Plane crash near St. Mary’s that killed 4 occurred about 30 minutes after ‘fogged in’ report, NTSB says

The pilot of a plane that crashed near St. Mary’s last month, killing all four men aboard, tried to land about 30 minutes after shifting visibility and fog turned back another pilot, according to a report released Thursday.

The five-page National Transportation Safety Board report is the first released since the Sept. 15 crash of the Yute Commuter Air plane carrying two employees, a former pilot and a passenger on a private flight to go moose hunting.

Separately, another NTSB report released Thursday provided new details about a crash Sept. 13 on the Kenai Peninsula that killed two men about 7 miles southwest of Tustumena Lake. The men were spotting moose ahead of a hunt while flying low over hilly terrain when the Champion 7GCBC crashed, according to the report.

The crashes were among three in as many days last month; a Wasilla man also died Sept. 14 when his extensively modified experimental plane crashed on a road near Wasilla. A total of five fatal crashes last month led to the deaths of nine people.

St. Mary’s

Authorities say the St. Mary’s crash about a half-mile from the airport killed 34-year-old pilot Scott Grillion of Chugiak, Yute’s assistant chief pilot; 23-year-old Mario Gioiello of Ohio, another Yute pilot; 25-year-old Caleb Swortzel of South Carolina, a former Yute pilot; and 44-year-old Benjamin Sweeney of Sterling.

The plane left Bethel just before 9:10 p.m. and flew at 500 to 800 feet above the ground before crashing, according to the report, written by lead investigator Joshua Lindberg. The sun set in St. Mary’s at 9:10 p.m. that day and civil twilight ended at 9:55 p.m., just as the plane was about to land.

Another pilot who left Bethel and got to St. Mary’s just before 9:30 p.m. turned back about five minutes later without landing and returned to Bethel, according to the report. The pilot described highly variable visibility going from 10 miles all the way down to a half mile just before he tried to land, it said.

The pilot “could see the hills surrounding the airport and Pitkas Point but could not see the runway environment,” Lindberg wrote, adding that the pilot said the airport “appeared completely ‘fogged in.’”

Grillion was about 10 miles out when he asked Anchorage-based controllers to land using what’s called Special Visual Flight Rules Clearance, the report said. The fairly common practice, which the prior pilot also requested, allows pilots to land when visibility worsens below what’s required for pilots relying on vision rather than instruments.

The controller provided weather conditions and issued the clearance.

Just before 10 p.m., the plane was less than five miles southeast of the airport and 180 feet over the Yukon River, the report said. Grillion flew north toward the airport, over the west side of a runway, then west of the airport before making a sharp left turn and flying over the runway again at about 200 feet, it said.

At 10:35 p.m., the controller tried to contact the pilot with no response, the report said. A missing-plane alert was issued at 11 p.m.

Investigators also found the plane’s engine had reached a level where an overhaul was required before it could fly charter passengers but was still allowed to carry private passengers and was being used for flight training and repositioning, the report said. The plane was equipped with tracking equipment called Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast but was emitting no signal, it said.

Officials said that will be part of the investigation but it wasn’t immediately clear why the signal was off.

A Yute representative did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday.

Ninilchik

The crash on the Kenai Peninsula near Ninilchik killed 70-year-old pilot Danny Presley of Happy Valley and 58-year-old passenger Keith Presley of Ninilchik.

According to a family member of both, the two departed Lowell Field Airport in Happy Valley to go moose spotting, according to the second federal report. A witness less than 5 miles south of the crash site saw the plane overhead around 7:45 a.m. about 100 or 200 feet off the ground.

The plane had a “crab angle” of about 10 degrees, indicating an uncoordinated turn, the report said. The witness said the plane then flew over about 500 feet to the east, “circled a group of four moose that were standing in an open field, then proceeded to fly northbound and out of view,” it said.

The Rescue Coordination Center reported receiving an emergency locator transmitter signal just after 8 a.m. and dispatched another plane to look for any wreckage and triggered a search.

The plane came to rest in an area of hilly, tundra-covered terrain, according to the report.

Investigators are hoping to recover the wreckage by early next week, said Clint Johnson, Alaska chief for the National Transportation Safety Board.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the status of two people involved in the crash. Mario Gioiello was a current employee of Yute Commuter Air and Caleb Swortzel was a former employee.