A federal investigator will travel to an East Molokai ridge today to begin looking into what caused a Maui tour helicopter to crash Thursday, killing all five people aboard.
"We will try to piece it together to conduct the investigation," said Keith Holloway, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board.
Three of the five victims have been identified, including two young nuclear engineers from Pennsylvania who got married five days before the crash. The third person identified was the pilot, a Kihei resident. The two others have been described as a man and a woman from Ontario, but their identities remained undisclosed Friday.
Maui County police and fire officials completed recovery of the victims’ remains Friday, police spokesman Lt. Wayne K. Ibarra said. The remains were taken to Maui.
Detectives are notifying the victims’ relatives, Ibarra said.
Holloway said the NTSB investigator, who arrived in Honolulu Friday, will examine the wreckage of the Blue Hawaiian Helicopters aircraft as well as medical and maintenance documents.
Holloway said the investigation could take 12 to 18 months.
Two of the victims were newlyweds who worked for Westinghouse Electric Corp. in northwestern Pennsylvania, a company spokesman confirmed.
Nicole Bevilacqua and Mike Abel were married before coming to Hawaii for their honeymoon, said Vaughn Gilbert, Westinghouse public relations and advertising manager. A wedding registry indicated they were married Nov. 5 in Pittsburgh.
Bevilacqua and Abel were engineers for the company’s nuclear services product line in Cranberry Township, Pa., Gilbert said Friday. "They were highly regarded by their colleagues, their co-workers and the company. Everyone within Westinghouse is saddened by this accident," Gilbert said.
Westinghouse’s Cranberry Township facility is the company’s headquarters, employing 4,300 people, Gilbert said.
Abel’s Facebook profile said he was a design engineer for Westinghouse Nuclear beginning in June 2008. He studied mechanical engineering at Grove City College and graduated from East Allegheny Junior and Senior High School in 2004.
Like Abel’s Facebook page, Bevilacqua’s also featured a photo of the newlyweds.
Her page offers less information to the general public, stating only that she lived in Pittsburgh.
Maui County officials tentatively identified the Blue Hawaiian Helicopters pilot in the crash as Nathan Cline, 30, a Kihei resident.
On Blue Hawaiian’s Facebook page, a growing number of tributes came from former passengers who had fond recollections of their Hawaii tour flights piloted by Cline.
Mary Barnish Cerceo said Cline was the pilot when she and her husband, Vince, took a helicopter tour of Maui while on their honeymoon three weeks ago. "Yes Maui is breathtaking, but Nathan really made the tour wonderful. He was funny, kind, knowledgeable about the island. I am saddened to hear the news of his loss."
The helicopter was on a one-hour flight originating from Kahului when it crashed at about 12:15 p.m. Thursday on a hillside about a quarter-mile behind Kilohana Elementary School near Molokai’s southeast shore.
Maui County officials and witnesses said the area had dense cloud cover and strong winds at the time of the crash.
Blue Hawaiian’s Kahului office was closed Friday afternoon. A company employee at the office said it was "standing down and reviewing procedures."
It was not clear whether Blue Hawaiian operations on Oahu, Hawaii island and Kauai were open Friday. An employee answering the phone at the company’s Oahu office referred calls to company co-owner Patricia Chevalier, who could not immediately be reached for comment.
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