HONOLULU (AP) — The National Transportation Safety Board said a team has recovered the stays of three flight crew members and the wreckage of a medical transport plane that crashed into the ocean off Maui last month.
The remnants of the twin-engine, turbine-powered airplane shall be taken to the agency’s laboratory in Washington, D.C., as a part of the accident investigation. The investigation is predicted to take one to 2 years, the agency said.
Pilot Brian Treptow, flight nurse Courtney Parry and flight paramedic Gabriel Camacho were killed when the Raytheon C90A crashed shortly after leaving Kahului Airport at 8:53 p.m. on Dec. 15.
The flight was headed to Waimea on the Big Island to move a patient to Honolulu.
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The stays were being transported to Oahu on a non-public vessel. The Honolulu Department of the Medical Examiner said it’s going to discover them.
The National Transportation Safety Board earlier this month said a witness saw the plane spiral down and hit the ocean.
The search area covered about 54 square miles (140 square kilometers) at depths starting from 4,500 to 7500 feet (1,371 to 2,286 meters). The search vessel, MV Island Pride, detected a series of pings from an acoustic beacon installed on the plane’s cockpit voice recorder. Recovery crews found the wreckage at a depth of about 6,420 feet (1,957 meters).
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