This story has been updated. Find the latest version here. ———— Rescue teams searching for a pilot and four passengers who crashed high atop a ridge deep in the Alaska Range in Denali National Park were unable to spot the crash site Sunday because of terrible weather, an official said. The attempted rescue began Saturday night shortly after the crash occurred and has been prevented so far by thick cloud cover. Search crews are hopeful they'll be able to reach the site Monday morning, said Katherine Belcher, a spokeswoman with the National Park Service, on Sunday night. The crashed plane is a de Havilland Beaver operated by K2 Aviation out of Talkeetna. It's believed to have crashed around 6 p.m. Saturday at about a 10,500-foot elevation at a location known unofficially as "Thunder Mountain." Two HH-60 rescue helicopters operated by the Alaska Air National Guard launched shortly after 1 p.m. Sunday were unable to spot the crash site, she said. "The helicopters were not able to make any kind of visual contact or get close to the area," Belcher said. "They'll try again at 7 a.m, depending on the weather. There's supposed to be a small window of opportunity to get closer and hopefully lay eyes on the crash." The crash occurred near the 10,920-foot summit, Belcher said. The area was described by the park service as "as extremely steep and a mix of near-vertical rock, ice and snow." The pilot of the downed plane made two satellite phone calls to the company's airport office Saturday night — one right after the crash and another around 7 p.m., Belcher said. "The pilot reported injuries, but the extent is unknown," the park service said in a statement Sunday. The Beaver is reported to be equipped with emergency supplies, including a first aid kit and survival gear including food and sleeping bags. Belcher said the weather at the crash site will definitely fall below freezing Sunday night. Throughout the day on Sunday, the winds were blowing in the area at 25 mph to 35 mph, with gusts up to 60 mph, further complicating the rescue efforts, she said. She said she did not know why the pilot had not made any satellite calls since Saturday night. The plane's electronic locator transmitter continues to convey a signal, indicating the plane's location remains at the altitude where it struck the mountainside. Belcher said an Alaska Air National Guard C-130 circled the site Sunday, relaying weather information back to a ranger station in Talkeetna. The town, about 90 miles north of Anchorage, is the home of K2 Aviation and a jump-off point for flightseeing tours in the Alaska Range. The names of the pilot and passengers had not been released as of Sunday afternoon. Thunder Mountain is about 14 miles southwest of the summit of Denali. "Thunder Mountain is more of a ridge than a mountain, stretching roughly a mile long from east to west and rising about 3,000 feet above both the Tokositna and Kahiltna glaciers," the park service said. "The knife-edge ridge that constitutes Thunder Mountain extends easterly to become a southern ridge of Mount Stevens, formerly known as the South Peak of Mount Hunter. Terrain in the vicinity of the crash site is characterized as extremely steep and a mix of near-vertical rock, ice and snow." A park service helicopter launched at 8 p.m. Saturday to search the area and was able to fly within a mile of the plane's GPS coordinates, but cloud cover prevented the crew from spotting the crash and they weren't able to make radio contact, the park service said. Air National Guard helicopters as well as two K2 planes flew to the area Saturday night but were also unable to see or communicate with the downed plane. The search resumed Sunday morning at around 5 a.m., but weather has been "the deciding factor" preventing aircraft from reaching the site, said David Bedard, a spokesman with the 176th wing of the Air National Guard in Anchorage. Pilots had been unable to see through the "soup" of cloudy weather, he said early Sunday afternoon. Agencies plan to stage a four-member ground crew near the base of Thunder Mountain when weather permits. But "a ground ascent of Thunder Mountain is not considered an option due to significant rockfall and unstable snow and cornice conditions at this time of the year," according to the park service. Belcher, with the park service, said the tour plane took off Saturday from K2 Aviation shortly after 5 p.m. The weather around the crash site was reported as cloudy but calm at the time of the accident, Belcher said. Belcher said it appears the flightseeing tour was wrapping up when the crash occurred. "We think they were coming back (to Talkeetna) because they were heading southeast," Belcher said. A spokeswoman for K2 Aviation, Jennifer Thompson, emailed a statement late Sunday afternoon saying the company has canceled flight tours until further notice. K2 said it's fully cooperating with multiple agencies involved in the response, including the National Transportation Safety Board that will investigate the accident. The company is also awaiting updates on the rescue.<doc-sep>PALMER — The pilot of a K2 Aviation flightseeing plane that crashed near Denali in early August lived long enough to report two possible fatalities before communications ceased, according to a National Transportation Safety Board report released Thursday. The crash killed all five people aboard the de Havilland Beaver, making it the deadliest in recent history for an air taxi flying into Denali National Park and Preserve. The plane left Talkeetna's airport just after 5 p.m. Aug. 4 and crashed an hour later, authorities said. Pilot Craig Layson, of Michigan, and four Polish visitors died in the crash. The plane came to rest in a crevasse at almost 11,000 feet altitude, high on a knife-edge ridge of Thunder Mountain about 14 miles from Denali's summit. K2 told investigators the one-hour tour was scheduled to fly over multiple glaciers and the Denali climbers' base camp on Kahiltna Glacier at 7,200 feet, then return to Talkeetna. Before he died, Layson conducted two satellite phone calls with the K2 office within an hour of the crash. The NTSB preliminary report describes the first call, made by Layson: "The pilot stated that they had impacted a mountain and needed rescue. The call only lasted a couple minutes before the connection was lost." The call came to K2's main operations number, lead NTSB investigator Shaun Williams said Thursday. K2 tried several times after that to contact Layson without success, Williams said. "Then finally it went through." That second call lasted an unknown period of time, he said. Layson in the second call told K2 "he was trapped in the wreckage and there were possibly two fatalities," the report stated. "No further information was received before the connection was once again lost." The plane's GPS track data indicated it flew over base camp at 5:46 p.m., then turned south above Kahiltna Glacier before turning left toward Talkeetna, the report says. The track terminated near the ridge high above the glacier. The Alaska Rescue Coordination Center got an alert from the plane's emergency locator transmitter at 5:53 p.m., NTSB learned. Three minutes later, K2 was alerted the satellite tracking had stopped moving, and the air carrier immediately initiated lost-aircraft procedures. Bad weather kept rescuers from reaching the craft for more than 36 hours. The National Park Service high-altitude helicopter headed for the coordinates transmitted from the downed plane just after 8 p.m. but couldn't reach the site, the report says. The Alaska Air National Guard and Army National Guard also participated in the search and rescue, as did the U.S. Army. A ranger lowered by helicopter the morning of Aug. 6 found the bodies of the pilot and three passengers inside; the body of a fourth passenger was found four days later toward the back of the plane, according to the report. The plane was fractured behind the trailing edge of the wings, Williams wrote. The fuselage was "splayed open with blown, packed snow inside." The fragmented aircraft remains perched on a hanging glacier on the north side of Thunder Mountain. The right wing came to rest several hundred feet below the main wreckage. The National Park Service last week ended efforts to recover the wreckage and the bodies inside, citing a harrowing and risky combination of steep terrain, avalanche hazard and the condition of the aircraft. Williams is being assisted in his investigation by Federal Aviation Administration staffers in Wasilla and Washington, D.C., as well as K2 Aviation. He said Thursday that clouds obscured the crash site when investigators conducted a fly-over. It's unclear whether another attempt will be made. Investigators are still in the early stages and will need to conduct further interviews with K2 Aviation and other pilots in the area. Williams said he was also still trying to establish Layson's aviation history including flight hours and time spent flying in Alaska's mountains. A newspaper in his hometown of Saline, Michigan, said Layson spent the last two summers working as a pilot in Alaska.<doc-sep>ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A fifth body was found on Friday in the wreckage of an Alaska sightseeing plane that crashed near North America’s tallest peak, leaving no doubt the pilot perished with his four Polish passengers on the steep mountainside, authorities said. The wreckage of a sightseeing plane that crashed near the summit of one of the mountains in Denali National Park in this National Park Service image in Alaska, U.S., on August 6, 2018. Courtesy National Park Service/Handout via REUTERS But the site of last Saturday’s crash, which tied the record for the deadliest civilian aviation accident in Denali National Park, was determined to be too treacherous to attempt to recover any of the five bodies, National Park Service officials said. The plane, a single-engine de Havilland Beaver operated by a local air-taxi company, crashed near the top of Thunder Mountain, about 14 miles (22.5 km) southwest of the summit of Denali, the highest mountain in North America. The impact left the plane in two pieces, lodged in the crevasse of a hanging glacier nearly 11,000 feet high on a steep, avalanche-prone slope from which unstable ice blocks are protruding, Park Service officials said. “The tail and fuselage of the aircraft are just hanging on by a piece of metal,” Park Service spokeswoman Katherine Belcher said. Any attempt to move the wreckage or remains would risk further loss of life, she said. Park rangers first reached the wreckage by helicopter on Monday, suspending one ranger from a safety line from the hovering aircraft while he dug through the snow enough to find the bodies of the four passengers. The pilot remained missing at that time, and though he was presumed dead, Park Service officials said he apparently had survived long enough to make two distress calls after impact - one giving notification of the crash. The second was unintelligible. After several weather delays, a second park ranger flown by helicopter to the crash site and lowered in a harness located the pilot’s remains. The pilot was identified as Craig Layson of Michigan. He worked for K2 Aviation, one of the many companies that ferry tourists and mountaineers from the Alaska town of Talkeetna to the park’s snowy peaks. The four Polish passengers’ identities were withheld at the request of the Polish government, Belcher said. Five other people died in Denali in a 1984 tourist flight from Anchorage, but two military crashes in the area in 1944 and 1952 claimed 18 and 19 lives, respectively. Denali’s mountaineering activities, meanwhile, have proven safer than usual, with no Denali climber deaths reported so far this year for the first time in 15 years, the Park Service said.<doc-sep>
The National Park Service released a photo on Monday showing a tourist plane that had crashed into a mountain ridge in Alaska's Denali National Park. The plane crashed Saturday evening, as pilot Craig Layson was taking a group of four Polish tourists to see Kahiltna Glacier. A park ranger confirmed Monday the deaths of four of the people on board. A fifth person is missing, but presumed dead. A dramatic photo the National Park Service released Monday shows a tourist plane hanging precariously on the side of an Alaskan mountain, after a deadly crash over the weekend. Pilot Craig Layson took a group of four Polish tourists to see the Kahiltna glacier, at the base of Denali — North America's tallest mountain — Saturday evening. About an hour after taking off, the plane crashed into the side of Thunder Mountain, that stands nearly 11,000 feet above the glacier. On Monday, the National Park Service released this photo showing the crashed plane. AP Layson called for help, saying his passengers were injured, and there was initially hope that they might survive since there were sleeping bags, a stove, and food on board. But poor weather prevented a rescue over the weekend, and by the time a ranger reached the crash site on Monday, he found four bodies. The missing fifth person is presumed dead as well. The park service ranger was lowered down on a line from the helicopter and dug through snow that had filled the aircraft to find the bodies of four people. There were no footprints or other disturbances in the snow that would have indicated anyone made it out of the plane, the park service said. —KTVA 11 News (@ktva) August 8, 2018 Officials at Denali National Park are now working to determine if and when they can launch a mission to recover the bodies. The four Polish passengers on the plane are not being identified, at the request of officials at their national embassy in Los Angeles. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Ideally, an investigator would travel to the crash site and keep analyzing the wreckage when it's removed from the mountain, spokesman Clint Johnson said. "My understanding is that it's in a crevasse-laden area," Johnson said, adding that reaching the site will "require technical climbing experience." A zoomed-in version of the photo. AP Layson was a married father-of-three from Saline, Michigan, The Saline Post reported. The newspaper says he spent the last two summers living in Alaska with his wife, working for K2 Aviation. He also owned Stony Creek Collision in nearby Ypsilanti, Michigan, manager Bobby Seldkamp told The Associated Press by phone Monday evening. His family told local ABC affiliate WXYZ that he had been flying since he was a teenager. While the climbing season generally ends in mid-July, it's still considered safe for sightseeing flights to land on the glacier later in the season, allowing visitors to walk on the ice field. Temperatures on the mountain at 11,000 feet can be warm if the sun is out, but likely below freezing at night, American Alpine Institute director of operations Jason Martin said. K2 Aviation suspended all sightseeing flights after the crash and said it's cooperating with the investigation. The company has been family-owned and operated for 55 years, according to a statement.