On August 4, 2018, 58-year-old Craig Layson, a male pilot from Michigan, was conducting a sightseeing tour that departed from Talkeetna, Alaska, with four passengers from Poland. The flight, operated by K2 Aviation, was scheduled to be a one-hour tour of Denali National Park. However, the de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver airplane never returned to the airport in Talkeetna. Shortly after flying over the base camp for Denali, the plane's GPS tracker stopped moving.
The aircraft had crashed high on a knife-edge ridge of Thunder Mountain, at an elevation of nearly 11,000 feet, approximately 14 miles from the summit of Denali. The plane came to rest in a crevasse amidst ice and snow. In the hour following the crash, Layson was able to make two satellite phone calls, reporting that the plane had crashed and that there were injuries among the passengers before the connection was lost. It is unclear how many individuals survived the initial impact.
Initial search and rescue efforts were severely hampered by challenging weather conditions, including heavy cloud cover and rain, which prevented aircraft from spotting the wreckage for a day and a half. The terrain was described as extremely steep, with a mix of near-vertical rock, ice, and snow. When a brief clearing in the weather occurred, a National Park Service ranger was lowered by helicopter to the crash site. During a very short and precarious search, with the ranger remaining attached to the helicopter, he was able to confirm the deaths of four of the five people on board. There were no signs of any survivors having moved away from the wreckage. Several days later, during another short-haul mission, a ranger was able to locate the fifth body inside the aircraft.
Due to the extremely hazardous conditions at the crash site, the National Park Service ultimately determined that recovering the bodies of the five victims and the aircraft wreckage was not feasible. The location was fraught with dangers, including the risk of avalanches, deep crevasses, unstable blocks of ice, and sharp, protruding metal from the broken aircraft. The plane itself was broken in half and was being pulled down a steep slope toward a glacier 3,500 feet below. Official reports confirmed that all five individuals on board, including pilot Craig Layson, had perished in the crash. The wreckage and the victims have not been recovered from the mountain. The overview of this case is that a sightseeing plane piloted by Craig Layson crashed in a remote and treacherous area of Denali National Park, and despite initial satellite phone calls from the pilot, severe weather and hazardous terrain made a timely rescue impossible and ultimately prevented the recovery of the victims.Last Seen: Aug 4, 2018
