California air tanker that crashed went down after striking tree

By Alex Dobuzinskis LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California firefighting plane that crashed while battling a wildlands blaze near Yosemite National park this month is believed to have gone down after its wing struck a tree and broke off, the results of an investigation showed on Wednesday. The air tanker slammed into the wall of a cliff on Oct. 7 while fighting the so-called Dog Rock Fire near a western entrance to Yosemite, killing veteran firefighting pilot Geoffrey "Craig" Hunt. Hunt, 62, had been preparing to drop fire retardant from his aircraft, in communication with another airplane overhead, when his plane struck the tree, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its preliminary report. The crew of the plane overhead saw the wing of Hunt's plane strike the tree, and the wing broke off as the plane crashed, the report said. Hunt had following another aircraft acting as a lead plane on the drop, but the crew of the lead plane did not see the crash. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection grounded its 22 other planes as a precaution after the crash. It lifted the order days later after finding no mechanical problems with the fleet, mostly planes from the 1950s and 1960s built as anti-submarine military aircraft, CalFire spokeswoman Alyssa Smith said. The crash that killed Hunt, who worked for DynCorp International under contract with CalFire, came two years after two air crew members died when their tanker plane crashed on a forested mountainside in Utah while on a mission to drop fire retardant on a blaze near the Nevada border. The Dog Rock Fire, which broke out the day Hunt died, grew to 311 acres and has since been totally contained. (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Peter Cooney)