Investigators are examining wreckage and debris in the aftermath of a rare two-plane
midair collision that left five people dead near a small community northeast of
Saskatoon.
underwater recovery team members locate debris from one of two airplanes involved in a mid-air crash
near St. Brieux. Five people died in the crash Saturday but little information is available about what
caused the tragedy. Photograph by: Richard Marjan, The StarPhoenix , The StarPhoenix
Transportation Safety Board investigators arrived in the St.
Brieux area on Sunday to sift through the remains of the crash, which happened Saturday. While the
investigators work to determine what led to the crash, an RCMP underwater recovery team continued
searching for debris and the remains of several victims in a swampy area west of St. Brieux, located
about 180 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon.
“Our members are still on scene and still combing
through the wreckage trying to ensure we have as much of the planes intact as possible,” said RCMP
spokesperson Cpl. Rob King on Sunday morning during a media tour of the crash sites.
One plane,
a Lake Buccaneer amphibious plane occupied by a man and a woman, was travelling from Regina to La
Ronge. The second airplane, a Piper PA-28 with two men and a young male, was on its way from Calgary to
St. Brieux. There were no survivors.
While RCMP would not identify the victims, Postmedia News
confirmed the names of those on board the Piper PA-28: Eric Donovan, his 11-year-old son Wade and
friend Denny Loree, who was the pilot.
The plane was travelling from Mossleigh, about 65
kilometres southeast of Calgary, and was just a few kilometres from its destination at St. Brieux when
it collided with the amphibious plane flying from Regina to La Ronge. The pilot and owner of the Lake
Buccaneer is a member of the Regina Flying Club, although the man’s name is not known.
RCMP
know the identies of the victims but autopsies are required for positive identification, King
said.
The search for remains is difficult because one plane – the St. Brieux-bound aircraft –
fell from the sky into a slough surrounded by trees and brush. Large parts of the plane are submerged
in waist-deep water. Debris and remains were scattered across the area and marked with dozens of
evidence flags.
“We’re still searching for all the remains,” King said. “The terrain is what
the terrain is and you have to work with what you’ve got. The density does make it more
difficult.”
Very little information about the mid-air collision is available and it could take
months for investigators to determine the cause of the crash, said Peter Hildebrand, regional manager
of the Transportation Safety Board’s Winnipeg office.
“It’s far enough away from Saskatoon,
the site itself is not under radar coverage,” Hildebrand said, “so we don’t have a radar picture of
things right up to the time of the accident. We have only a very partial flight path.”
Neither
plane had a black box containing flight information, he said.
Hildebrand said investigators have
some flight path data, including radar and altitude, from the Piper PA-28 but no flight path
information from the Lake Buccaneer.
Investigators could remain at the crash site up to the end
of the week before returning to Winnipeg to continue the investigation, Hildebrand
said.
It’s rare for two planes to collide in mid-air, but
even more rare given the prairies are so “spread out,” Hildebrand said.
The first reports of a
plane crash came just before 9 a.m. Saturday when a farmer found a piece of debris in his field and
called the RCMP. First responders found a plane submerged in a slough. The second aircraft was located
soon after in the vicinity.
“As our members came to the scene, they identified it as part of a
wing from an aircraft,” King said. “Logically, if there’s a wing missing somewhere, there might be an
aircraft. There was a person that assisted us by going up in a plane, but it was mainly the ground
search that went and found (the wreckage) by following the debris.”
The Piper PA-28 was
scheduled to land at a Bourgault Industries landing strip located northeast of St. Brieux, where it was
to pick up air seeder parts, said company general manager and president Gerry Bourgault. The occupants
were not company employees, he added.
Bourgault is a pilot with 30-plus years of experience and
the RCMP tapped him to help find the wreckage by air. At about 10 a.m. on Saturday, Bourgault boarded
his Piper Super Cub plane with friend Ted Gaillard and took off to scour the area for signs of the
downed aircraft.
The two planes were found in different sloughs less than a kilometre apart. The
crash sites are about 10 kilometres west of St. Brieux, hidden away in sloughs found after driving 15
minutes on rural roads off Highway 41. The area is dotted with sloughs, bluffs and
farmland.
“There was a lot of wreckage, probably pieces spread for a mile,” said Bourgault, who,
like others in the town, was at a loss to explain the mid-air crash.
“How do you explain it?” he
said. “It’s almost like a lightning strike. The probability of it happening would be extremely
low.”
The plane crash victims are not from St. Brieux so the community hasn’t heard much about
the crash, said Coun. Pat Yeager on Saturday night.
“It’s been very, very quiet,” he said.
“It’s a robust little town and when a tragedy like this happens, it’s never a good thing.”
St.
Brieux is familiar with tragedy. In August 2008, five children and one woman from St. Brieux died in a
car crash north of the town while returning from a birthday party in Melfort. The SUV carrying the six
people left the road at a highway intersection and rolled into a water-filled dugout.
“The town
is still pretty shook up by that,” Yeager said. “When the town makes the news, it sort of brings back
the memories.”