Crash claims four young lives

A determined search ended grimly Wednesday when the wreckage of a small plane was found on a rugged, remote hillside southwest of Dixon.

Soon after the crash site was located, Lake and Sanders county law enforcement officials announced that none of the four people on board had survived.

Killed in the crash were two Daily Inter Lake reporters — Melissa Weaver, 23, Erika Hoefer, 27 — and two Missoula men, pilot Sonny Kless, 25, and Brian Williams, 28.

The group left Kalispell City Airport on Sunday afternoon to go on a sightseeing flight.

The discovery of the crash victims inside the downed plane’s fuselage brought a tragic end to a wide-ranging 2 1/2-day search for the missing friends.

Family members awaiting word at the National Bison Range, the headquarters for the search, broke down upon hearing of the deaths.

Early Wednesday afternoon, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security pilot spotted a plane matching the description of the missing 1968 Piper Arrow on a steep, densely wooded hillside about 80 miles south of Kalispell, just inside the Sanders County line.

The crash site a couple of miles south of the lower Flathead River outside the Bison Range was not far from the plane’s last known location.

About an hour and a half after the wreckage was located near the head of the Revais Creek drainage, a helicopter from Malmstrom Air Force Base was used to lower the crew’s medic and Sanders County Undersheriff Rube Wrightsman into the area. They soon determined there were no survivors.

“We did confirm it was the plane that we were looking for, and we also confirmed there were four deceased people in the plane,” Wrightsman said. “Because of the ruggedness of the area, you almost had be right over top to see it.”

The National Transportation Safety Board has been notified and will be take over the investigation, and the Federal Aviation Administration also has been contacted, Wrightsman said.

Authorities were trying to come up with a plan to remove the bodies from the crash site, Lake County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Carey Cooley said.

“There’s no way to get a basket down there without getting it tangled up,” Cooley said.

“Now our job is recovery,” she said. “The nearest road is about two miles from the wreckage, it’s mountainous with lots of brush and trees. They are going to hike in there in the morning and determine the best way to do the recovery.”

The plane was somewhat intact and not scattered where it crashed, Cooley said.

The foursome had been on a scenic flight Sunday afternoon that ranged north to Glacier National Park before going along the Swan Mountain Range, across Flathead Lake and over the National Bison Range at Moiese, according to radar tracking from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The blue-and-white single-engine plane last was tracked by radar at about 300 feet above ground level west of the Bison Range 80 miles south of Kalispell.

It went off the radar screen at 4:02 p.m. Sunday.

Search efforts in the air, on the ground and on the lower Flathead River had been under way since Monday.

Based on the initial coordinates he was provided, search pilot Larry Ashcraft of Yellow Bay said the wreckage was found just below steep terrain that rises to an east-west ridge with a 7,700-foot elevation.

“There’s a lot of trees in there, and it’s real steep,” said Ashcraft, who participated in Tuesday’s search that focused heavily on the area where the wreckage was found.

The search was concentrated there, he said, because an eyewitness saw a blue-and-white plane rising out of the Flathead River corridor, throttling up and barely clearing a ridge in that general area.

Ashcraft said he spent about eight flight hours on the search effort, but other pilots put in much more time. He estimated the combined flight time for the search was about 200 hours.

From the valley floor, much of higher terrain is open grasslands capped by timber and to some it may seem that a downed aircraft would be easy to find.

But Ashcraft said that is a deceptive perspective because the terrain has trees and thick vegetation in many areas. There are hidden draws and canyons that simply aren’t visible from the valley floor.

“You look around at this stuff, it’s huge,” he said. “You get up in the air and it looks really big.”

Those elements made the search challenging, he said, requiring pilots to fly high-priority grid routes repeatedly, in addition to covering new terrain.

“You really can’t fly over an area too much,” Ashcraft said. “The light even makes a big difference. You might be flying an area for hours and a change in sunlight will make something shine.”

The pilot, Kless, last made radio contact with the tower at Glacier Park International Airport at 2:11 p.m. on Sunday, reporting that he was east of Kalispell, traveling south to north.  

In addition to radar tracking, cell-phone tower information also was analyzed to determine the plane’s path.

Hoefer last updated her Facebook page at 1:40 p.m. Sunday with a message reading, “Flying over Glacier in a private plane then off to a barbecue!”

The last voice message from any of the individuals’ phones occurred at 1:51 p.m.

However, there was casual text messaging between Weaver and Hoefer at 3:47 p.m.  

“The last text they sent pinged off the Ronan tower,” Flathead County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ernie Freebury said. “That was our second confirmation, besides the radar data, that they were in that area.”

Sasha Goldstein of the Lake County Leader contributed to this story.