The search continued Monday for nine people, including a child, missing after a plane crashed Sunday afternoon in Washington state’s Puget Sound, the U.S. Coast Guard said. The body of one person was recovered on Sunday. Crews searched throughout the night, but no additional people were located and no debris was found, the Coast Guard said via Twitter around 8 a.m. Monday. It said Coast Guard aircraft were involved in the search. “This remains an active search.” The agency said in a news release that the plane was flying from Friday Harbor, a popular tourist destination in the San Juan Islands, to Renton, a southern suburb of Seattle. Four Coast Guard vessels, a rescue helicopter and an aircraft were involved in the extensive search, along with nearby rescue and law enforcement agencies. Two ships continued to search overnight, with search flights resuming at first light on Monday, the Coast Guard said. The crash was reported at 3:11 p.m. The Coast Guard said one body had been recovered and nine people were still missing around 9 p.m. The cause of the crash is unknown, authorities said. The plane went down in Mutiny Bay off Whidbey Island, about 50 kilometers northwest of downtown Seattle and about halfway between Friday Harbor and Renton. The National Transportation Safety Board said the plane was a de Havilland DHC-3 Otter, a single-engine propeller plane. Float planes, which have floats that allow them to land on water, are a common sight around Puget Sound, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean. There are several daily flights between the Seattle area and the San Juan Islands, a picturesque archipelago northwest of Seattle that attracts tourists from all over the world. These aircraft, which also fly between Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver, often fly over Seattle and land on Lake Washington, not far from the city’s iconic Space Needle. Renton, where authorities say the flight was headed on Sunday, is at the southern end of Lake Washington, about 10 miles southeast of Seattle. In 2019, a plane crash in Alaska between two sightseeing planes killed six people. The Ketchikan-based planes were carrying passengers from the same cruise ship, the Royal Princess, and were returning from tours of the Misty Fjords National Monument. A week later, a plane crashed in Metlakatla Harbor, Alaska during a commuter flight from Ketchikan. There were also deaths in that crash. Two months later, four of the nine people on board died after a crash north of Port Hardy in 2019, which authorities said was partly due to pilot fatigue and bad weather. In 2013, three people died when a Cessna 185 crashed into a hillside about 20 meters from Potts Lagoon on West Cracroft Island near Port McNeill. They headed to a logging operation in the area. Two people were rescued after a floatplane crashed on takeoff from Parker Island in the Southern Gulf Islands in 2015. Last year, a float plane overturned in Tofino Harbor during takeoff, but no serious injuries were reported. — With a file from the Times Colonist
