Dan Lynch, EMS Director, said that at approximately 7:05 pm, the Fresno County EMS dispatch Center was unable to make radio contact with Skylife 4, while conducting the routine safety check, which is a 10 minute safety check when aircraft are in flight.
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Valeri said the company was still trying to notify relatives of some of the crew late Thursday night. “It’s a human tragedy that these people lost their lives”.
The Bell 407 helicopter was headed from Porterville Municipal Airport south to San Joaquin Community Hospital in Bakersfield when it crashed, said Ray Pruitt, a Kern County Sheriff’s spokesman.
The patient was being taken to San Joaquin Community Hospital in Bakersfield, it said.
But it wasn’t clear what role weather played in the crash.
The helicopter went down Thursday night half a mile east of Highway 65 and just over a mile north of Sherwood Avenue.
There were four people on board the helicopter: a pilot, a flight nurse, a flight paramedic and the patient. He wouldn’t speculate on the cause of the crash, leaving the FAA and NTSB, both of whom were present Friday, to answer those questions after completing their investigation.
A Kern County Sheriff’s Office helicopter team reported their sighting of a debris field near McFarland at around 20:35 hrs.
Fire crews in Central California are searching for a missing medical helicopter. Kern County sheriff’s deputies secured a road leading to the site.
“They were very well liked, these individuals”, Lynch said. The Kern County Fire Department told ABC7 affiliate KERO-TV that four people had died after the missing aircraft crashed.
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Skylife Air Medical began operations in June 1991 as a partnership between Rogers Helicopters and American Ambulance and transports around 1,000 patients per year.
