ANCHORAGE — National Transportation Safety Board officials in Anchorage will begin sorting through applications as they look to fill positions left vacant by two of their four investigators.
The agency’s Alaska chief, Clint Johnson, announced Monday that his office had openings to replace air safety investigator Chris Shaver and aviation accident investigator Millicent Hoidal. Both will remain with the NTSB, but Shaver is going to Denver and Hoidal is moving to Georgia, The Alaska Dispatch News reported.
Application pages for both jobs have been posted on a federal jobs website. The aviation accident investigator position is listed online as open until Jan. 11 and the air safety investigator position until Jan. 13.
Johnson said he hopes to select new candidates before February.
“We don’t have openings all that often, so people take advantage of it when we do have openings,” Johnson said. “Usually we get 100 to 120 applications (per position); we have to sort through those.”
The two investigators that remain in Alaska are lead investigator Brice Banning and Shaun Williams, who joined the Anchorage office with Hoidal in December 2014.
During the transition, Anchorage investigators could get assistance from other NTSB offices across the country.
“We always have the ability to bring investigators up from the Lower 48,” Johnson said. “This is the best time of the year for this kind of thing to happen.”
Johnson said the vacancies have come during a winter with relatively few crashes. There were 77 crashes in Alaska this year, including 10 fatal crashes and 22 crash fatalities, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Nearly half the fatalities occurred in a June 25 crash near Ketchikan when a de Havilland DHC-3 Otter struck a rock face in the Misty Fjords National Monument. The pilot and eight cruise-ship passengers were killed.
