South Dakota airplane crash kills 9 in extended family

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

South Dakota airplane crash kills 9 in extended family

By JAMES MacPHERSON
December 1, 2019

Nine members of an extended Idaho family died when their plane crashed in a South Dakota field as they were heading home after a hunting trip.

Travis Garza, president of the wellness company Kyani, said in a Facebook post Sunday that the crash near Chamberlain Saturday afternoon killed brothers and founders Jim and Kirk Hansen. Garza said the crash also killed their father, Jim Hansen Sr.; Kirk Hansen’s children, Stockton and Logan; his sons-in-law, Kyle Taylor and Tyson Dennert; and Jim Hansen’s son, Jake, and grandson, Houston.

Garza identified the injured as Kirk’s son, Josh, and Jim’s son, Matt, and son-in-law, Thomas Long. All three were hospitalized.

The Hansens were executives with Kyani, as well as with Conrad & Bischoff, a petroleum products distributor, and KJ’s Super Stores.

East Idaho News, which first identified the victims, reported that the party had been on a hunting trip to South Dakota, one of the nation’s top destinations for pheasants.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/0e07709d1a0a4d439c700f0fc0b4fc40

[jberryhill]

1. Oh, pheasants!

I need to clean my glasses. I didn’t even know it was legal again to hunt peasants. Even in South Dakota.

The Pilatus PC-12 is a single engine turboprop:



The area where the crash occurred is currently under a winter storm warning, according to the National Weather Service, with heavy snow and wind gusts as high as 45 mph.

[2naSalit]

2. Yeah, it was not a good day for flying

and especially in something like that. Their trip would have been almost entirely over some seriously rough mountain country including a large wilderness.

[jmowreader]

3. Those planes are huge, and made for shitty weather

If you can manage to get a PC-12 to fall out of the sky due to weather, you shouldn't have been up in the weather in any kind of a plane.

[2naSalit]

4. It was certainly that kind of weather

where they should not have been up. It was an all out blizzard, I wonder what they were thinking.

[BigmanPigman]

5. They weren't thinking about flying safely

since they were preoccupied with thoughts of killing birds and selling petroleum instead.

[2naSalit]

6. They were on their way home

to Idaho Falls area. Maybe they thought they could beat the storm that they were trying to fly right into.

[BigmanPigman]

7. Reminds me of all the people who ignore

road closure signs telling cars to turn around and not drive into rising flooded streets and the drivers do it anyway, usually needing to be rescued 15 min later.

[2naSalit]

8. That's what I was thinking.

I live just a couple hundred miles up the mountain range from there, it's been on our local-ish news.

A lot of people come up here and tempt fate because what do you locals know about where you live and the dangers of the area? It's rough country up here and it takes a lot of paying attention to survive.

There are usually at least one crash of this type each year around this time. Sad that most of three generations of one family were wiped out. Sounds like they were good people. Idaho Falls isn't that far from mountains, if you fly to or from there, you will go over mountains, the Tetons are right there for goodness sake. They would have flown near or over them on their route.

Anyway, maybe the survivors can tell what was going on.

[Blue_true]

9. What is their loft rating? I honestly hate smallish plans.

Anything smaller that a 737 is too small for me.

[Drahthaardogs]

10. What the hell?

This is tragic.

[Disaffected]

11. Reminiscent of

the ill fated Kennedy flight in a light, single engine aircraft over Chesapeake(?) Bay.

[flotsam]

12. Lotta questions here

Who was/were at the controls and what were their pilot ratings? Were icing conditions indicated? Was the aircraft equipped with de-icing boots? Should be a blockbuster investigation...