By Rich McKay
(Reuters) -Even as the wreckage of a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan that crashed on Thursday, killing all 10 on board, drifts on a Bering Sea ice floe, authorities said they had recovered and identified the bodies of all the victims on Saturday.
Time was of the essence as the ice floe, about 34 miles (54 km) out to sea near Nome, Alaska, was made of slushy ice and the weather was predicted to turn foul on Sunday, whipping up snow and 45 mph winds, officials said.
“All ten individuals aboard the Bering Air plane have been officially brought home,” the Nome Volunteer Fire Department said in a Facebook post on Saturday night.
Recovery of the victims from the small commuter aircraft was made by a joint effort of the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Air Force and other agencies.
Meanwhile, a crew of nine investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, on Saturday to find out why it crashed.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said the Cessna carrying nine passengers and one pilot was lost from radar contact about 3:30 p.m. local time on Thursday over the Bering Sea as it headed from Unalakleet, Alaska, to an airfield in Nome, about 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
The Coast Guard found the wreckage late on Friday on an ice floe drifting about 5 miles a day at sea, officials said.
“The priority is victim recovery. Then we will recover the wreckage,” Homendy said at a press conference earlier on Saturday.
Officials had said they would use Black Hawk helicopters to try to lift the wreckage off the ice.
She also expressed her “deepest condolences” to the victims’ families and friends.
“Please know that we will work diligently to determine how this happened,” she said, adding, “It must be extremely heartbreaking for the families.”
On Friday, the Coast Guard put two divers in the water and they were able to see into the aircraft, but it was largely inaccessible due to the extent of the damage.
In a press statement to the media, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium said two of the passengers worked for the agency in utility operations and had traveled to Unalakleet to service part of the community’s water plant.
The agency’s interim president and CEO, Natasha Singh, said the employees were “passionate about the work they did, cared deeply for the communities they served, and made a lasting impact on rural communities across our state.”
Neither the ANTHC nor Singh could immediately be reached by Reuters for additional comment.
The incident comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of air safety in the United States. NTSB investigators are probing two deadly crashes in recent days: the midair collision of a passenger jet and U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people, and a medical jet crash in Philadelphia that killed seven.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Saad Sayeed)
