Officials have shared that all 10 individuals who were aboard a small commuter aircraft that crashed in western Alaska last Thursday were found dead.
The airplane crash marks another deadly moment in the world of aviation and comes a week after a commercial jet collided with a helicopter outside Reagan National Airport, killing 67, and less than a week since a fatal medical flight crash in Philadelphia killed seven.
As for the Alaska crash, the plane was being operated by Bering Air and traveling from Unalakleet to Nome. However, the plane vanished and wasn’t found until a day later on a sea of ice.
“My heart is broken over the news out of Nome. Alaska is a big small town,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) wrote on X.“When tragedy strikes, we’re never far removed from the Alaskans directly impacted. But that also means we come together as a community to grieve and heal.”
Rescue teams utilized helicopters and two rescue swimmers to search for the plane near its last known position. Not long after the rescue mission was launched, the wreckage was found, according to Mike Salerno, a representative from the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard shared that the aircraft vanished around 30 miles southeast of Nome and radar forensic data from the US Civil Air Patrol found that at around 3:18 p.m., the plane experienced some sort of incident that led to a rapid decrease in altitude and speed.
Officials are still investigating what led to the crash, and Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Benjamin McIntyre-Coble said he didn’t want to “speculate on what that incident was,” The Hill reported.
The Alaska State Troopers reported that ten adults were on board the flight and it was a standard commuter service, Anchorage Daily News reported.
With the influx of deadly aviation accidents, President Trump has vowed to look into the Federal Aviation Administration and see what changes need to be made to ensure the public’s safety is being protected.
“The tragedy last week should remind us all that we have to make the most out of every single day we have,” Trump said at the National Prayer Breakfast. “We should have had better equipment. They were understaffed for whatever reason. I guess the helicopter was high, and we’ll find out exactly what happened.
“I think that’s going to be used for good,” he continued. “We’re going to do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new, not pieced together, obsolete. … We spent billions and billions of dollars trying to renovate an old broken system instead of just saying, ‘Let’s cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system.’”