WASHINGTON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - A family friend of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens said he has not received confirmation that the lawmaker had died in a plane crash overnight, despite previous television reports that quoted the friend as saying that he had perished.
The friend, Dave Dittman, told local Alaska news outlets that he had been told Stevens had died in the crash, but in a new statement said "that has not been confirmed."
EADS North America Chief Executive Officer Sean O’Keefe, he former head of NASA, was a passenger aboard the plane that crashed in Alaska on Monday.
O’Keefe, 54, was leading EADS’s bid to win a hotly contested competition to build a new generation of aerial tankers for the U.S. military, one of the biggest Pentagon contracts ever.
It is unclear if Stevens and O’Keefe survived.
