Authorities have released the names of the two people presumed dead after an airplane crashed Wednesday in a steep ravine in the southwest corner of Denali National Park and Preserve. Park rangers and investigators are trying to figure out how get to the crash site and recover the victims’ bodies.
Park officials said in a Saturday update that 45-year-old Jason Tucker of Wasilla was the pilot of the Piper PA-18 Super Cub that went down Wednesday in a remote and mountainous area in the park’s southwest preserve. They also identified the passenger in the plane as 44-year-old Nicolas Blace of Chugiak.
Park spokesperson Sharon Stitler said investigators won’t be able to confirm their deaths or recover the bodies until they can get to the site.
“Our mountaineering rangers are still assessing the site and safety,” she said.
Stiteler said rescue personnel have concluded after three flights into the area that it would be unsafe to try and recover the bodies with a high-risk operation, involving the use of a 460-foot rescue tether line suspended from a helicopter. She said in an interview Sunday that they’re also considering hiking up to the site, but they’re concerned about the area’s unstable footing.
“The narrow ravine has a lot of loose rock, and there’s not really any kind of shoreline on a very rapidly moving creek at the crash site,” she said.
The difficulty of accessing the site also is complicating the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation into the crash, according to lead investigator Aaron Sauer.
“We’re still kind of in a standby mode, as far as rescue and recovery operations,” he said.
Sauer says the NTSB is collecting information about weather conditions Wednesday evening, when the Super Cub went down. And they’re talking with people involved in the flight — like a second hunter who Stiteler says was waiting for Tucker to return to pick him up after he dropping off Blace at a different airstrip near the western boundary of the preserve.
“He was the one that had the information that the pilot had taken his hunting partner out to the other airstrip,” Stiteler said.
Stiteler said after being stranded for several hours the hunter contacted Alaska State Troopers, who rescued him.
The hunter provided information that answers many questions, but Sauer said there are still a lot of unknowns, including the cause of the crash, that investigators won’t be able to determine until they can get on-site and examine the wreckage.
“We all hope that recovery efforts can be made in this situation,” he said. “But again, that’s the National Park Service (that’s) coordinating all that.”
Sauer said in an interview Sunday that investigators would like to include the cause of the crash in their preliminary report findings. And he says that may determine when the NTSB issues that report.
“I would like to say we’d get the preliminary report out this coming week, but in this situation, with the recovery operation still being considered, we may hold up on that in case we have some additional information that we could be part of the report,” he said.
The agency probably won’t issue a final report on the crash for several more months.
Tim Ellis is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
