A small plane that crashed in rural Alaska in 2023, killing the husband of a member of Congress, was weighed down by too much moose meat and faced drag from a set of antlers mounted on its right wing strut, federal investigators said Tuesday.
The plane, a single-engine Piper PA-18-150 Super Cub, crashed shortly after takeoff in a mountainous area of southwestern Alaska on Sept. 12, 2023. Only the pilot, Eugene Peltola Jr., 57, the husband of former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska, was on board and died in the crash.
“The overweight airplane and the added drag and lateral weight imbalance caused by the antlers on the right wing,” along with downdrafts, “would likely have resulted in the airplane having insufficient power and/or control authority to maneuver above terrain,” the National Transportation Safety Board said in its report on probable cause findings.
There were also turbulent flight conditions in the area of the crash at 8:45 p.m., the time when the plane went down, the report said.
Peltola had taken a group of hunters and equipment days earlier from Holy Cross, a community of about 200 people near the Yukon River, to an airstrip nearly 100 miles northwest in St. Mary’s, Alaska, the agency said in its final report on the crash.
The group set up camp next to the runway in St. Mary’s, the report said. One day before the crash, the group bagged a moose and Peltola was asked to transport the meat.
Peltola did not use scales to weigh the cargo, the report said. The plane was carrying about 115 more pounds of cargo than its maximum takeoff weight, the agency said.
Carrying antlers on the outside of a plane is commonplace in Alaska, the agency said, but it requires formal approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. “There was no evidence that such approval had been granted for the accident airplane,” the report stated, such as a notation in the plane’s logbooks.
In 2018, Peltola, who was of Yup’ik and Tlingit descent, was appointed regional director for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Alaska, according to the Interior Department. In that role, he helped oversee services for 227 federally recognized Alaska Native tribes, the department said.
Previously, Peltola had worked for more than 34 years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska. From October 2010 to September 2012, he served as vice mayor and was a council member for the city of Bethel, Alaska.
Mary Peltola, who had represented the Bethel region in the Alaska Legislature, won the state’s lone U.S. House of Representatives seat in August 2022 in a special election to finish the term of Rep. Don Young, a Republican who died in March 2022.
Her victory, which flipped the seat to Democrats for the first time in 50 years, was considered an upset against Sarah Palin, the former governor and vice-presidential candidate, who was also in the race. Peltola, who is Yup’ik, became the first Alaska Native woman to serve in Congress.
She served a full, two-year term but lost her reelection race in November. Peltola’s office said that she would not comment on the report Wednesday. She filed a lawsuit last week against the owners of the plane.
The lawsuit says that the owners acted negligently by causing Eugene Peltola to fly too many hours, with too little rest. According to the suit, he was asked to fly under unreasonably dangerous conditions, and had to carry moose antlers on the outside of the plane without the required permit.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
