The aircraft was traveling at about 60 knots, at an altitude of 700 feet, when it dropped off the radar at 11:57 p.m., she said. The accident site was about three miles from the runway.
"There is no recording of a distress call," Hersman said.
There was no voice recorder or flight data recorder on the helicopter, nor are they required, she said.
Police and fire crews sent out search teams at 12:30 a.m. and located the crash site at 2 a.m., police said. Wells was taken by ambulance to the Prince George's County hospital and transferred to Baltimore yesterday afternoon.
With their helicopter network grounded, state police officials asked commercial companies and nearby state and federal helicopter crews for assistance. As of last evening, two flights had taken place in Maryland - a patient transported from Charles County in a U.S. Park Police helicopter and a patient flown from Frederick County by the private MedStar Transport of Columbia, Bass said
With the deaths of Bunker and Lippy, eight state police pilots or crew members have died in helicopter crashes since the service took responsibility for aero-medical evacuation in 1970. Before yesterday, the most recent fatal crash was in 1986, when a helicopter leaving Shock Trauma crashed in Leakin Park, killing two crew members. The state police and the NTSB blamed dense fog. A fatal crash in Queen Anne's County in 1972 was also blamed on heavy fog, and a deadly crash in Beltsville in 1973 was attributed to mechanical failure.
Hersman said the accident was the eighth such incident nationwide in the past 12 months. A 2006 report from the NTSB found that medical evacuation flights are "inherently dangerous" because of their urgency and varying weather and terrain, and it detailed 55 medevac accidents between 2001 and 2006, leading to 18 serious injuries and 54 deaths.
A black flag hung limp yesterday outside the front door of the Gamber Community Volunteer Fire Department, where Lippy also worked as a paramedic and where several members mourned his death as they awaited their next call. Lippy, whose wife, Christina, gave birth to a daughter this year, began as a paid engine driver at Gamber in April 2004, before training as a paramedic.
"Everybody's feeling very badly about it," said Clay Myers, Gamber's public information officer. "Everybody liked him a lot."
At the crash scene yesterday some of Mallard's relatives gathered to seek information and to remember her.
