The bodies of four people were found by a National Park Service ranger Monday morning in the wreckage of a flightseeing plane that crashed Saturday near Denali, according to an update.
A fifth person was not found but is presumed dead, the park service said.
On Monday afternoon, the National Park Service identified the pilot of the aircraft as Craig Layson of Saline, Michigan. The Saline Post newspaper says Layson is married with three children.
Rangers took advantage of a “brief window of clearing weather” to spot the wreckage for the first time since the plane went down at about 6 p.m. Saturday, the park service said in an alert.
A ranger was suspended beneath the helicopter and “dug through the snow that had filled the aircraft and found the bodies of four of the five passengers,” the agency said. “There were no footprints or disturbances leading away from the site and there were no other signs to indicate any of the passengers made it out of the plane.”
The weather has since closed back in, making additional efforts to find the fifth person impossible for now, park service spokeswoman Katherine Belcher said.
The wreckage is near the summit of Thunder Mountain, a feature roughly 14 miles southwest of the summit of Denali, in extremely technical terrain on a hanging glacier that spans a crevice.
The plane was found Monday morning when searchers finally “got through to the crash site” after bad weather hampered efforts for 36 hours, said a spokesman for the 176th Wing of the Alaska Air National Guard.
The National Park Service high-altitude helicopter, along with an Air National Guard C-130 and two HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters, departed early Monday morning and were attempting to reach the crash site, according to a statement from the park service. A U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook from Fort Wainwright was in Talkeetna. A ground crew will be inserted into a glacier staging area to assist with operations.
The crashed plane is a de Havilland Beaver operated by K2 Aviation out of Talkeetna.
The passengers are from Poland but their names, as well as that of the pilot, have not been released. The park service is in contact with the Polish Consulate in Los Angeles.
The pilot called the K2 office at Talkeetna’s airport twice on Saturday night, once right after the crash and again about an hour later, according to the National Park Service.
The plane’s emergency transponder continued to emit a signal.
The ridge where the plane crashed was described by searchers as “a mix of near-vertical rock, ice and snow.”
A park service helicopter launched two hours after the crash was reported Saturday evening and got within a mile of the plane’s GPS coordinates but couldn’t spot the crash or make radio contact, officials said. An Air National Guard helicopter and two K2 planes flew the area Saturday night but also couldn’t see anything or communicate with the downed plane.
The search resumed about 5 a.m. Sunday but a heavy cloud cover blocked efforts to find the plane.
