Alaska Medevac Plane Debris Found, Crew Still Missing

Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

Aircraft debris found in the waters off a small Southeast Alaska village belongs to a missing medevac plane carrying three crew members, the air ambulance company confirmed Thursday.

The Beechcraft King Air 200 turboprop, operated by Guardian Flight, took off from Anchorage on Tuesday for a flight of about 600 miles to the village of Kake but never arrived.

Guardian has identified the three Juneau-based crew members aboard as 63-year-old pilot Patrick Coyle, 30-year-old flight nurse Stacie Rae Morse, and 43-year-old flight paramedic Margaret Langston.

"While the Coast Guard and others continue the search for the missing Guardian Flight aircraft off the coast of Alaska, the debris found by searchers unfortunately gives us a very strong indication that it was our airplane," corporate vice president of operations Randy Lyman said in a statement Thursday afternoon. "While search and rescue efforts are continuing in an attempt to find survivors, we are resigned to accept that the aircraft was ours."

Airborne searchers from Petersburg on Wednesday afternoon spotted part of an aircraft wing in the water about 22 miles west of Kake, near the south tip of Admiralty Island in Chatham Strait, according to the Coast Guard. Two U.S. Coast Guard cutters worked through the night into Thursday morning while other agencies and volunteers who joined the search Wednesday overnighted in the Tlingit village of just under 600 people on Kupreanof Island about 50 miles east of Sitka.

More aircraft debris turned up in that search, a Coast Guard spokeswoman said.

The National Transportation Safety Board is holding off on any investigation until the search is called off, NTSB Alaska chief Clint Johnson said Thursday.

"This is still an active search," Johnson said. "Until such time the Coast Guard is done with the search and they hand it over to us and the troopers, we're in the back seat."

Guardian is one of several companies providing air ambulance services around Alaska, where it can cost tens of thousands of dollars for emergency medical evacuations from remote locations hundreds of miles from the closest hospital.

Utah-based Guardian Flight operates about 85 fixed- and rotor-wing aircraft dedicated to air medical flights in the upper Midwest, Mountain West, Southwest, Alaska and Hawaii, according to the company.