WHITE PASS, Wash. — All 10 people aboard an airplane bringing a group of skydiving friends home from an event in Idaho are believed to have died when the plane crashed in the Cascade Range, authorities said Tuesday, but only seven bodies have been found so far in the "horrific" wreckage.
The debris at the remote crash site indicated that the Cessna Caravan 208 went down in a steep nosedive, Yakima County Sheriff Ken Irwin said.
Search teams will continue looking as long as it takes to find all those on board, then local authorities will turn the investigation over to the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, Irwin said.
Names of the victims, who ranged in age from 18 to 40, were not immediately released because not all family members had been notified, authorities said.
Fighting back tears, Kelly Craig, whose 30-year-old brother Casey, died in the crash, said the nine skydivers on board had made lots of jumps over the weekend, and he doubted they would have been prepared for an emergency jump on the long flight back. He and other friends and relatives joined rescue officials at a news conference Tuesday near White Pass, about 45 miles west of Yakima.
Craig called skydiving an educated risk. "It's not as safe as staying in bed, but it's not what you think it is until you go out and try it," said Craig, a skydiver, himself. "It's definitely safer than just about everything you can do that pushes the limit."
The plane left Star, Idaho, near Boise, on Sunday evening en route to Shelton, Wash., northwest of Olympia, but did not arrive. It had been returning from a skydiving meet in Idaho when it disappeared.
"I'm told it was a horrific sight and the airplane crashed at a fairly high speed," Jim Hall, director of Yakima Valley Emergency Management, said earlier. "It appears that no one survived that crash."
The plane crashed just east of the crest of the Cascades, about five miles south of White Pass and on the edge of the Goat Rocks Wilderness, said Wayne Frudd of Yakima County Search and Rescue. The crash site is about 25 miles southeast of Mount Rainier.
The nine skydivers all were affiliated with Skydive Snohomish, a company that operates a training school and skydiving flights at Harvey Field in Snohomish County, about 20 miles north of Seattle.
The plane was registered to Kapowsin Air Sports of Shelton.
Skydive Snohomish had nothing to do with the flight to Idaho or the event held there, said Elaine Harvey, co-owner of the company.