Air ambulance company Guardian Flight says it has not been able to find the three crew members who went missing after a crash of the company’s plane in Southeast Alaska in January.
A statement on the company’s website on March 27 says the search for the pilot, flight nurse and paramedic lost in the Jan. 29 crash is winding down. Guardian Flight does plan a helicopter search of the shoreline for any remaining pieces of the aircraft that may have washed ashore.
“This is a very sad time for us and our team, the families of our friends who died in this tragedy, and for everyone associated with flying patients in need of a higher level of care,” Guardian Flight’s Randy Lyman writes in the statement.
The plane was flying from Anchorage to Kake to pick up a patient when it went down in the waters of Frederick Sound. Searchers were able to recover the cockpit voice recorder and other parts of the plane. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash.
Lyman says Guardian Flight is planning a memorial in Juneau sometime within the next few months.
Air ambulance company Guardian Flight said it has recovered the cockpit voice recorder for its plane that crashed in Southeast Alaska’s Frederick Sound in late January.
Clint Johnson, chief for the Alaska regional office of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the NTSB has taken custody of the cockpit voice recorder, commonly referred to as a black box, and confirmed it is from the crashed aircraft.
“We’re working right now to get a plan formulated to be able to get that cockpit voice recorder back to our Washington, D.C., vehicle recorder lab, where they hopefully can download that information and hopefully give us a little bit more insight of the sequence of events of this tragic accident,” Johnson said Tuesday.
Johnson said it’s still not known whether the recorder was working or captured information from the crash.
“It could possibly record conversations with either air traffic control or intercom systems within the airplane,” he explained. “We won’t really know exactly what the quality (is), or if there is in fact a recording that would give us a better idea of the sequence of events, until we have a chance to audition that cockpit voice recorder. Hopefully that will take place probably within a day after reaching our Washington, D.C., vehicle recorder lab, and we’re anxiously awaiting that information.”
The NTSB has an investigator on board the recovery boat in Frederick Sound. Johnson said the NTSB hopes to know more about plans for recovering other parts of the plane within the next 24-to-48 hours.
In an email, Randy Lyman, Guardian Flight’s senior vice president of operations, calls the discovery a “positive development in the search” but also a “heartbreaking time” for the company and families of the lost crew.
Three people — a pilot, nurse and a paramedic — died in the crash. All three were Juneau residents. Guardian Flight says it continues to search for the crew members.
Searchers have detected an underwater beacon from the Guardian Flight air ambulance that vanished en route to the Southeast community of Kake, the company said in a statement Tuesday.
The plane with three crew members aboard departed Anchorage on Jan. 29 but never arrived in Kake. A three-day search turned up a piece of a wing near Kake, but there was no sign of the wreckage or three crew members aboard.
Randy Lyman, Guardian Flight’s vice president of operations, said a ping from the plane’s “black box” was detected Tuesday. Efforts to triangulate the signal and recover the twin-engine aircraft are expected to follow, he said in a statement.
Aboard were three Juneau residents: 63-year-old pilot Patrick Coyle, 30-year-old flight nurse Stacie Rae Morse, and 43-year-old paramedic Margaret Langston.
Community members listen as family members of the missing Guardian Flight personnel speak Friday at a ceremony held at Mayor Bill Overstreet Park. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO)
The crew of a medevac plane went missing this week. The news hit Juneau’s medical community particularly hard.
Pilot Patrick Coyle, 63, paramedic Margaret Langston, 43, and nurse Stacie Rae Morse, 30, took off from Anchorage Tuesday to pick up a patient in need of a medical evacuation in Kake.
But the plane never arrived.
Hundreds of people braved the cold to attend a candlelight remembrance by the whale statue in downtown Juneau’s Overstreet Park Friday evening. Many wore uniforms from various first responder agencies. Friends and family of the crew members spoke, thanking the community for its support.
Guardian Flight pilot Eric Magnusson is a colleague of the missing crew members and has worked with medical evacuation companies out of Juneau for more than 20 years.
Friends and family of the missing Guardian Flight crew members sit surrounded by community members at a remembrance ceremony at Overstreet Park on Friday, Feb. 2, 2019. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO)
Speaking earlier in the day Friday, Magnusson said he’s never lost a colleague before this.
“It’s a job I love. It’s a job I get very passionate about, and I’m glad to be doing it,” Magnusson said. “I sense that same passion in my co-workers.”
Magnusson said this week’s events have been stressful for everyone at Guardian Flight.
The company performs medical evacuations across the state. Magnusson said they do about 2,500 flights annually.
In Juneau, they have a staff of about eight pilots and six nurse and paramedic teams.
Guardian crews remain grounded across the state Friday as the company gives employees time to process grief.
“We know that we’ve all been distracted and are, you know, experiencing a lot of grief over the loss of our co-workers,” he said. “We are determined to plan through and talk through how to get individuals back on the job, but allow them to take their time to grieve and not come back distracted.”
Magnusson said he and his colleagues are working to get their operations back on line and get back to doing the work they love soon.
Morse was also a nurse in the emergency department and critical care unit at Bartlett Regional Hospital. In a statement, hospital officials said Morse was “respected, highly regarded and most of all, greatly missed.”
A Coast Guard Air Station Sitka MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew flies over a piece of debris spotted by Alaska Wildlife Troopers while searching for three people aboard an overdue Guardian Life Flight aircraft 20 miles west of Kake, Jan. 30, 2019. (Photo courtesy of Alaska Wildlife Troopers)
A search has been suspended for the medevac plane that vanished over Southeast Alaska with three crew members on board.
The U.S. Coast Guard announced, on Thursday evening, that they were calling off the search for the Guardian Flight air ambulance that was due to land in Kake on Tuesday night but never arrived.
Coast Guard conducted aerial and maritime searches for 63 hours over the course of three days. They continued those efforts late into Thursday afternoon with the cutters Anacapa and Bailey Barco, as well as crews from Air Station Sitka and Air Station Kodiak, Search and Rescue teams from Kake and surrounding communities and volunteers. Together, they scoured 240 square nautical miles in an area 20 miles west of Kake.
Chief Charly Hengen, public affairs specialist for the Coast Guard, confirmed that the debris found on Wednesday appeared to be from the Guardian Flight, but said that no other debris was found over the course of their three-day effort. That was one of several factors that led the Coast Guard to call off the search.
“I think the weather was going to become pretty severe over the next few days. That could have been taken into consideration,” Hengen said. “The extensive amount of time and the saturation of the search area that we did. Plus they were not able to locate any other debris.”
Original story
A third day of searching for a twin-engine Beechcraft medevac plane that vanished Tuesday over Southeast Alaska has yielded no sign of the three crew members aboard.
U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Michael Kahl said efforts by Coast Guard ships and aircraft have been ongoing day and night. Local rescuers have also been combing nearby beaches.
“We’re focused right now on finding survivors,” Kahl told reporters Thursday in Juneau. “With the incoming weather, we’re throwing all of the resources right now to that effect. We will continue to search either until we have found them, or we are comfortable that we have given the best effort to locate them in that search area.”
Freezing temperatures and high winds are forecast in the search area around the community of Kake, where the Guardian Flight air ambulance was due at 6:19 p.m. Tuesday.
Guardian Flight Senior Vice President of Operations Randy Lyman released a statement Wednesday:
“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. While search and rescue efforts are continuing in an attempt to find survivors, we are resigned to accept that the aircraft was ours. On board were Pilot Patrick Coyle, 63, Flight Nurse Stacie Rae Morse, 30, and Flight Paramedic Margaret Langston, 43, all based in Juneau. (Margaret was earlier identified as Margaret Langston Allen, but we have been informed by her family that she was recently married, and her last name is now Langston.) We continue to ask for everyone’s prayers and support as we focus on families, crew members and the entire Guardian Flight team and extended family of all those involved.”
Kahl said the National Transportation Safety Board will examine the debris being held in Kake.
“We located what appears to be a piece of the wing just north and west of the last known position of the aircraft,” Kahl said. “We now have that wing in our possession and are holding it for the NTSB.”
The Coast Guard commander said this search effects many in the close-knit community of first responders.
“Southeast Alaska is a very small community. We’re all very close here,” Kahl said. “We know the three passengers on board are friends and neighbors. We focus all of our energy on every search we do, but this one is particularly personal for us.”
The trio had left Anchorage and were bound for Kake to medevac a patient from the community’s clinic.
Their plane never arrived, and signals from its electronic locating transmitter haven’t been detected. Kahl said the patient was later flown by another carrier.
Guardian’s operations in Alaska remained suspended Thursday afternoon pending more information on its missing plane and crew.
The Coast Guard says it continues to search for an air ambulance that vanished near Kake. A piece of metal suspected to be part of the plane has been recovered. (Read more.)
Update (11:13 p.m.)— Ryan Cunningham, KTOO
Guardian Flight has released the names of the three personnel aboard the medevac plane that went missing Tuesday night: pilot Patrick Coyle, 63; flight nurse Stacie Rae Morse, 30; and flight paramedic Margaret Langston Allen, 43. Guardian says all three are based in Juneau.
“We continue to ask for prayers and support as we focus on these crew members and their families during this very difficult time,” said Guardian Senior Vice President of Operations Randy Lyman.
Late Wednesday evening, the Coast Guard said they were still searching for the plane in the waters near Kake. Debris from an aircraft had been spotted earlier in the day, but the Coast Guard was unable to confirm if the debris belonged to the missing plane.
The Coast Guard says a number of local agencies have assisted in the search, including Petersburg Search and Rescue, Alaska State Troopers, Kake Search and Rescue, Wrangell Search and Rescue, Alaska Marine Highway ferries and good Samaritans in the area.
Update (5:04 p.m.)— Katherine Rose, KCAW-Sitka
The U.S. Coast Guard says debris from a plane has been found in the water near Kake. Coast Guard officials have not yet confirmed that the debris came from the missing medevac plane.
The Coast Guard has been focusing their search on the last known position of the aircraft, an area of water 30 nautical miles by 20 nautical miles west of Kake.
Chief Charly Hengen, public affairs specialist with the Coast Guard, said the debris was found near that area.
“The Coast Guard and partner agencies and volunteers, they’re still continuing the search for that overdue aircraft near Kake,” Hengen said. “We did receive reports that debris from a plane was located in the water approximately 22 miles west of Kake. It’s located about the south tip of Admiralty Island in Chatham Straight. However, the Coast Guard cannot confirm that the debris is from that aircraft.”
Original story
As of late Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. Coast Guard and others were still searching for a medevac aircraft that went missing Tuesday night on a flight from Anchorage to Kake.
A pilot, nurse and paramedic were on board the twin-engine King Air 200 plane owned by Guardian Flight. The plane was due in Kake at 6:19 p.m. Tuesday evening, but it never arrived.
Guardian senior vice president of operations Randy Lyman said, “Our thoughts and prayers go out to our fellow employees and their families during this very trying time.”
The company is standing down with its planes in Alaska until they have more information about the missing plane. Guardian says it is cooperating with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration in their investigations.
The Coast Guard says the electronic locating transmitter is not broadcasting for the plane. The search is focusing on the last known position of the aircraft.
Tuesday night the Petersburg-based Coast Guard cutter Anacapa, along with several good Samaritan vessels, were searching an area 20 miles west of Kake.
The Coast Guard says the cutter Bailey T. Barco relieved the Anacapa Wednesday morning, and a National Guard H-60 helicopter from Juneau was also joining in the search.
