A passenger plane has crashed in the US state of Alaska. The pilot and all nine passengers were killed.

Earlier, on January 29, a commercial passenger plane crashed into the Potomac River in Washington, the US capital, after a head-on collision with a US military Blackhawk chopper helicopter. The pilot and all 68 passengers were killed in the incident.

US media reported, citing Alaska police, that the crashed plane was a Cessna category aircraft of the US airline Bering Air. Aircraft in this category are small in size.

David Olsen, director of operations at Bering Air, told US media that the plane had departed from Unalakleet in western Alaska at 2:37 pm local time on Thursday, February 6, for the Norton Sound area. The distance from Unalakleet to Norton Sound is 140 miles. The plane stopped sending signals to the radar 45 minutes into the flight.

Lieutenant Commodore Benjamin McIntyre-Coble, a spokesman for the US Coast Guard Alaska branch, told reporters in a briefing, “Radar records indicate that the last signal came from the plane at 3:18 p.m. We believe that the plane had a serious engine failure that caused it to lose its ability to float and fly.”

Benjamin McIntyre-Coble told reporters that the wreckage of the plane was found 34 miles southeast of Nome, Alaska. The bodies of three people have been recovered from the wreckage. He also mentioned that the condition of the plane makes it impossible to recover the bodies of the remaining seven people.