Authorities are trying to determine the cause of the crash of a medical transport flight that killed all five people aboard the plane, including a patient, in a mountainous area in northern Nevada.<\/p>\n
The National Transportation Safety Board has sent in a seven-member team of investigators to the site of Friday night\u2019s crash near Stagecoach.<\/p>\n
The crash occurred amid a winter storm warning issued by the National Weather Service in Reno for large swaths of Nevada, including parts of Lyon County. It was snowing steadily with winds around 30 kph with gusts up to 50 kph.<\/p>\n
Visibility was under 3.2 kilometers with a cloud ceiling about 600 meters above ground when the flight left Reno for Salt Lake City, Utah, and went down, according to the weather service.<\/p>\n
Care Flight, which provides ambulance service by plane and helicopter, identified the downed aircraft as a Pilatus PC-12 and said the pilot, a flight nurse, a flight paramedic, a patient and a patient\u2019s family member all died.<\/p>\n
Robin Hays, a Stagecoach resident and a former flight nurse, said she heard the sputtering plane fly over her house before crashing behind her property.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew the plane was in trouble,\u201d Hays told the Reno Gazette Journal. \u201cI knew it was going to crash. I was just hoping it wasn\u2019t going to crash into my house.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hays called 911 and went outside but could not see the wreckage because of the blowing snow.<\/p>\n
Misty Gruenemay told the newspaper that the wind was howling and the snow blowing hard when she heard what sounded like a whiz and a thump behind her house in Stagecoach. The rural community is home to around 2,500 residents and located about 72 kilometers southeast of Reno.<\/p>\n
Gruenemay said she wanted to help but conditions were terrible and she didn\u2019t have a vehicle that could safely travel the unpaved roads buried in 6 inches of snow.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was snowing and visibility was horrible. I don\u2019t even understand why that plane was allowed to take off,\u201d Gruenemay said.<\/p>\n
The Lyon County Sheriff\u2019s office said authorities began receiving calls about the crash near Stagecoach, Nevada, around 9:15 p.m. and found the wreckage two hours later.<\/p>\n
Care Flight officials said it was halting all flights and will work with each of its operations to determine when it will return to service.<\/p>\n
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the plane was registered to Guardian Flight, based in South Jordan, Utah. Care Flight is a service of REMSA Health in Reno and Guardian Flight.<\/p>\n
More than half a million medical patients use air ambulance services each month in the U.S., according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners\u2019 website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Authorities are trying to determine the cause of the crash of a medical transport flight that killed all five people aboard the plane, including a patient, in a mountainous area in northern Nevada. The National Transportation Safety Board has sent in a seven-member team of investigators to the site of Friday night\u2019s crash near Stagecoach. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":495,"featured_media":6358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[141],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/495"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobbinghood.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}