A hunting guide and his teenage employee died in a plane crash after taking off Thursday from a dirt airstrip in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.
The crash killed Palmer resident Cabot Pitts, 42, and Connor Helsel, 18, of Michigan, according to Alaska State Troopers, who released their names Tuesday. The men were the sole occupants of the PA-18 Super Cub, troopers said.
Pitts was owner of Alaska Wildwind Adventures and president of the Alaska Professional Hunters Association, the group said in a Facebook post that described Pitts as a father and husband.
Helsel was the son of a pastor and had traveled to Alaska to work for Pitts, according to a Facebook post by his father’s church, the Grove Church.
Pitts was moving Helsel from one hunting camp to another when the plane went down a little before 8 p.m. Thursday, said Millicent Hill, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board and chief of the agency’s Alaska region. Hill put the location of the crash about 50 miles east of Nabesna near Snag Creek.
There were no eye witnesses to the crash and no early indications as to what caused it, said Hill, who planned to travel to the crash site Wednesday.
Since August, 16 people have died in plane crashes in Alaska.
Eight died in a crash Aug. 20 at a remote military radar site in southwest Alaska. Four of the fatalities, including the crash that killed Pitts and Helsel, were on flights related to hunting.
An uptick in the number of people flying to and from hunting camps means Alaska usually sees more plane crashes in the fall, Hill said.
“This is typically the peak busy season, both for fatal accidents and non-fatal accidents,” she said. “Unfortunately, off-airport operations are just risky, even when you’re doing your best to mitigate all of those risks. So unfortunately, we tend to see a lot more this time of year when there’s a lot of that going on.”
