A pilot and passenger were killed when a Pen Air charter plane crashed near Port Heiden on the Alaska Peninsula, the Coast Guard said Friday.


The pilot was a 25-year-old Anchorage man and the passenger, 45, was a Port Heiden woman,


The wreckage of the six-seater Piper Cherokee was spotted by the helicopter crew in slightly hilly terrain about 18 northeast of Port Heiden.

The single engine, propeller-driven plane crashed on land about 4 miles from shore.

The plane, on the community’s daily scheduled flight, was going from Port Heiden to King Salmon about 150 miles away when the accident occurred.

An emergency beacon directed the Coast Guard Command Center in Juneau to the location northeast of Port Heiden. The signal from the plane’s emergency beacon was received at about 6:30 p.m. Thursday.

It also was not known if weather was a facto. The weather at the time of the crash was mostly cloudy with winds gusting to 29 mph and 6 miles visibility.

Port Heiden is a small community on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula about 425 miles southwest of Anchorage. The 2000 census put the population at 119.

Plans were to retrieve the bodies Friday from the crash site. However, Booth-Miller said bad weather was moving into the area so there could be a delay.

The accident was the first charter crash in more than two years, according to Clint Johnson, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board.