A year and a half after a Ravn aircraft crashed into a mountain near Togiak, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) appears poised to issue a report on the accident.
The Ravn Connect crash, which took place on October 2, 2016, was the subject of a rare hearing held in Alaska last summer, during which the NTSB grilled Hageland Aviation staff in order to understand the issues involved in the accident that killed three people. Timothy Cline of Homer and Drew Welty of Anchorage were the two pilots who died in the crash, as did one passenger: Louie John, a fisherman from Manokotak who got on the plane in Quinhagak.
There was no malfunction that caused the plane to fly into Caribou Ridge outside of Togiak that day. The NTSB calls this type of accident a “controlled flight into terrain.” Alaska has a high number of such accidents and Hageland, a subsidiary of Ravn, had a disproportionate number of them at the time. The hearing last summer was held to better understand both the accident outside of Togiak, and the conditions in Alaska that make flying here so dangerous.
The final report on the investigation is not yet available to the public. It goes before the NTSB at its April 10 public meeting in Washington, D.C..