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A chartered Lear jet with four people aboard on...

Oct. 23, 1985

JUNEAU, Alaska -- A chartered Lear jet with four people aboard on a medical mission to pick up a high-risk pregnancy case was feared to have crashed in rugged terrain or chilly waters near Glacier Bay National Monument, officials said Wednesday.

The chartered jet is presumed down, said Dave Baumeister, president of ERA Helicopters in Anchorage, the company that owns the charter firm, Jet Alaska.

Darkness halted search efforts Wednesday.

The plane was chartered by the Maternal Transport Team from Anchorage's Providence Hospital. On board the plane was the team's coordinator, Mary Pat Haberle, 38. Also on the craft were nurse Laurine Malouf, 40, pilot Charles Nolte, 27, and co-pilot Bruce Blunt, 28, all of Anchorage.

The Jet Alaska plane was 21 miles from Juneau, nine minutes away, on its flight from Anchorage when flight controllers lost contact with it, said Gloria Moody of the FAA.

The plane carried a two-man crew and two Medical Transport Team nurses from Providence Hospital in Anchorage who were to care for the pregnant woman on the 578-mile flight back to the Anchorage hospital.

A hospital spokesman said that the woman was put on a commercial flight from Juneau to Anchorage when the charter did not arrive.

The flight left Anchorage at 7:31 p.m. ADT Tuesday (11:31 p.m. EDT) and was to arrive in Juneau 90 minutes later. The FAA was in radio contact with the pilot at 8:41 p.m. ADT, but five minutes later, they had lost him, Moody reported.

Because of darkness and poor weather, a comprehensive search did not begin until Wednesday.

Three helicopters -- from the Coast Guard, Jet Alaska's parent firm of ERA Helicopters, and TEMSCO, a private contractor employed by the U.S. Forest Service -- were looking for the jet. Ground crews using two Coast Guard vessels also joined the search, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Mark Farmer.

Light snow was falling and a cloud ceiling of 300 feet hampered the search, Farmer said. No wreckage had been spotted and there had been no signal from the emergency locator beacon.

To reach the Juneau airport from its last reported location, the jet had to fly over a 4,200-foot peak of the Chilkat Mountains.

The Maternal Transport Team program uses the medivac charter about 500 times yearly, mostly for high risk neonatal cases, a hospital spokesman said.

On Aug. 20, three people were killed when one of Jet Alaska's chartered jets went down near Gulkana, north of the trans-Alaska pipeline terminal at Valdez, en route to deliver a pipeline repair crew. The crash remained under investigation.