A man has died after a commercial plane went off the runway while landing in a city in Alaska's Aleutian Islands on Thursday, officials said.
Alaska State Troopers identified the victim as 38-year-old David Allan Oltman of Washington state. He was one of two patients said to be critically injured. The second was transported to an Anchorage hospital, the city of Unalaska said Friday.
PenAir Flight 3286, which had 39 passengers and three crew members aboard, went off the runway at Dutch Harbor in Unalaska around 5:40 p.m., Pen Air said in a statement. The flight originated in Anchorage.
Among those onboard were members of an Alaska school swim team and their chaperones, but no injuries were reported among those students or adults. "Repeat, everyone is safe and secure," the superintendent of the Cordova City School District said on its website.
The city of Unalaska said in a statement Friday morning that 11 people in all were taken to a local clinic, and their injuries ranged from minor to critical.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to investigate.
Unalaska said that special permission was granted to allow a Ravn Air flight to land with an NTSB investigator and other officials Friday, and that students and chaperone from Cordova departed for Anchorage on the return flight.
An eyewitness told the Associated Press on Thursday that the plane landed about 500 feet beyond the airport. Photos posted to social media appeared to show the plane with its nose hanging over a rocky embankment near the water.
The flight was marketed by Alaska Airlines. That airline said that PenAir operates the Anchorage-Dutch Harbor service for Alaska with a Saab 2000 aircraft.
Randy Batten, an Unalaska resident, told NBC affiliate KTUU of Anchorage that while walking their dog along a road near the runway, he and his wife saw a plane approach and then go around for another attempt. He noted that conditions were windy.
The couple returned home and heard the sound of screeching rubber and scraping metal, "and we knew right away it was probably that plane that we had seen do the flyover on the first attempt," he said.
Unalaska has a population of around 4,300 and is around 800 miles southwest of Anchorage.
