Plane with 10 Aboard Crashes in Alaska

He says the charter flight was heading to the small community of Homer on the Kenai Peninsula, a quick 100 miles by air.
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Servant Air is a local company that serves half a dozen communities on the large island in south-central Alaska, 225 miles southwest of Anchorage. The flight service started in 2003 as a one-plane operation and has grown to a fleet of 7 small aircraft. Panamarioff says the company has never had an accident until now.

Dean Andrew, a pilot in another aircraft who had been taxiing nearby, arrived in his floatplane just after the crash. He saw two people standing waist deep in water on the sunken fuselage and two others in the water nearby. He pulled all four aboard his plane.

"Once I got them in they were really cold, and they were just pretty hysterical because they had told me that their family's in that plane," Andrew said.
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Acquaintances described the passengers as Russian Old Believers who fish in Kodiak and were headed to Homer on a charter flight to celebrate Russian Christmas -- which is Monday.
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Panamarioff, the Servant Air spokesman, said charter flights to Homer are a routine trip for the company. The crash is tragic, he said."We're a very small and a very close knit company, and everybody is very close friends, both professionally and personally," he said. "This was our first accident, and it's been very, very hard ... we're family."