Three people died Monday night when a small plane crashed near the Dan Creek airstrip outside a remote community in south-central Alaska, according to the Alaska Department of Public Safety.
Alaska State Troopers were notified of the crash at 9:36 p.m. on July 27, according to a dispatch bulletin from the department. Troopers could not reach the crash site until the following morning, when they flew in at around 6 a.m. and found the wreckage.
All three people aboard the aircraft were already dead when troopers arrived. Their bodies were sent to the State Medical Examiner's Office in Anchorage for autopsies and formal identification.
Federal aviation records shed more light on how the crash happened. According to a July 28 report from the Federal Aviation Administration's Analysis and Sharing system, the aircraft involved was a Piper PA-22, registration number N4535A. The report says the plane banked left while landing, then struck the ground and caught fire near McCarthy. Federal data logged the time of the crash at 5:30 a.m. UTC on July 28 and classified the damage as substantial. The flight was for personal, non-commercial purposes, and the crash happened during the landing phase. Of the three fatalities, one was the pilot and two were passengers.
Speaking with Alaska's News Source, Randy Elliott described the journey his son and the others took to reach the area, explaining that they drove roughly 300 miles before flying the final stretch because no road reaches the destination. He said the flight was the last one of the day, taking off around 9 p.m. Elliott recalled that the pilot appeared to come in too high on approach and chose to circle around for another attempt, a maneuver he called routine given the pilot's experience. But during that turn, in a valley Elliott described as accommodating travel in only one direction, he said the engine seemed to lose power.
"I've seen the wreckage, of course. It doesn't look like it was running when they hit the ground. I don't know why that is, but the big question is why did he decide to go around? We don't really know," Elliott said in an interview.