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Police experts
risked their lives
to recover bodies
It took seven hours of
Pilot in previous crash By Rod Ohira
dangerous labor dangling from
a chopper above a steep slope
Star-BulletinDangling from a 60-foot-long rope attached to a helicopter hovering overhead at the 2,700-foot level of Iao Valley, rappel master Randy Bell managed to secure an anchor line on a treacherous mountainside.
"There was ground to step on but it was all mud," said Bell, one of three Maui police sergeants who rappelled down to recover seven bodies Saturday from the crash site of a Blue Hawaiian tour helicopter.
"It would have been suicidal to navigate the ground without a rescue line. At one point, I was on top skidding on my butt and using my feet to burrow out a ledge to have something to stand on."
It took Bell, Greg Moniz and Francis Tom between 90 minutes and two hours to secure their anchor lines above the crash site with the help of Kelan Puala and Derrick Arruda of Maui Fire Rescue.
Pacific Helicopter Tours Inc. owner Thomas Hauptman piloted the copter that strategically placed each officer at the scene.
"It was probably the riskiest tactical mission I've ever worked," the 38-year-old Bell said of recovery effort on an 80-degree slope.
"It's about 600 feet from a river bed at the bottom to the top of the ridge and the wreckage was about 100 feet from the bottom. The helicopter got us to the top edge of the crash site. We each had 300 feet of rope and used about 240 to 250 feet."
It took about seven hours to recover the bodies of pilot Larry Kirsch, 55; Texas teenagers Natalie Prince and Whitney Wood, and William "Jack" Jordan, 51, his wife, Jan S. Herscovitz, 49, and their two children -- Max, 16, and Lindsey, 15 -- of New Jersey.
"Our main objective was to get the bodies out for the families," said Bell, an Iao Valley resident.
"We were lucky there was nothing beyond the perimeter because we could not allow anyone to unhook from their lines."
Bell said the large pieces of wreckage included two doors, a portion of the tail section and tail rotor of the American Eurocopter AS355 Twin-Star.
When their mission was completed, the three sergeants were taken back to Maui Police headquarters for debriefing, which included time with a chaplain.
"It's tough to be up on a mountainside in a remote area under these conditions for seven hours," Bell said. "It creates a scar in your mind.
"You never forget working a crash site," added Bell, who has been involved in one other crash recovery effort.
Maui pilot involved
By Jaymes Song
in previous crash
Star-BulletinThe 55-year-old pilot involved in Friday's fatal helicopter crash on Maui was partially responsible for a mid-air collision in Alaska four years ago.
As a result of the Alaska crash, the Federal Aviation Administration suspended the commercial pilot license of Lawrence Kirsch for 45 days, according to an FAA spokesman, Roland Herwig.
Kirsch was piloting a McDonnell Douglas MD-369 helicopter for Tundra Copters that collided with a Cessna 185 airplane near Healy, Alaska, on Aug. 4, 1996, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. The impact severed the helicopter's tail rotor drive shaft and damaged the plane's lower fuselage and tail wheel.
It was an "opposite direction collision," which could have been disastrous, said Jim LaBelle of the NTSB office in Alaska.
The Cessna pilot and the four passengers were not injured. Kirsch and his three passengers, geologists surveying rock formations, suffered minor injuries.
The NTSB determined the probable cause to be the "inadequate visual outlook by the pilots of both aircraft and their failure to see and avoid the other aircraft." Glare from the sun also affected Kirsch's vision, the NTSB said.
Kirsch said he was about 400 feet above ground looking for potential landing sites, according to the NTSB. When Kirsch looked up, he saw the Cessna about 20 feet away. The aircrafts collided and Kirsch was able to continue and "made an uneventful landing," according to NTSB.
The Talekeetna Air Taxi plane was able to return to its base.
Meanwhile, on Maui, Kirsch's body has been positively identified and released to his family. The body of Natalie Prince of Fort Worth, Texas, was also identified and released to her family, said Burt Freeland of the Maui medical examiner's office.
