Officials reported that a medical transport flight that crashed in a mountainous area in northern Nevada, killing all five persons on board, including a patient, reportedly disintegrated before impact.
The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched a seven-member team of investigators to the collision scene near Stagecoach on Friday night.
Medical Plane Crashes in Nevada
Landsberg stated in the afternoon briefing that a team had spent the whole day searching for plane debris. He noted that it would likely be several days before the single-engine Pilatus PC-12 debris is transported so that investigators may attempt to ascertain a probable accident cause. The aircraft was produced in 2002, as per KSL.
The National Weather Service in Reno had issued a winter storm warning for significant portions of Nevada, including Lyon County. It was snowing persistently with winds between 20 and 30 miles per hour. According to the meteorological service, visibility was less than two miles. The cloud ceiling was around 2,000 feet above the ground as the aircraft descended from Reno, Nevada, to Salt Lake City.
Care Flight, a provider of air and helicopter ambulance service, discovered the fallen aircraft and confirmed the deaths of the pilot, a flight nurse, a flight paramedic, a patient, and a patient's family member.
Former flight nurse and Stagecoach homeowner Robin Hays reported hearing the sputtering jet pass over her home before landing behind her property. Hays dialed 911 and stepped outside, but because of the swirling snow, he could not see the debris.
On Saturday, Care Flight said the Lyon County Sheriff's Department and the Central Lyon Fire Department were coordinating with the NTSB to determine the cause of the crash, CNN reported. Authorities in Lyon County - which encompasses Stagecoach - received multiple calls of a possible aircraft crash around 9:15 p.m. Friday. First responders from Lyon and Douglas counties responded and located the airplane around 11:15 p.m.
Landsberg said that an 11-member team with the NTSB would be on site for several days to gather evidence. He said the agency would focus its investigation on the pilot, the aircraft, maintenance records, the fuel on the aircraft, weather conditions - as icing and moderate turbulence were reported - the company's dispatch procedures, and its general policies.
Landsberg said a preliminary report would be available in the next two weeks. REMSA Health is currently in what it called a "passive stand down" for all flights across the company, adding that it intends to work with internal operations to determine when services may return. Stagecoach is about 25 miles southeast of Reno.
False Claims Over Nevada Plane Crash Incident
In the days following the plane crash on February 22, some social media users falsely claimed that the aircraft was transporting environmental scientists to East Palestine, where officials released and burned toxic vinyl chloride to prevent an uncontrolled explosion caused by a freight train derailment earlier in the month.
Yet, it is false that the plane's occupants were on their way to East Palestine. The five workers of an environmental consulting business who perished in Wednesday's tragedy were heading from Little Rock airport to John Glenn Columbus International Airport in Columbus.
All five individuals on board the plane, including the pilot, were employees of CTEH, an environmental consulting firm in North Little Rock. According to the company, they were reacting to the February 20 explosion at an Ohio metals facility in the Cleveland suburb of Oakwood Village. According to AP News, the explosion killed one employee and sent over a dozen others to the hospital.
The twin-engine jet, a Beech BE20, crashed a couple of miles south of the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, according to Pulaski County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Lt. Cody Burk.
The incident occurred as a line of thunderstorms that the National Weather Service claimed contained wind gusts of 40 mph (64 kph) passed through the Little Rock region. AP stated that Burk said it would be up to investigators to establish if weather played a role.
Neither the plane accident nor the explosion at the metals facility is linked to the railway disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, which occurred some distance east-southeast of the Cleveland metropolitan region.
According to the Pennsylvania governor's office, CTEH was contracted by rail operator Norfolk Southern to analyze sample information for surface waterways. Local citizens and several government leaders are concerned about the environmental risks posed by the derailment and following controlled fire, which has evolved into an intense political dispute.
Thursday, federal investigators stated that the crew driving the freight train did not have much notice before scores of cars slid off the rails, and there is no sign that they were negligent. Online, widespread misinformation about the railway catastrophe has been propagated.
As a result of the incident, social media users misrepresented a map to suggest that everyone in the Ohio River basin should be concerned about the safety of their drinking water. In contrast, others have falsely claimed that a new draft government report on vinyl chloride was suspiciously edited to omit key information about cancer, children, and drinking water.
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