Alaska Aircrash Investigations

When a Cessna 180 crashes on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, two lives are lost … along with nearly all the evidence. After a terrible post-crash fire, investigator Shaun Williams must piece together eyewitness accounts from a grieving community, and compare that with the surviving pieces of wreckage. It takes a trip to an Alabama engine factory and back to Alaska to begin to make sense of the mysterious final sounds of the aircraft.

A tourist flight crashes just after takeoff from a remote fishing lodge, killing several passengers. The wreckage layout reveals that neither the airframe nor the engine caused the crash. Now the “Go Team” must launch a probe into the bizarre noises described by the survivors in the last minutes of the flight, and painstakingly determine whether the aircraft was overloaded past its weight limit.

Newcomer Shaun Williams gets a report at midnight of a downed plane in a local bay, but by dawn, the aircraft has disappeared under the waters of Knik Arm. With rescuers and helicopters attempting to recover the wreckage, Williams tries to determine what caused the plane to plunge only two miles before its planned landing. When the fatal crash is pulled from the water, the NTSB rules out mechanical problems, leaving the possibly damaged GPS as the only evidence that might solve the mystery.

A 23-year-old pilot’s Cessna plunges nose first into a public road near Big Lake, and investigator Millicent Hoidal must piece together the evidence remaining from the fiery crash. A set of missing logbooks and a propeller with no serial number complicate the investigation, which must rely on a deep dive into the young pilot’s history and training to determine the final cause of the disaster.