Six dead in Alaska seaplane crash
Six people were killed Thursday, August 6, in a seaplane crash in southeastern Alaska, the US Coast Guard said.
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The Coast Guard said in a statement that emergency services received the signal from a distress beacon at approximately 11:20 a.m. (7:20 p.m. GMT), 13 kilometers northeast of Ketchikan. They added that a Coast Guard helicopter found the wreck at 2:37 p.m. and brought down two rescuers, but no survivors were found.
dangerous landing
The seaplane, carrying five passengers and a pilot, took off from Misty Fjords National Park. The company said on Twitter that the passengers were tourists on Holland America Line’s Nieuw Amsterdam cruise ship, adding that it was an independent flight that the cruise line did not provide.
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Several tour companies offer tours of the fjords around Ketchikan, which are surrounded by lush forests and almost vertical rock faces. Most of these trips involve a seaplane landing on the water, and the area has seen several accidents in recent years.
In May 2019, six people were killed in a collision between two seaplanes carrying passengers on a cruise ship. In 2015, a plane crashed into a granite rock face, killing all nine passengers, near a lake in the same area of Misty Fiords.
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