The fire was spreading up

Yosemite National Park in Northern California smashed into a steep canyon wall Tuesday, killing the pilot who was believed to be the only person aboard, officials said. Rescue crews hiking through extremely rugged terrain found the wreckage and confirmed the pilot's death several hours after the plane crashed, said Alyssa Smith, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The pilot's family has requested no name be released until all immediate family members can be notified, Smith said. The plane went down about 4:30 p.m. within a mile of the park's west entrance, Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said. California Highway Patrol Sgt. Chris Michael said he was stopping traffic along state Route 140 at the west entrance to the park when he witnessed the crash. "I heard a large explosion, I looked up on the steep canyon wall and saw aircraft debris was actually raining down the side of the mountain after the impact," he told The Associated Press by telephone. "It hit the steep side of the canyon wall. It appeared from the direction he was going, he was trying to make a drop down the side of the canyon when he hit the canyon wall." The fire was spreading up the canyon wall, and it appeared the pilot was trying to lay down fire retardant to stop its progress, Michael said. "It most definitely did disintegrate on impact," he said. "It was nothing. I didn't see anything but small pieces." Pieces of the aircraft landed on the highway and came close to hitting fire crews on the ground nearby, but no one on the ground was injured, he said. "It came pretty close to hitting them, but they were far enough away that it missed them, fortunately," he said. The airplane, manufactured in 2001 and based out of Hollister, is an S-2T air tanker, which is flown by a single pilot and normally has no other crew members. The tanker uses twin turbine engines and is capable of carrying 1,200 gallons of retardant, said another CalFire spokesman, Daniel Berlant. Don Talend, of West Dundee, Illinois, said he also may have seen the plane go down. Talend and friends were vacationing at the park when they stopped to snap some photographs of the fire, which was several miles away. The plane "disappeared into the smoke and you heard a boom," he told The Associated Press by phone. "I couldn't believe what I saw," Talend said. "There was actually a ranger there behind us. ... He had a look of disbelief on his face." The missing pilot is an employee of DynCorp., a contractor that provides the pilots for all CalFire planes and maintenance for the department's aircraft, said Janet Upton, a CalFire spokeswoman. The fire had broken out about 90 minutes earlier Tuesday near Route 140, which leads into the heart of the park. It had grown to about 130 acres by Tuesday evening and forced the evacuation of several dozen homes near the community of Foresta. The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration were investigating the crash and were expected to arrive at the crash site Wednesday morning, FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said. FAA records show the plane is registered to the U.S. Forest Service, which originally provided the plane to CalFire, Upton said. The last time a CalFire air tanker crashed was in 2001, when two tankers collided while fighting a fire in Mendocino County, killing both pilots, Berlant said. The agency had another plane crash in 2006, when a fire battalion chief and a pilot were killed while observing a fire in a two-seat plane in Tulare County. According to the lawsuit filed Monday in Indiana, an officer told Mahone she was being pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt and asked to see both her driver's license and Jones' identification. Mahone produced her license, but Jones told the officer he did not have his license because he had been ticketed for not paying his insurance, and offered to show them the ticket. The officer refused, according to Jones, and ordered him to step out of the car. According to the suit, Jones refused, fearing "the officers would harm him." But Hammond police say Jones "refused to lower the window more than a small amount" and refused to provide his name. The officer then called for backup, requesting a video-equipped squad car. It was around this time, police say, that Mahone shifted the car into drive. When officers warned her they had placed a "stop strip" that would puncture her tires in front of the vehicle, she pleaded with them to let her go. cording to the lawsuit, the club struck Jones in the shoulder and caused shards of glass to hit the four passengers. The officers then tasered Jones and forcibly removed him from car, placing him under arrest. He was charged with resisting arrest, according to the suit. "At no point during this entire encounter did Jamal physically resist the officers in any way," the lawsuit states. But in a statement, Hammond Police Lt. Richard Hoyda said the officers were "at all times acting in the interest of officer safety and in accordance with Indiana law." "In general, police officers who make legal traffic stops are allowed to ask passengers inside of a stopped vehicle for identification and to request that they exit a stopped vehicle for the officer’s safety without a requirement of reasonable suspicion," Hoyda said. "When the passenger displayed movements inside of the stopped vehicle that included placing his hand in places where the officer could not see, officers’ concerns for their safety were heightened." The case is the latest in a series involving officers accused of using excessive force. Last month, a South Carolina Highway Patrol officer was charged with armed aggravated assault after he shot an unarmed driver who had reached into his car to retrieve his license. The shooting was captured on the officer's dash cam. The shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August sparked nightly demonstrations that included heavily armed militarized police clashing with protesters in the St. Louis suburb. That shooting, which was not captured on video, led to calls from lawmakers for police to wear video cameras on their uniforms.