By Rich McKay
(Reuters) – As the wreckage of a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan that crashed on Thursday, killing all 10 on board, drifts on a Bering Sea ice floe, a crew of nine investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, on Saturday to find out why it crashed.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said the Cessna carrying nine passengers and one pilot was lost from radar contact about 3:30 p.m. local time on Thursday over the Bering Sea as it headed from Unalakleet, Alaska, to an airfield in Nome, about 100 miles (161 km) south of the Arctic Circle.
The U.S. Coast Guard found the wreckage late on Friday on an ice floe about 34 miles (54 km) out to sea and drifting about 5 miles (8 km) a day, officials said.
“Recovery efforts are still under way,” Homendy said at a press conference on Saturday. “The priority is victim recovery. Then we will recover the wreckage.”
Homendy said time is a factor because “we do have a short window, bad weather is coming in” and they are operating in difficult conditions.
She also expressed her “deepest condolences” to the victims’ families and friends.
“Please know that we will work diligently to determine how this happened,” she said, adding, “It must be extremely heartbreaking for the families.”
On Friday, the Coast Guard put two divers in the water and they were able to see into the aircraft, but it was largely inaccessible due to the extent of the damage.
Officials have not identified the victims of the crash. But in a news release late on Friday, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium said two of the passengers were their employees, Alaska Public Media reported.
In a press statement received by the news agency, the ANTHC identified two passengers as Rhone Baumgartner and Kameron Hartvigson, who both worked in utility operations for the organization and had traveled to Unalakleet to service part of the community’s water plant.
In the statement, ANTHC’s interim president and CEO, Natasha Singh, said the employees were “passionate about the work they did, cared deeply for the communities they served, and made a lasting impact on rural communities across our state.”
Neither the ANTHC nor Singh could immediately be reached by Reuters for comment.
The incident comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of air safety in the United States. NTSB investigators are probing two deadly crashes in recent days: the midair collision of a passenger jet and U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people, and a medical jet crash in Philadelphia that killed seven.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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