A plane carrying 10 people seemingly vanished while flying over Alaska’s Norton Sound south of the Arctic Circle, triggering a desperate search along the state’s western coast on Friday.
The Cessna aircraft, a single-engine turboprop operated by Bering Air, departed from Unalakleet for Nome on Thursday afternoon with nine passengers and a pilot onboard, Alaska’s Department of Public Safety said. Officials lost contact with plane around 2:37 p.m., less than an hour after take-off, and it was reported “overdue” by 4 p.m., per a dispatch message shared on the agency’s website.
According to data from FlightRadar, the aircraft was last seen flying over the Norton Sound, an inlet of the Bering Sea separating Unalakleet and Nome, just after 3:15 p.m. It was “12 miles offshore transiting from Unalakleet to Nome when its position was lost,” the U.S. Coast Guard Alaska maritime region posted on X.
While it’s still unclear what happened to the plane, its pilot apparently “told Anchorage Air Traffic Control that he intended to enter a holding pattern while waiting for the runway to be clear,” according to a Facebook post from the Nome Volunteer Fire Department. A C-130 Coast Guard plane was “planning to scope the area” in response. The agency said its firefighters were also actively searching the ground, between Nome and White Mountain, after they received a “a report of a missing Bering Air Caravan.”
“Due to weather and visibility, we are limited on air search at the current time. National Guard and Coast Guard and Troopers have been notified and are active in the search,” the fire department said. “Norton Sound Health Corporation is standing by.”
The White Mountain fire chief, Jack Adams, told KTUU that the aircraft “disappeared from the radar somewhere along the coast of Nome to Topkok,” leaving crews to search the approximately “30-mile stretch” of land overnight and into Friday. He said they’re hoping to find the plane on land, adding that it “being in the water would be the worst-case scenario.”
The names of the people onboard weren’t yet being released.
“Staff at Bering Air is working hard to gather details, get emergency assistance, search and rescue going,” said David Olson, director of operations for Nome-based Bering Air, which serves more than 30 local communities.
The plane’s disappearance marks the third major incident in U.S. aviation in just more than a week’s time. It comes one week after a medical transportation plane crashed in Philadelphia on Jan. 31, killing the six people onboard and another person on the ground. And on Jan. 29, a US military Black Hawk helicopter collided with a passenger jet near Washington, DC, leaving no survivors.