STAGECOACH, Nevada – A medical transport flight that crashed in a mountainous region of northern Nevada, killing all five people aboard the plane, including a patient, apparently collapsed before touching the ground, have authorities announced on Wednesday.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sent a team of seven investigators to the crash site Friday night near Stagecoach.
“How do you know if the plane broke up in flight? We found parts of the plane within a half to three-quarters of a mile distance” from the crash site, NTSB Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg said at a news conference in Carson. City.
Landsberg told the evening briefing that a team had spent the whole day searching for parts of the downed plane. He added that investigators will likely be at the scene for several days before the wreckage of the single-engine Pilatus PC-12 is moved so that investigators can try to determine a possible cause of the accident. The aircraft was assembled in 2002.
“Right now, we just don’t know. It’s like a three-dimensional puzzle,” Landsberg said. “It’s harder when you don’t have all the pieces in one place.”
The crash happened amid a winter storm warning issued by the National Weather Service in Reno for large swaths of Nevada, including parts of Lyon County. It was constantly snowing with winds around 20 mph and gusts up to 30 mph.
A teenager piloting a small plane made an emergency landing on a freeway in San Bernardino. No one was hurt.
Visibility was less than 2 miles with a cloud ceiling around 2,000 feet above the ground as the flight departed Reno for Salt Lake City, Utah, and descended, according to the weather service.
Care Flight, which provides air and helicopter ambulance service, identified the downed plane as a Pilatus PC-12 and said the pilot, a flight nurse, a paramedic, a patient and a member of the patient’s family had been killed.
Robin Hays, a resident of Stagecoach and a former flight nurse, said she heard the plane making noise above her house before crashing behind her property.
“I knew the plane was having trouble,” Hays told the Reno Gazette Journal. “I knew it was going to crash. I was just hoping it wouldn’t fall on my house.”
The Lyon County Police Department said authorities began receiving calls about the crash near Stagecoach, Nevada, around 9:15 p.m. and found the wreckage two hours later.
Care Flight officials said they will halt all flights and work with each of its operations to determine when it will return to service.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the plane was registered with Guardian Flight, based in South Jordan, Utah. Care Flight is a service of REMSA Health in Reno and Guardian Flight.
More than half a million medical patients use air ambulance services each month in the United States, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners website.