The passenger plane that crashed near Nome last month, killing all 10 people on board, was hundreds of pounds overweight according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.
The NTSB released its first report Wednesday on the crash of Bering Air Flight 445. The Cessna Caravan was en route from Unalakleet to Nome. A massive search extending into the next day found the plane on an ice floe, which had been moving up to 10 miles per day, at a location 34 miles southeast of Nome.
The dead include:
34-year-old Chad Antill of Nome (pilot)
52-year-old Liane Ryan of Wasilla
58-year-old Donnell Erickson of Nome
30-year-old Andrew Gonzalez of Wasilla
41-year-old Kameron Hartvigson of Anchorage
46-year-old Rhone Baumgartner of Anchorage
52-year-old Jadee Moncur of Eagle River
45-year-old Ian Hofmann of Anchorage
34-year-old Talaluk Katchatag of Unalakleet
48-year-old Carol Mooers of Unalakleet
At the request of U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy visited Nome soon after the crash, one of the deadliest in recent Alaska history. Residents of the region came together to support families of the victims as well as Bering Air, which has flown in Northwest Alaska for 45 years.
‘A tremendous amount of information’
Clint Johnson, the NTSB’s Alaska chief, said Wednesday that investigators haven’t yet determined why the plane was overweight.
“There's no way around that. Unfortunately, our estimations are that the airplane was about 1,000 pounds over gross (weight),” Johnson said.
Still, Johnson said, it isn’t yet clear what specific role the weight might have played in the plane’s crash and whether other factors were involved.
Johnson noted that investigators have recovered several avionics components from the plane, with data from them still being assessed.
“That has given us a tremendous amount of information,” he said. “We're still poring over that information at this point.”
According to the report, the flight originated in Nome and headed to St. Michael and Unalakleet, before taking off on a return leg to Nome at 2:37 p.m. on Feb. 6. It headed to Nome at a cruising altitude of 8,000 feet, under instrument-only flight rules for a time, then began a planned descent to 6,000 feet just before 3 p.m.
At about 3:15 p.m., an air traffic controller informed the Caravan that the Nome airport’s runway was closed for about 10 to 15 minutes due to deicing.
“The controller added that if the pilot wanted to ‘slow down a little bit’ to prevent the flight from arriving before the runway reopened, that would be fine, and the pilot acknowledged,” investigators wrote.
A minute later, the controller asked the plane to descend to 4,000 feet, which the pilot acknowledged.
In about 15 minutes, between 3 p.m. and 3:15 p.m., the plane’s airspeed gradually fell from a peak of about 160 knots to 112 knots and continued to decrease. It had also turned from a westerly heading to a southerly one.
“At (3:19 p.m.), the autopilot disengaged,” investigators wrote. “At that time, the airplane’s airspeed was 99 knots. About 19 seconds later, the airspeed had decreased to about 70 knots, and the altitude was about 3,100 (feet above sea level) which was the end of the data available from the onboard avionics.”
A final data point from the plane’s avionics, at 3:20 p.m., showed it 32 miles east of Nome and 12 miles offshore over Norton Sound. Third-party satellite data eight seconds later showed it at an altitude of 200 feet.
“(One second later), the controller transmitted a low altitude alert to the pilot,” investigators said. “The controller’s efforts to contact the pilot were not successful, and no further communications were received.”
Plane was 969 pounds overweight, NTSB says
Antill’s pilot records showed that he had about 2,500 hours of flight time, including just over 1,000 hours in Cessna Caravans. He had flown with Bering Air since 2022, completing a Cessna cold-weather operations course in October and recurrent ground training in January.
The crashed Caravan was fitted with a TKS ice protection system, which Johnson called a “weeping wing” designed to dispense deicing fluid from wing and tail surfaces’ leading edges in flight. That system was mechanically functional based on examination of the wreckage, he said.
The plane was also fitted with a fuselage cargo pod, according to the NTSB. Preliminary calculations found that the plane’s gross takeoff weight was about 9,776 pounds.
“This was about 969 (pounds) over the maximum takeoff gross weight for flight into known or forecast icing conditions under the TKS system supplement,” investigators wrote. “It was also about 714 (pounds) over the maximum gross takeoff weight for any flight operation under (a) flight manual supplement.”
The report says Bering Air’s load manifest estimated that the plane was carrying about 709 pounds of baggage and cargo. A post-accident examination found that approximately 798 pounds was aboard at the time of the accident.
A weather report from the Nome airport at 3:45 p.m. noted light snow for about 10 minutes shortly after 3 p.m., as well as “trace precipitation” and “trace icing” just before 3 p.m.
Searchers had said no emergency locator transmitter signal was detected from the plane, which investigators at the crash site initially confirmed.
“However, the on-scene examination determined that the ELT had become disconnected from the antenna likely during the impact sequence,” investigators said. “When a portable ELT antenna was installed, a strong signal was heard from a handheld receiver.”
Bering Air crash was ‘eerily similar’ to 2021 incident
Johnson said the flight data, and the sequence of events it depicted, has led investigators to revisit a 2021 incident near Fairbanks in which a Wright Air Service Caravan suddenly dropped thousands of feet. Nobody was injured in that incident, but a final NTSB report found that the plane was overweight when it encountered icing and suffered an abrupt loss in airspeed, with its autopilot subsequently disengaging.
Johnson called the events of the 2021 altitude drop “eerily similar” to the Bering Air crash, although the Wright Air Service plane was fitted with a less-powerful engine. Autopilot procedures often call for them to be checked during flight in icing conditions, but what happened during last month’s Bering Air crash is still not clear, Johnson said.
“We are in the process of looking to see what the sequence of events were, as far as the airspeed drop, the disconnection (of) the autopilot,” he said. “Was that pilot-induced? Was that automatically done? We don't know, but we are drilling down into that information as we speak right now to see if we can get a little bit better of an idea and understand the final moments of this flight.”
Johnson said Wednesday that a total of 15 to 20 people are involved in the crash investigation, including NTSB officials and expert sources whom they are consulting. A final investigation report is expected in 12 to 18 months.
