Mid-air crash kills 4

TRAPPER CREEK — A mid-air collision near here has killed four people Saturday afternoon on board a small aircraft.

Mat-Su Borough Director of Emergency Services Dennis Brodigan said crews were called at 2:13 p.m., Saturday to respond to the Amber Lake area where one of the two planes involved, a 1959 Cessna 180B, crashed after the mid-air collision and caught fire near Mile 12 of Oil Well Road off of Petersville Road.

Brodigan said the first responders on scene walked from the road to the crash scene, but had no firefighting gear to quell the flames.

A second set of rescuers from Trapper Creek used all-terrain vehicles to reach the crash site and carried fire extinguishers they used to douse the flames, he said.

The fixed-wing, single-engine aircraft can carry four people, Alaska State Troopers spokesperson Megan Peters said Saturday afternoon. She later confirmed that four people had died, and troopers are waiting for positive identification from the state Medical Examiner’s Office before their names are released.

Peters said the identity of the plane’s owner, determined by its tail number, has not been released pending notification of next of kin.

The pilot of the second plane involved — as well as multiple people on the ground — called 911 to report the crash, Brodigan said.

Peters said despite extensive damage to the second plane, the pilot — who was uninjured and that plane’s sole passenger — managed to fly back to Anchorage and land safely at Ted Stevens International Airport at about 3:30 p.m.

That plane is a Cessna 206 registered to Eagle River resident Kevin W. Earp, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s tail number registry. Peters later confirmed Earp was piloting the plane at the time of the collision.

Anchorage Airport police and fire rescue personnel were staged at the runway with a crash response team, troopers say. AST reports the cause and circumstances surrounding the crash are under investigation and that the National Transportation Safety Board and FAA are responding to the scene.

Brodigan said the incident happened in an area of the borough with no firefighting service, but the Division of Forestry was called in case the fire spread from the plane into the surrounding wilderness.

“The aviation community is very small up here,” Brodigan said. “This is going to affect a lot of people.”

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.