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Mystery Remains After Copter Crash Kills Two Nurses

Associated Press

Finding the cause of a helicopter crash that killed two nurses and left the pilot missing will depend on whether the wreckage can be found 700 feet beneath the surface of Puget Sound, authorities said.

The Seattle-based medical-evacuation helicopter was en route to Bainbridge Island, about six miles west of here, when it plunged into the sound shortly before dawn Monday.

The bodies of the Airlift Northwest nurses were pulled from the water by a fireboat, Seattle Fire Department officials said. Authorities said the pilot probably remained with the helicopter as it sank.

“The working assumption is that there are no survivors,” said spokesman Larry Zalin of Harborview Medical Center.

The copter, an Italian-made Agusta 109, was summoned to Bainbridge Island to fly a woman in labor to a hospital, Bainbridge Island Fire Chief Kirk Stickels said. The woman ended up having her baby in an ambulance on the way to a hospital in Bremerton, which can be reached from the island by a bridge, he said.

“The hardest part is that we don’t know what happened and don’t have a concrete answer as to why the aircraft fell out of the sky,” said Debbie Sampson, chief flight nurse for Airlift Northwest, the company that operated the helicopter.

“Everyone here is in a state of disbelief.”

The airlift service, operated by a consortium of four Seattle hospitals, flies emergency medical missions in Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho. It handles about seven emergency calls a day, Sampson said.

Investigators said they hoped to locate and recover the wreckage.

This is Airlift Northwest’s first serious accident in 28,000 missions since it began operations in 1982, the company’s director, Dr. Michael Copass, told a news conference at Boeing Field.

Airlift Northwest identified the crew as nurses Marna Fleetwood, 40, of Brier, and Amy Riebe, 41, of Seattle, and pilot Lee Bothwell, 42, of Puyallup. The pilot had more than 20 years of military flight experience and had been with the company for three or four months.