The U.S. Coast Guard said the wreckage of a plane matching one was found on Alaska’s sea ice on Friday, February 7.
The Coast Guard told the Anchorage Daily News that 10 passengers and pilots on all 10 ships flew a single-engine turboprop.
“Our idea is someone affected by this tragic incident,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.
Initially, a Coast Guard spokesman told the Associated Press that staff could not fully open Flight 445, which they believed was a flight from Unalakleet to Nome.
“Now, we only know there are three,” Cameron Snell told the Associated Press, people are believed to be inside a single-engine turboprop.
Unalakleet and Nome are about 150 miles apart and are separated by Norton Sound south of the Arctic Circle.
In a Thursday post on social media, the Coast Guard said the plane was already about 12 miles offshore at the time of its lost location.
The Norm Volunteer Fire Department said in a Facebook post earlier on February 7 that the search and rescue team, as well as the Coast Guard, National Guard and the U.S. Air Force have expanded their search for missing aircraft.
Fire Department said it is conducting ground searches inland and coastal areas, while the National Guard and Coast Guard conduct grid searches through the air for ice-covered oceans.
FBI agents also use passengers’ cell phone tracking data to help locate the aircraft.
At a press conference Friday afternoon, Benjamin McIntyre-Coble, assistant head of incident management for the U.S. Coast Guard District 17, said “projects of interest” have been found and searchers are being searched Go to the location of the item. He would not speculate on what might be discovered.
David Olson, director of operations at Belling Airways, told the Associated Press that the plane left Unalakleet at 2:37 p.m. Thursday, February 6 and lost radio contact about 38 minutes later.
According to the flight tracking site Flighttradar24, the last location of the plane was received at 3:16 pm local time, about 10 minutes after the original arrival at Nome.
McIntyre – Transparent will say that radar forensic data showed that at about 3:18 p.m., the plane “experienced some kind of event that led to rapid loss of high lift and rapid speed loss”.
The pilot of the missing plane told Anchorage Air Traffic Control, “He intends to enter a fixed mode while waiting for the runway to be cleared.”
According to the National Weather Service, rain and fog were frozen around Norm Airport Thursday night.
Alaska Department of Transportation spokesman Danielle Tessen is near the airport.”
The Alaska Department of Public Safety said in a statement that the U.S. Coast Guard contacted the U.S. Coast Guard at 4 p.m. Thursday and search and rescue personnel are working to determine the last known coordinates of the aircraft.
The Coast Guard said Friday that the identity of the people on board had not been released, but all their families had been notified.
