The names of the two victims of the fatal plane crash Friday morning at Charleston's Yeager Airport have been released.
Anh K. Ho, 31, of Cross Lanes, and Johnathan Pablo Alvarado, 47, of Stamford, Texas, died in the crash Friday, according to a news release from Yeager Airport.
Steve Altnau, president of Air Cargo Carriers, the company that owned and operated the plane, confirmed the pilots' families have been notified in the release.
Yeager Airport Police Chief Joe Crawford said in the release, "Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of Mr. Alvarado and Ms. Ho."
Determining the cause of the fatal crash may take a little longer than first expected, as an investigator said the plane was not equipped with a "black box" device to record what was happening inside the aircraft.
The cargo plane that crashed and killed the two people on board did not have a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder, according to Bill English, a National Transportation Safety Board investigator, in a news briefing Saturday at Yeager Airport.
"The initial information is that there are no other electronic devices on board that record any significant information," he said. "We'll keep looking for other electronics that could be on here, but there are no [cockpit voice recorders]."
The plane, owned and operated by Milwaukee-based Air Cargo Carriers, a contractor for UPS, was not required to have either recorder, English said.
Airport Director Terry Sayre said the airport will begin looking into the economic impact of the airport closing for 30 hours following the crash and how many passengers were affected by the closing starting Monday.
The plane, which took off from Louisville International Airport, in Kentucky, arrived at Yeager around 6:53 a.m., according to flightaware.com. It landed on the end of the airport's runway closest to Charleston and crashed down a wooded area on a slope, airport spokesman Mike Plante told the Gazette-Mail Friday.
The initial witness mark on the runway is about 340 feet from the runway threshold, according to English. The fuselage, the plane's central structure, came to rest on the side of a hill about 650 feet from its initial point of contact with the runway and about 40 degrees left of the runway heading, he added.
The NTSB continued its investigation Saturday, documenting evidence on the runway and the main wreckage. English said all major plane components have been accounted for but still need to be recovered, and the NTSB will be examining air traffic control records.
English said the NTSB is expected to be on the scene for the next few days, but he added Saturday's news conference would be the last public statement the NTSB would issue from the airport.
U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., gave remarks at the briefing thanking the NTSB for its work and offering condolences to the family of the victims.
"We're all anxious, and we'll all look forward to the final report to find out why or how this will occur, and preventative steps to figure out how to prevent this in the future," she said.
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