New simulations of a small plane's crash last summer on a Southeast Alaska commuter flight are giving National Transportation Safety Board investigators a fresh perspective on the final moments of a trip that left one person dead and four injured.
"Alaska Aircrash Investigations," a Smithsonian Channel show about the NTSB's work in Alaska, aired its premiere episode last Sunday, discussing the July 17 crash west of Juneau that killed 45-year-old Wings of Alaska pilot Fariah Peterson. Four passengers in the Cessna 207, which was on a flight from Juneau to Hoonah at the time, survived the crash.
The NTSB has promised to release additional information about each crash featured on the show before its respective episode airs. A March 7 factual docket on the Wings of Alaska crash includes a few photos of the crash site as well as flight-simulator videos of the fatal flight based on data from the downed aircraft.
Chris Shaver, the NTSB investigator examining the Wings of Alaska crash, said Tuesday that the new docket is simply a public release of assets used on the show. He said the simulated instrument readings seen in the videos during Peterson's departure from Juneau aren't particularly alarming.
"All the parameters you can see in the instruments are within normal parameters," Shaver said. "She was a little bit low compared to where you'd see people usually flying that route."
He said that while the board already had telemetry data transmitted by Peterson's plane to the Juneau air traffic control center, it cut off before the last 30 seconds of flight. When investigators recovered data from the plane's instruments, at the crash site west of Juneau where the plane broke in half after hitting a spruce tree, the additional time up until impact was included -- detail shown in the new videos.
"There were a couple banks left and right, a couple changes in pitch; she went left and right a little bit before the last data point," Shaver said.
Although the video shows the full course Peterson's flight took, Shaver said no clear reason for the crash has yet emerged.
"That's one of the big questions we still have at this point," Shaver said. "We're trying to figure out -- what were those maneuvers, what were they for?"