Helicopter wreckage recovered, sent to Maui

A Maui contractor removed the wreckage of a tour helicopter from a remote hillside in East Molokai on Sunday after Thursday’s crash that killed all five people on board.

The National Transportation Safety Board might issue a preliminary report at the end of this week or early next week, but it will not touch on what might have caused the crash, NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said Sunday from Washington, D.C.

"We don’t draw any preliminary conclusions or state the cause," Holloway said.

The identities of two of the victims, a man and a woman from Canada, remained undisclosed yesterday.

Claude Rochon, spokeswoman for Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa, confirmed Sunday by email the deaths of two Canadian citizens but wrote that "for privacy reasons, no further information can be disclosed at this time."

Maui County police Lt. Wayne Ibarra said the department followed protocol by notifying the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco of the deaths of a man and a woman from Ontario.

The pilot of the Blue Hawaiian Helicopters’ aircraft was identified as Nathan Cline, 30, of Maui. Newlyweds Michael and Nicole Abel, engineers from western Pennsylvania, also died in the crash.

The Blue Hawaiian helicopter left Kahului Airport Thursday for a one-hour tour of West Maui and Molokai, police said.

The helicopter crashed at about 12:15 p.m. at about the 1,000-foot elevation on a hillside about a quarter-mile behind Kilohana Elementary School.

Witnesses said the crash happened in rain and under thick, low-hanging cloud cover. The National Weather Service had issued a high-wind advisory for Maui County for much of Thursday.

An NTSB investigator spent most of Saturday and Sunday examining the aircraft and documenting the data collected, Holloway said. The preliminary report will include information gleaned from examination of the aircraft, as well as information on weather conditions and maintenance of the aircraft, he said.

The wreckage was moved Sunday to a storage facility on Maui. Catherine Cluett, a photographer and editor in chief of the Molokai Dispatch newspaper, said she watched the removal work, which began in the morning and continued until about 12:30 p.m.

Workers placed pieces of the wreckage in a net, which a helicopter carried away, Cluett said. The wreckage was airlifted in two loads.