Alaska Aviation: "Baffling Details Emerge"

 ... in report on fatal 2019 air ambulance crash in Southeast Alaska

After an extensive underwater search, the wreckage of a Beechcraft B200 was recovered from Frederick Sound near Kake. The airplane crashed Jan. 29, 2019 while on approach to the Kake Airport. The airplane was being operated by Guardian Flight as an air ambulance flight. The pilot, flight paramedic and flight nurse were fatally injured. (NTSB photo)

A new federal report on a 2019 air ambulance crash in Southeast Alaska that killed all three crew members adds new mystery to an already challenging investigation into what caused the plane to go down just before landing in Kake.

Both front flight crew seats and a passenger seat recovered from the ocean floor were empty, their restraints unbuckled, according to a National Transportation Safety Board factual report released Wednesday. The base of a second passenger seat was recovered but without the seat back or restraint. One rear seat wasn’t found.

The twin-engine, turbine-powered Beechcraft B200 took off from Anchorage the afternoon of Jan. 29 for the roughly 600-mile trip to pick up a patient in the Tlingit village. It never arrived.

Lost in the crash were pilot Patrick Coyle, 63; flight paramedic Margaret Langston, 43; and flight nurse Stacie Morse, 30. Coyle was a seasoned pilot with thousands of hours of flying time. Langston was recently married. Morse was 27 weeks pregnant.

Their bodies have not been found.

Coyle would have been sitting in the front left seat, according to Clint Johnson, Alaska chief for the NTSB. It’s possible one of the other crew members was in the seat next to him, but investigators don’t know.

It’s not clear what led the people in those seats to take the unusual action of unbuckling the safety devices about nine minutes before the plane was due to land.

The plane plummeted just over 2,500 feet in 14 seconds, according to accident tracking data included in the report. Its last radar data point was at about 1,300 feet altitude. The aircraft was traveling at 200 mph.

“This was a very challenging investigation for us, not only logistically but every time we found something it led to a dead end,” Johnson said, adding the lack of a cockpit voice recording complicated efforts to explain what might have happened. “We just don’t know. We can’t speculate. All we can do is report the facts.”

Read the rest here.