several years. This is really, really tragic."
Kodiak and Homer each have populations of roughly 6,000 people.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
RSS