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| Photo Credit: AP. |
LANGLEY, Wash. (AP) — One person was killed and nine people remained missing, including a child, after a floatplane crashed Sunday afternoon in Puget Sound in Washington state, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
The agency
said in a press release the plane was flying from Friday Harbor, a popular
tourist destination in the San Juan Islands, to Renton, a southern suburb of
Seattle.
Four Coast
Guard vessels, a rescue helicopter and an aircraft were involved in the
extensive search, along with nearby rescue and law enforcement agencies. Two
vessels were to continue searching during the night and air patrols would
resume at first light, the Coast Guard said late Sunday.
The crash
was reported at 3:11 p.m. The Coast Guard said one body had been recovered and
nine people were still missing. The cause of the crash is unknown, authorities
said.
The plane
went down in Mutiny Bay off Whidbey Island, roughly 30 miles (50 kilometers)
northwest of downtown Seattle and about halfway between Friday Harbor and
Renton.
The National
Transportation Safety Board said the plane was a de Havilland DHC-3 Otter, a
single-engine propeller plane.
Floatplanes,
which have pontoons allowing them to land on water, are a common sight around
Puget Sound, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean. There are multiple, daily flights
between the Seattle area and the San Juan Islands, a scenic archipelago
northwest of Seattle that draws tourists from around the world.
These
aircraft, which also fly between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia,
frequently travel over Seattle and land in Lake Washington, not far from the
city’s iconic Space Needle.
Renton,
where authorities say the flight was headed Sunday, is at the southern tip of
Lake Washington, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Seattle.
In 2019, a
midair crash in Alaska between two sightseeing planes killed six people. The
Ketchikan-based floatplanes were carrying passengers from the same cruise ship,
the Royal Princess, and were returning from tours of Misty Fjords National
Monument.