NTSB releases first report on kit-plane crash

BIG LAKE — The National Transportation Safety Board this week released a preliminary report on a plane crash that claimed a Big Lake man’s life Sept. 9.

Kenneth Whedbee, 66, died in the crash. Passenger Jason Scott, 37, of Big Lake, was hospitalized with serious injuries. The report released Sept. 30 makes no conclusions about what caused the homebuilt plane to go down, but does detail some of the events leading up to the crash.

According to the report, the plane took off shortly after noon, Sept. 9 from the Kucera Residence Airport, an FAA-identified landing strip in the West Lake area of Big Lake.

“According to a close family member of the pilot, the purpose of the flight was to locate a large male grizzly bear that had been leaving tracks on the family’s private runway over the last several years. When a report came in that the bear had been seen protecting a moose kill in the area, the pilot decided to take the airplane and see if he could locate the bear,” according to the report.

The plane was described as a Zenith CH-701 airplane. The plane is the kind a person buys in a kit and builds at home.

According to the NTSB, investigators made it out to the crash site the next day. Alaska State Troopers identified the crash site as being near Blanket Lake, which, according to Google Maps, is around 2 miles from the strip where Whedbee departed.

“The wreckage was located in an area of sparsely populated spruce trees which had been previously burned by a forest fire. The airplane came to rest upright, in a nose-low attitude, and it was resting on a tangled mass of dead fallen trees and branches,” the report says.

Investigators said they found all the “primary flight control surfaces” — generally defined as things like ailerons and rudders.

They also made sure everything was hooked up right — often a concern in kit-built planes — when they, in NTSB lingo, ensured that “control continuity was verified from all primary flight control surfaces in the cockpit.”

Investigators also tracked down weather data from around the time of this flight from the nearest airport — Birchwood Airport in Chugiak. Weather at the time was clear, partially cloudy with a 3-knot wind with temperatures at 55 degrees.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.