Four victims removed from crash site
Pilot Larry Ashcraft, who flew in this week’s search effort, was unable on Thursday to find the crash site of the small plane despite making several passes over the rugged terrain.
Crews gather Thursday morning on a forest road in Sanders County about two miles away from the site of a plane crash near Dixon. They were preparing for an arduous trek to retrieve four victims of Sunday’s crash.
Teams recovered the bodies of two Missoula men and two Kalispell newspaper reporters from the site of a small plane crash Thursday as federal investigators began to look at piecing together what happened.
The recovery teams had a difficult time making progress through dense forest to the site on a remote, rugged hillside near Dixon, Lake County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Carey Cooley said.
Accompanying them was a saw team from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ fire division.
The crew cleared enough trees and underbrush in the area to allow a helicopter to hoist the bodies at about 8 p.m., Cooley said. The remains have been sent to the state crime lab in Missoula.
Authorities found the wreckage Wednesday about 80 miles south of Kalispell after a 2 1/2-day ground and air search for the four friends who never returned from a sightseeing trip Sunday.
On board were Daily Inter Lake reporters Melissa Weaver, 23, Erika Hoefer, 27, and two Missoula men, Brian Williams, 28, and the pilot, 25-year-old Sonny Kless.
The terrain made recovering the victims by helicopter impossible without the hoist becoming snagged in the trees, authorities determined.
On Thursday, a recovery crew from the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office specializing in mountain rescues set out for the site from about a mile above the wreckage.
A second team approached from below about two miles away, using the sawyers to clear the dense brush and timber in their path, Cooley said.
“There was a lot of downed timber and brush,” she said. “It was a very arduous hike in for these folks.”
About 45 people took part in the recovery effort, including officials from the Sanders and Lake county sheriff’s offices along with the Flathead, and Salish and Kootenai teams.
“For the families’ sake, that’s why they are working so hard,” Cooley said of the recovery team. “They’ve been going at this for several days and they are still going hard. They deserve some kudos, that’s for sure.”
The site was discovered Wednesday afternoon, and within a couple of hours two searchers were dropped into the area by helicopter to confirm that there were no survivors.
The four left Kalispell City Airport Sunday afternoon and did not return, prompting a search that got under way Monday, focusing on an area west of the National Bison Range where the plane was last detected by radar.
The plane impacted in a heavily timbered area on a north-south ridge that rises between the Revais Creek and Magpie Creek drainages toward the 7,700-foot east-west Reservation Divide.
Larry Ashcraft, a pilot who participated in the search, flew over the area Thursday morning with a good idea of where the wreckage was located.
It was telling that Ashcraft wasn’t able to spot any glimpse of the wreckage after several passes over the rugged, timbered terrain.
The plane was spotted by a crew aboard a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol aircraft Wednesday afternoon, but only after it made numerous passes over the area.
The area was scoured by aerial searchers based on the report of an eyewitness who saw a blue-and-white plane rise out of the Flathead River corridor approaching the north-south ridge from the Revais Creek side. The witness heard the plane throttle up, barely clearing a rise on the ridge, before going out of sight.
The problem for searchers, Ashcraft explained, was knowing how far south on the ridgeline the pilot attempted to cross. They initially thought Kless would attempt to cross it at a lower elevation.
From his observations, Ashcraft believes that Kless either cleared a part of the ridge and turned the wrong direction toward even higher terrain, or he cleared a portion of the ridge only to immediately encounter higher terrain.
“It all depends on where he crossed that ridge,” Ashcraft said. “This is a main ridge. It’s a long ways up there, maybe 6,900 or 6,800 feet.”
Ashcraft said Sunday’s warm weather also would have problematic in that terrain for that type of aircraft, a Piper Arrow.
“The density altitude up there is going to be extreme,” said Ashcraft, a retired airline pilot who now runs a charter flight service and is a flight instructor at the Polson Airport. “Any time you have heat, the air is less dense. The performance of the engine isn’t as good, the aerodynamics of the plane aren’t as good.”
Pilots have flown into mountainous areas in the morning and then flown out in the afternoon, in higher temperatures, and discovered that the performance of their aircraft has changed, Ashcraft said.
“For that plane, being low on the river, below 500 feet, and then to be up to that altitude in higher temperatures, is not a good match,” he said.
Kless reportedly had 100 hours of flying experience, 30 of them in the 1968 Piper Arrow.
“I think the more hours you get, the more reserved you get,” said Ashcraft, who has been flying for 52 years. “If you’re around this stuff for a while, you’ve heard the stories, and you’ve learned from other peoples’ problems.”
Van McKenny, a National Transportation Safety Board investigator, is headed to the crash site to lead an investigation.
“They will have the expertise to determine how that plane ended up where it did,” Ashcraft said.