A small plane carrying eight people that crashed into the ocean off North Carolina’s Outer Banks earlier this month raised no alarm calls in the moments before it lost contact with air traffic controllers and went down, officials say.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released new details about the 13 February crash in a preliminary report on Friday.
All eight people on board were killed as they returned home from an annual duck hunting trip. The adult victims were identified as pilot Ernest Durwood Rawls, 67; his son Jeffrey Worthington Rawls, 28; Stephanie Ann McInnis Fulcher, 42; and her boyfriend Douglas Hunter Parks, 45, who owned the plane.
The four other victims were high school students and friends Jonathan Kole McInnis, 15; Noah Lee Styron, 15; Michael Daily Shepard, 15; and Jacob Nolan Taylor, 16.
The plane, a single-engine Pilatus PC-12, had taken off from Hyde County Airport at 1.35pm and requested clearance to land at Michael J Smith Field Airport in Beaufort.
The pilot’s last known contact with air traffic control was at around 2pm when he approached Cape Lookout National Seashore and acknowledged that he was flying about 200 feet lower than the necessary altitude of 1,900.
The controller tried to reach the pilot again less than three minutes later after the plane made a rapid ascent to 4,700 feet and continued “climbing quickly”.
Within a minute of that call attempt, the plane dropped off the radar at 2.04pm before crashing three miles off shore of Drum Inlet.
“Throughout the communication with air traffic control, there was no distress calls or a declaration of emergency from the airplane,” the report states.
It said the plane had been diverted over the ocean after flying near airspace that was restricted due to military activity. When that activity cleared, the pilot was instructed to approach Smith Field but never made it there.
The report did not speculate about the cause of the crash, which could take months to determine conclusively.
The pilot, Ernest Rawls, had more than 3,000 hours of flight experience and had received his most recent medical certification last summer.
He was accompanied in the cock pit by an individual with a student pilot certificate, the NTSB said, without naming that person or indicating if they were directly involved in the flight.
It took several days for US Coast Guard search crews to recover the remains of all eight passengers who lived in and around Cateret County.
The plane’s emergency locator transmitter and flight data recorder were recovered by dive crews and sent to a lab for examination.
