A helicopter lifted 10 chunks of plane debris from a hillside at Yeager Airport on Tuesday, parts of a nearly 15,000-pound cargo plane that crashed Friday, killing the pilot and co-pilot.
AMF Aviation - a company based in Springfield, Tennessee - then loaded the parts on flatbed trailers and transported them to a warehouse. The company specializes in aircraft recovery, transportation and storage, according to its website.
Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board left the airport Tuesday, but their investigation is ongoing, said Joe Crawford, the airport's police chief.
He said investigators can inspect the debris more closely, now that it's been recovered from the thickly wooded area where the Short 330 turboprop aircraft came to a rest during the crash.
Anh Kim Ho, 31, of Cross Lanes, and Jonathan Pablo Alvarado, 47, of Stamford, Texas, died in the crash.
Although officials predicted the helicopter would lift only four chunks of debris from the crash site, they later discovered that some of the pieces were too heavy. The helicopter landed several times while crews on the ground cut the debris into smaller chunks.
Workers secured straps to the wreckage beforehand, and it took the helicopter less than two hours to hoist everything onto trucks. Commercial planes continued to take off and land during the nearby operation.
"There was a lot of work done beforehand," Crawford said.
Milwaukee-based Air Cargo Carriers, a contractor for UPS, owned and operated the aircraft. By 2014, it was one of only 12 still in use. Short Aviation, of Belfast, Northern Ireland, built more than 100 330s before stopping production in 1992.
Clean Harbor, Yeager Airport's environmental contractor, will now clean the site of any leftover fuel or hydraulic fluid.
Airport spokesman Mike Plante has said a preliminary crash report might be released in about a month.
Reach Giuseppe Sabella at giuseppe.sabella@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5189 or follow @Gsabella on Twitter.