On-Site Investigation Of Plane Crash Completed
National Transportation and Safety Board officials have completed an on-site investigation of a plane crash near Malad, Idaho, that killed eight Salt Lake City men.
Michael Stockhill, senior air safety investigator for the NTSB, said Saturday that investigators will now spend the next several weeks sifting through the information they have gathered.
Wreckage from the Mitsubishi MU-2 that crashed Monday also was taken to a storage site in Oregon where NTSB investigators can continue to examine it.
Two pilots and six business executives were killed when the MU-2 nosedived into a grassy hillside at the base of a canyon 10 miles northwest of Malad in southeastern Idaho.
Stockhill said that while he cannot talk about the probable cause of the accident, preliminary findings seem to indicate there was no propeller problem.
A crash of a similar plane in 1993 that killed South Dakota Gov. George Mickelson was blamed on a failed propeller hub that caused a blade to break off in flight.
Investigators are looking at icing as a possible contributor. Stockhill said another airplane, about 12 minutes behind the plane that crashed, was flying at the same altitude and in the same direction.
That pilot reported icing when he arrived in the vicinity of the accident.