Investigators work to determine cause of fatal plane crash
By Ted Sullivan
Bozeman Daily Chronicle
Three Mercy Flight crew members from Great Falls were killed late Tuesday night after their twin-engine airplane crashed on a ridge two miles north of Menard Road.
The pilot, Vince Kirol, 40, registered nurse Darcy Dengel, 27, and paramedic Paul Erickson, 33, died at 9:15 p.m. after the air ambulance from Benefis Healthcare in Great Falls crashed on its approach to Gallatin Field airport, officials said.
Kirol was flying a six-passenger Beechcraft 200 1300 Super King Air commuter plane. He contacted air-traffic control at Gallatin Field shortly before the crash, but did not report any problems with the aircraft, Airport Director Ted Mathis said Wednesday.
The plane disappeared from radar shortly after 9 p.m., when the plane dropped below 12,000 feet and couldn’t be tracked by the radar site in Idaho, Mathis said. Gallatin Field does not have its own radar.
The weather at the time of the crash was clear below 11,000 feet, with a 6 mph northwest wind and 10 miles of visibility, National Weather Service spokesman Jerome Saucier said Wednesday.
 Obituary: Paul Jason Erickson |
 Obituary: Darcy Lynn Dengel |
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The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
“We’re not going to speculate on what might or might not have happened,” Gallatin County Sheriff Jim Cashell said.
The plane, which was headed to Bozeman to transport a patient, crashed on a rugged, rocky and wooded ridge in the Horseshoe Hills, about 15 miles northwest of the airport, according to the landowner, who refused to provide his name.
The landowner and his girlfriend drove his pickup truck to the crash site an hour before search-and-rescue teams arrived.
He described the wreckage as “three or four main pieces, with debris scattered in a 300-yard circle.”
“Trees were on fire. Rocks were thrown everywhere,” he said. “We were going through it and looking for survivors. There were none.”
Witnesses who called 911 described seeing a fireball or “explosion” at the time of the crash, Cashell said.
“There’s a lot of wreckage spread over a large area,” Cashell said.
After the crash, the plane’s fuel burned and brush, grass and trees caught fire, Central Valley Fire Chief Brett Waters said. On Wednesday, smoke was still visible on the ridge where the plane crashed.
“There’s some stuff burning up there today,” Waters said.
The crash site was only reachable by all-terrain vehicles and large trucks. A sheriff’s deputy on Menard Road kept the people two miles from the wreck.
On Tuesday night and throughout Wednesday, up to 65 searchers, fire and law-enforcement officials were at the scene, Gallatin County Sheriff’s Sgt. Jason Jarrett said.
Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigators, who will be in charge of the investigation, arrived Wednesday morning.
It could be up to a year until the cause of the crash is known.
Local officials were also scouring the wreckage to recover debris and the remains of those on board, Gallatin County Coroner Duncan MacNab said.
Since the crash, Benefis has grounded its remaining aircraft, the Mercy Flight helicopter.
“We are devastated by the loss of our beloved friends, coworkers and members of our community,” Benefis Chief Clinical Officer Julie Hickethier said in a news release. “This is a time of tremendous mourning for our entire organization.”
Kirol had been a pilot for 40 years, Benefis spokeswoman Brandy Hansen-Solyst said Wednesday. He was a Mercy Flight fixed-wing pilot for 12 years. He had a wife and two sons.
Dengel was hired at Benefis in June 2001 and had been working on medical flights for more than a year. She attended Montana State University’s nursing school and was engaged to be married this spring to a member of the Great Falls Police Department, Hansen-Solyst said.
Erickson was hired at Benefis in August 2004. He and his wife have an 8-month-old son, Hansen-Solyst said.
It was the second fatal accident for a Benefis aircraft. The first occurred in 1987.
It was also the third plane crash in Gallatin County in about a year.
In November 2005, a twin-engine airplane crashed five miles north of Belgrade while approaching the airport, killing the pilot, an Ohio businessman alone in the private jet.
In April 2006, a small private plane crashed in a Belgrade field off Jackrabbit Lane. All three people on board survived.