The lone surviving passenger of a fatal plane crash near Haines told investigators that the pilot purposely stopped one engine to demonstrate how to re-start it in flight.
National Transportation Safety Board released a preliminary report this week in a crash that killed two people and injured another about late morning May 27.
An NTSB investigator interviewed Chan Valentine, 31, of Juneau, who survived but suffered serious injuries, in the hospital.
The pilot David Kunat, 29, of Juneau and Stanley Quoc Nguyen, 29, of Garden Grove, California, were killed in the crash.
They were traveling from Juneau to Haines in Kunat’s twin-engine Piper PA-30 Twin Comanche, heading to the Great Alaska Craft Beer & Home Brew Festival in Haines, Alaska, said Clint Johnson, NTSB’s Alaska Regional Office chief.
The plane went down about 11 a.m. on a rocky beach near the Glacier Point airstrip, approximately 10 miles away from Haines.
Valentine was sitting in the back of the plane.
“Unfortunately, it does sound like one engine, the right engine, was shut down intentionally,” Johnson said. “They were unable to restart it, which ultimately led to the accident.”
The NTSB’s preliminary report summarizes Valentine’s account: that about 20 minutes into the flight, Kunat intentionally shut down the right engine to demonstrate how to restart it in-flight. But it didn’t work.
“It’s my understanding that they tried to restart it using the battery power, but they weren’t able to restart it using the battery,” Johnson said. “They then tried to air start it, which means they climbed to an altitude and dove the airplane to try and get the air speed up to be able to windmill the prop. Unfortunately that did not work.”
The NTSB report said after multiple failed attempts to restart the engine, Kunat decided to land at the Glacier Point gravel airstrip.
Kunat wanted to land the plane and use a battery booster to start the right engine, Valentine told the NTSB.
Kunat made a low-level pass to check the conditions at the airstrip before landing, Valentine said. That was his last memory of the flight.
The Chilkat Valley News reported that a witness, Steve Dice, and his friends, helped save Valentine’s life.
Dice was watching the plane through binoculars across the Lynn Canal.
He saw the plane reach the end of the airstrip, descend, turn right and then crash into the shoreline, the NTSB report said.
Dice said the plane hit the shore at a right wing-down, nose-down angle. The NTSB recovered the wrecked plane, and said the damage is consistent with that angle of impact.
After Dice saw the plane go down, he and Haines residents Tom, Patricia and Kirby Faverty took a boat from their cabin to the crash site.
They saw Valentine was alive but trapped in the plane and ultimately were able to keep the plane from going under the rising water by attaching it to a backhoe from a nearby tourism camp.
The NTSB report confirms that Dice and the Favertys kept the plane in shallow water until emergency responders arrived.
Valentine was eventually taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, who was in “satisfactory” condition, a spokesperson there said.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions. Johnson, with the NTSB, said he does not know why Kunat would try to demonstrate an in-air engine restart.
Also, there’s still the question of why the engine wouldn’t restart after it was turned off.
“Investigators are going to be working very closely with the airframe manufacturer, the engine manufacturer, looking at performance issues, trying to figure out more why they weren’t able to restart the engine,” Johnson said.
The NTSB also will conduct a more in-depth interview with Valentine once his health is better.
The final report, which will include a probably cause, will take nine months to a year to compile, Johnson said.
