Airplane recovered from river

Using air bags, boats, a crane and lots of time, divers Saturday brought to shore most of the plane that crashed into the Spokane River.

The Piper Malibu crashed Thursday afternoon not long after taking off from Felts Field. Both men in the plane, Lyndon L. Amestoy, 60, and Richard Lewis Runyon, 64, were pulled from the sunken plane about a half-hour after it crashed, but they did not survive.

Over several hours Saturday, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office Dive Team attached the fuselage to air bags, and a boat pulled it to shore while the plane remained submerged. Once it came close to shore a crane pulled it from the water, just before 2 p.m.

The boats and divers made more trips to recover other parts left in the water, including the wings.

“We recovered pretty much everything the NTSB wanted recovered,” said Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich. “There was one section of a flap that we just couldn’t find.”

Keith Holloway, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said the agency had one official on scene and would take over the investigation once the plane was out and secured.

“Our role begins when the aircraft has been recovered,” he said.

Two Department of Ecology workers monitored the recovery. The plane had a 120-gallon fuel tank, but it was not certain how much fuel was in the plane, said department spokesman Andy Wineke.

“Most of the fuel seems to be getting captured by the pads and booms,” Wineke said. “There’s a little bit of a sheen that’s getting away.”

Wineke said the department hired a company to place the pads and booms into the water after the crash Thursday. Ecology officials no longer are concerned about a cap on the bottom of the river preventing PCBs from escaping. The plane was not resting on the cap, which is closer to Upriver Dam, Wineke said.