By Zachary West
Although there have been eight fatalities related to airplane crashes in Utah since the beginning of the year, officials say they are not finding any patterns in the crashes.
'The recent plane crashes have been raising some eyebrows,' said Patrick Morley, director of aeronautical operations for the Utah Department of Transportation. 'We''ve had an abnormal amount of crashes since the year began.'
Other officials agree with Morley, but are calling the events random.
'The recent accidents were random in nature,' said Larry Burch, a Utah aviation safety counselor who is also a meteorologist for the Federal Aviation Administration.
The most recent of these crashes happened two weeks ago when four people died when a plane crashed into the La Sal Mountains of Southern Utah. The private four-seater plane left Longmont, Colo., en route to Las Vegas, and was last heard from at about 8:30 p.m. A local person found the plane two days later.
Two men were also killed on Jan. 16, when their 1983 small engine, Russian-built plane took a nosedive directly into a snowy field just east of Midway. The cause of the crash is under investigation.
Two medics died Jan. 10 and a third was left in critical condition after a Life Flight helicopter from LDS Hospital crashed near the Salt Lake International Airport because of dense fog.
'There is no apparent pattern,' Morley said. 'These accidents happen a lot, like the midair collision that happened in Colorado -- very unexpectedly,'
In Denver on Jan. 24, two small airplanes collided in midair, killing all five people on the two planes and injuring six people on the ground.
A handful of non-fatal crashes also occurred in Utah this month:
-- A man in Bountiful smacked a telephone pole and crashed.
-- Two men, one a Salt Lake Community flight school instructor, survived a flight-training crash.
-- On New Year''s Day, two men -- an instructor and student -- were rescued after crashing a small plane into Beaver County''s Mineral Mountains. They said they didn''t see the mountain, Morley said.