The Maui News

The majority of the wreckage of the Hawaii Life Flight plane that crashed Dec. 15 into waters off of Kaupo, killing three crew members, has been recovered, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Wednesday.

The retrieval occurred on Tuesday and the aircraft will be transported to a secure location in Hawaii for further examination, the NTSB said. The airplane’s cockpit voice recorder, the cockpit image recorder and other electronic components will be transported to the NTSB laboratory in Washington, D.C.

The recovery comes nearly a month since the Raytheon Aircraft Co. (formerly Beech) C90A, twin-engine, turbine-powered airplane operated by Hawaii Life Flight crashed after leaving Kahului Airport at 8:53 p.m. Dec. 15.

The victims were flight nurse and Kihei resident Courtney Parry, pilot Brian Treptow and flight paramedic Gabriel Camacho.

The medical transport plane was headed from Kahului to Waimea on Hawaii island to pick up a patient.

A preliminary report released by the NTSB on Jan. 5 provided factual information and a witness account of the incident but not a probable cause.

The investigation is expected to be completed in 12 to 24 months, the NTSB said.

The wreckage field was at a depth of about 6,420 feet and about 1,200 feet south of the last data point received from the airplane.

It was located at about 5:30 a.m. Monday, the NTSB said.

Guardian Flight, which is part of Global Medical Response and the parent company of Hawaii Life Flight, contracted a company to undertake a deep-water search operation to locate and recover the crew and airplane.

The Ocean Infinity-operated search vessel, MV Island Pride, arrived off the coast of Oahu on Saturday, and the search began the next day.

The NTSB investigator-in-charge, the chief of the NTSB Office of Transportation Disaster Assistance, the director of safety for Guardian Flight and a project manager who has prior experience with over-water loss recoveries, were on board the vessel when the search began on Sunday.

The search involved the use of side-scan and multibeam sonar, autonomous underwater vehicles and a remotely operated vehicle. The equipment was used to search an area of about 54 square miles at depths ranging from 4,500 to 7,500 feet.

After the vessel’s high-precision acoustic positioning system detected a series of pings from the acoustic beacon installed on the cockpit voice recorder, the wreckage was located on Monday.

Additional surveys were then done by the remotely operated vehicle, which provided the information needed to develop a detailed recovery plan before the flight crew and the majority of the wreckage could be recovered, the NTSB said.