An actual photograph taken by a passenger aboard the de Havilland Beaver of the De Havilland Otter just before it crashed. All aboard the Beaver, including the passenger who had just snapped the photograph, were tragically killed in the crash.
The NTSB has released its final report regarding the midair collision between two sightseeing airplanes in Alaska in May of 2019. This collision resulted in fatalities for all five individuals aboard the de Havilland Beaver operated by Mountain Air Services, and one fatality and 10 injuries in the other plane, a de Havilland Otter. The Otter’s pilot and nine passengers managed to survive the collision and subsequent crash landing. The Otter was being operated by Taquan Air.
Unlike the majority of the NTSB’s reports on midair collisions, the board did not find that the cause was the pilots’ failure to see and avoid other traffic. In fact, Board Member Bruce Landsberg, who formerly headed the AOPA’s Air Safety Foundation, specifically stated that see and avoid alone would not have been sufficient to prevent this collision. Instead, the Board cited two factors – the obstruction of the sky by the aircraft’s structure, although it’s unclear what exactly a pilot could do about that, and the lack of required traffic alerting systems for aircraft engaged in sightseeing duties, especially in crowded areas such as the Misty Fjords National Monument. Both planes were carrying passengers from the cruise ship The Royal Princess at the time of the crash.
The NTSB also created an animation depicting the crash sequence, and interestingly, a recreation of the pilots’ line of sight. It was determined that the Beaver converged with the Otter such that the Beaver was in the other plane’s blind spot behind the vertical structural pillar on the pilot’s left. Similarly, the Beaver pilot’s view would have been obstructed by the plane’s structure and the passenger seated in the right second row seat.
Read about the NTSB’s report here.
