Float plane down in Mutiny Bay, Washington State

They pulled up the plane in pieces. One wing shows leading edge compression damage. It went in vertical.

My coworker lives along that beach and was watching the recovery barge.
 
The floats are ripped in pieces, fuselage is twisted and in half on the barge. Very violent impact.

From the Seattle Times, may they RIP:

The bodies of multiple victims of the deadly Labor Day weekend plane crash in Mutiny Bay have been recovered, along with most of the wreckage.

Island County Emergency Management confirmed victims had been recovered, but Deputy Director Eric Brooks said Thursday afternoon that he wasn’t able to confirm the number found.

About 80% of the plane, including the engine, has been recovered and pulled to the surface using remotely operated vessels, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said Thursday. Homendy is among the crew on barges leading the recovery efforts that began Tuesday in a shipping channel off Whidbey Island.

As of Thursday afternoon, Homendy said crews had found and were working to bring up one wing and several flight control pieces, including a horizontal stabilizer and both of the plane’s control elevators. Crews have identified the propeller and the gear box and are looking for the ailerons, which control the roll of the plane.

Whidbey Island floatplane crash
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As they look to recover the “four corners” of the airplane — the nose, the tail and both wings — Homendy said crews are pleased with the progress made in just over 48 hours of recovery, and would likely halt the operation in the next couple of days.
“The recovery operation for wreckage is going really well,” Homendy said, noting that crews of between 20 and 23 people from NTSB, the Navy, Island County sheriff personnel and subcontractors have been working in 12-hour shifts around the clock since Tuesday.
Despite dozens of witnesses narrowing down the crash site, it took officials more than a week and multiple types of sonar to locate the plane because of the depth and current of the channel in Mutiny Bay. Recovery efforts began Tuesday, with remotely operated vehicles plunging more than 150 feet below the surface to retrieve the wreckage.

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Reminds one of the wisdom that water is just as hard as concrete. They still have to find some of the victims which after this time is going to be difficult. One possible victim could have been found two weeks later, miles away on the outflow to the ocean from Puget Sound. So hard on the families.
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Weird since it wasn't a Beaver
 
Hunter:

I clicked on your link in the above post and hit a "paywall" which denies access to the Seattle Times article on the crash. Do you know of another source for the article/report?
 
Capngrog said:
Hunter:

I clicked on your link in the above post and hit a "paywall" which denies access to the Seattle Times article on the crash. Do you know of another source for the article/report?
Click to expand...
Use an incognito window. You may still get bugged to sign up but can close that popup.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
Use an incognito window. You may still get bugged to sign up but can close that popup.
Click to expand...
I got a popup asking me to turn off my ad blocker. I wasn't aware that I had one, but turning off Firefox's enhanced tracking protection for that site got rid of the popup.
 
Another update from the Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/busine...-crash-investigators-identify-possible-cause/

The National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency investigating the crash of a seaplane last month off Whidbey Island, said Monday that its experts have identified a potential cause of the accident that killed 10 people: a critical component that moves the plane’s horizontal tail came apart.

The component, called an actuator, is the only means to hold the plane’s horizontal tail — also called the stabilizer — in its position.
…
The investigators said that when the wreckage was retrieved, the upper portion of the actuator was found still attached to the horizontal stabilizer while the lower portion was “attached to its mount in the fuselage.”

They said the separation of this component occurred when a clamp nut that should have been fixed in place by a circular wire lock ring unthreaded and rotated.

The NTSB said that while the lock ring was not located in the wreckage, they found that three of five holes drilled in the clamp nut to accept the lock ring were damaged “such that they would not allow for the full insertion of the lock ring.”

“This suggests that it may be possible for a lock ring to be partially installed … not fully seated in a hole in the clamp nut,” the NTSB said. “Further, it might be difficult to visually determine if the lock ring is fully engaged in the clamp nut hole” depending on conditions such as lighting, viewing angle and the presence of dirt or grease.

The most recent overhaul of the plane’s horizontal stabilizer actuator was completed April 21.
…
 
Very sad for the maintenance folks in Kenmore. And horrific for the pilot and passengers. The photo shows the two halves of the controls free and nothing connected to the control surface. Nightmarish.
 
Not the same mechanism suggested by Dan Grider immediately after the accident, but just a different kind of elevator failure. I'm not familiar enough with the systems described to know if the kind of elevator/trim tab inspection suggested by Dan would have detected this problem, which (if the preliminary report is correct) suggests a maintenance error.

HHH

States Flown.jpg
 
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