All nine people aboard an excursion plane from a Holland America Line cruise ship that crashed in Alaska on Thursday died in the accident, police and the aircraft company said.
Eight passengers and the pilot were killed when the plane went down during a tour of the Misty Fjords area of southeast Alaska on Thursday afternoon, flight operator Promech Air said in a statement.
“There is nothing I can say that can alleviate the pain and overwhelming sense of loss,” Promech Air president Marcus Sessoms said.
None of those aboard the crashed single-engine aircraft was identified, pending notification of their families, Promech added.
“It was a bad crash site,” volunteer rescue worker Chris John told the Alaska Dispatch News, adding that the weather in the area at the time was windy and turbulent.
The small float plane crashed near Ella Lake, about 30km northeast of the town of Ketchikan, cruise operator Holland America Line said.
Conditions at the nearby Ketchikan International Airport were overcast and rainy around the time of the crash, the National Weather Service said.
Ketchikan is a popular summertime cruise destination about 370 km south of Juneau, the state capital.
A helicopter pilot spotted the downed plane against a granite rock face about 240m above Ella Lake in the Misty Fjords, according to an Alaska State Trooper report.
Due to bad weather, efforts to retrieve bodies were to begin yesterday, a state trooper said.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known. The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to investigate. The aircraft was a DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter, one of five operated by Promech.
The excursion flight was sold through Holland America Line, a unit of Carnival Corp.
The eight passengers had been on the cruise ship **Westerdam**, which left Seattle on Saturday last week for a seven-day round trip, the cruise line said in a statement.
Promech’s sightseeing flights around the Misty Fjords National Monument offer views of “towering granite cliffs, 1,000-foot waterfalls, lush and remote valleys and serene crystalline lakes,” the company says on its Web site.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion