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.
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.
“Please know that we will work diligently to determine how this happened,“ she said, adding, “It must be extremely heartbreaking for the families.”
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 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.
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