5 dead in copter crash on Hawaii island

HONOLULU - A helicopter taking four tourists on an excursion over West Maui and the neighboring island of Molokai crashed into a mountainside near an elementary school Thursday, killing all of the tourists and the pilot, authorities said.

Maui County spokesman Rod Antone said firefighters recovered four bodies and believe they found a fifth at the crash site on the eastern part of Molokai, but they were having trouble retrieving it under the wreckage.

Blue Hawaiian Helicopters owner David Chevalier confirmed that five people were dead. He said the passengers were two men and two women from the mainland U.S. who were taking a 45-minute tour.

He declined to release the pilot's name because his wife had not yet been notified.

"We're extremely grieved for our pilot as well as the passengers," he said. "Something like this can't be more devastating to us."

The DC-130 chopper was less than a year old, Chevalier said.

A secretary at Kilohana Elementary School said the helicopter crashed in the mountains above the campus. No children were injured.

"When it hit you could hear just like an explosion," said the secretary, who declined to give her name. "When it first crashed, there was black smoke and stuff."

The helicopter was engulfed in flames, said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor.

From the school, the helicopter's yellow tail could be seen pointing up from the ground.

Molokai is a mostly rural island of about 7,000 people between Maui and Oahu, where world leaders have gathered this week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Honolulu.

Helicopter tour companies advertise trips to Molokai to see the island's sea cliffs and Hawaii's tallest waterfall. The remote Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokai is where Hawaii exiled leprosy patients between 1866 and 1969.

Tour helicopters have come under heavy scrutiny over their safety in recent years around the country, most recently after a deadly chopper crash in Manhattan last month. Some lawmakers called for a ban on tourist flights and pleasure trips by privately owned aircraft in Manhattan following that crash.

A Blue Hawaiian helicopter was previously involved in a July 2000 crash that killed seven people on Maui. Pilot Larry Kirsch, 55, and six passengers died when the twin-engine AS-355 crashed into a steep mountainside deep in Maui's Iao Valley.

The company conducts 160,000 tours each year on all of the Hawaiian islands, Chevalier said.