Probe launched after former senator dies in plane crash

An amphibious plane carrying former US Republican Senator Ted Stevens crashed into a remote mountainside during a fishing trip, killing Alaska's most beloved political figure and four others and stranding the survivors on a rocky, brush-covered slope overnight.

Mr Stevens and the eight other people in the single-engine plane were on a fishing trip when the flight experienced sudden fog and rain in a rugged section of south-western Alaska.

Three teenagers and their parents, including the former head of Nasa, were on the plane when it crashed into the mountain on Monday afternoon with so much force that it left a 300-foot gash on the slope, US federal investigators said.

A doctor and two emergency medical technicians hiked to the scene on Monday evening and tended to the survivors' broken bones, cuts and bruises during a cold and frightening night on the mountain with the pungent odour of jet fuel wafting through the air.

A 13-year-old boy survived but had to spend the night near his dead father and the senator.

A mother and her 16-year-old daughter died. Former Nasa chief Sean O'Keefe survived along with his teenage son.

The 86-year-old Mr Stevens' death stunned politicians and residents alike because of his pre-eminence in Alaska history.

A decorated Second World War pilot who survived a deadly 1978 plane crash, he was the longest-serving Republican senator in history and became the patron saint of Alaska politics as he brought billions of federal dollars home.

One failed effort - the Bridge to Nowhere - became part of his national legacy, as did corruption convictions that helped foil his 2008 campaign after 40 years in office. The case was later thrown out.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board arrived at the crash site outside Dillingham, located on Bristol Bay about 325 miles south-west of Anchorage.

The cause was not immediately known, but weather is one area investigators will examine.