Reporting from Redlands and Butte, Mont. — A plane carrying 14 passengers on a family ski vacation from California was designed to carry only 11 passengers, investigators said today as they began trying to explain the small, single-engine plane's fiery crash into a cemetery near the airport in Butte, Mont.
Seven adults and seven children died instantly Sunday afternoon after the plane's nose suddenly veered downward during its approach and the craft crashed about half a mile short of the runway. Among the victims were nine family members of a prominent Redlands dentist, according to a relative.
Authorities also will be looking at the airplane's structural integrity, weather, pilot capability and engine operations in a probe that will likely take some time because there are no obvious explanations, Mark Rosenker, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters.
"This one is not going to be one that we can answer [for] you in the next two or three or four months. This is going to take a while," Rosenker said.
"Because, one, we have no flight-data recorder, and it makes it a little tougher to understand exactly the performance of the aircraft, and, two, there are no survivors to give us some additional information of what was going on and why the aircraft may have diverted there."
Authorities said the plane, a Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12 turboprop, was described by the manufacturer as designed to carry nine passengers and two pilots, for a total of 11.
But Rosenker declined to say definitively that the plane, which probably would have been also carrying ski gear, was overloaded.
"You're asking me to do some analysis here. It will take us a while to understand. First we have to get the weights of all the passengers, the weight of the fuel, the weights of all the luggage and any cargo that may have been aboard the aircraft," he said. "There are a lot of questions that still need to be answered."
Investigators still do not know the ages of the children. If some were infants, they could have been traveling as "lap" passengers, Rosenker said. He said it would be important for investigators to determine the total weight of all passengers, cargo and fuel.
"We'll certainly be looking at that," he said.
The plane was owned by Eagle Cap Leasing Inc., of Enterprise, Ore., whose president is Irving M. "Bud" Feldkamp III, a dentist who lives in Redlands.
The crash killed Dr. Vanessa Pullen and her husband, Mike, and their two children; along with her sister Amy Jacobson, of St. Helena, Mont., Jacobson's husband, Erin, and their three children. The women are the daughters of Feldkamp, who owns a string of dental offices in Redlands and was driving up to meet the family in Montana, according to David Feldkamp, Irving's cousin.
Feldkamp said Pullen was a pediatrician in Galt, and Jacobson was a dental hygienist in St. Helena, whose three children were Taylor, 4; Ava, 3; and Jude, 2. The names and ages of Pullen's children were not available.
He said the pilot was Bud Summerfield, who lives in the San Bernardino area and had flown the family in the past.
According to NTSB investigators, the plane's occupants were traveling to Bozeman, Mont., to meet other family members for a ski vacation.
The plane left Redlands early Sunday and stopped at Vacaville, Calif., to pick up passengers, then stopped again at Oroville, Calif., to pick up additional passengers, the NTSB said.
In Oroville, where the plane was refueled, Tom Hagler, owner of the general aviation service, said several children briefly got off the plane to use the bathroom. Hagler told the Associated Press that he saw about a dozen children ranging in age from 6 to 10 and four adults.
"There were a lot of kids in the group," he said. "A lot of really cute kids."
The plane left Oroville at 12:10 p.m. MDT and filed an Instrument Flight Rules flight plan with Bozeman as its destination, and Butte as an alternate in case of difficulty landing at Bozeman.
At 2:03 p.m., while traveling at an altitude of 25,000 feet, the pilot contacted the air route traffic control center at Salt Lake City, which was monitoring the flight's progress en route, and stated the plane was diverting to Butte, without giving a reason.
The plane descended to 14,000 feet and again contacted air traffic controllers at 2:05 p.m. requesting a diversion to Butte.
At 2:27 p.m., the controller asked the pilot if he had the airport in sight.
"The pilot indicated he had one more cloud to maneuver around," Rosenker said. At 2:28, he reported the airport in sight, and air traffic controllers terminated radar service to the aircraft.
The accident was reported to local authorities at 2:33 p.m.
Witnesses interviewed by the NTSB reported that the plane was flying about 300 feet above the ground when it suddenly pitched down 90 to 95 degrees and plunged into the ground, where it burst into flames on impact.
"One witness with aviation experience reported the airplane was west of the runway centerline and too high to land on the runway. It then appeared to bank to the left, fly further west, when it rolled, pitched down and descended out of his view," Rosenker said.
A heavily loaded plane attempting to maneuver sharply to realign with the runway centerline could lose lift and stall much more easily than a normally loaded plane making gentle maneuvers.
But NTSB officials refused to speculate on the significance of witness reports before studying the crash site, which still has some pieces of the plane intact. Although the plane does not have a "black box" with a cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, NTSB officials said they hoped that some of its avionics may have been preserved, enough to give a clue to what happened in its final moments of flight.
Harley Howard said he and his wife were driving near the airport when they saw the plane making an unusual low approach to the airport from the south, rather than from the north, as is more typical of planes in Butte. He felt at the time it was unusual that the plane's landing gear was not extended.
"We were about a quarter of a mile behind it when the plane, it looked like the tail end lifted up, then it spun around at a 90-degree angle to the earth and then it just dove right into the ground. When it hit, it exploded, in a big old fireball," he said in an interview.
Howard said he ran to the site to see if he could help and came upon a friend from church.
"The plane was all over, and it was on fire, what was left of it," Howard said. Then he saw the bodies of several children.
"The devastation was just beyond belief, he said. "The friend of mine, we both, we just turned and started praying for the families and for the people that had died. We felt so helpless."
Howard was in tears recounting the events.
"I know you're from the area where those people are from," he told a Times reporter. "If you could somehow put in there that our prayers are with them, and that their family members didn't go unnoticed. There were people there, and we are praying for them, and we care. I think that's important that they have that knowledge."
Martha Guidoni, of Butte, told The Times that she and her husband were taking a drive on the outskirts of town when the crash occurred.
"All of a sudden we seen this airplane coming in, and my husband said, 'That plane's going to crash.' I was just going to say, 'No it's not,' and before I could get that out of my mouth, it took a nose dive into the cemetery."
She said the plane's engine could be heard before the crash. "It sounded like a little Cessna: That's what I would compare it to," she said. "And then all of a sudden it just dropped. It was like -- it just went 'boom!' Right into the ground. And then it was immediately on fire. It just shot up in flames, and it looked like it caught some of the headstones on fire, that's how hot it was."
Butte, a town of 32,000 in western Montana, does not have a control tower at its small airport, but a company at the airport that monitors pilots' voluntary radio traffic transmissions told the NTSB that the pilot report could be heard saying he was on the final approach to the runway shortly before the impact.
The weather at both Bozeman and Butte was relatively mild: Clouds at Butte were at 4,400 feet under an 8,000-foot overcast, with visibility of 10 miles and winds of 10 knots.
kim.murphy@latimes.com
david.kelly@latimes.com
