At least 1 engine running when B.C. plane crashed: safety board
There's no evidence a twin-engine plane that crashed Sunday morning on northern Vancouver Island, killing five people, had stalled or lost power, a spokesman for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said Tuesday.
"We do have information that at least one of the engines was running on high power," Bill Yearwood, a manager of aviation investigations with the TSB, told CBC News.
The Grumman Goose amphibious aircraft, chartered from Pacific Coastal Airlines and carrying seven people, went down shortly after taking off from Port Hardy, B.C., at about 7 a.m. PT Sunday.
Earlier, police believed the plane's engines might have been at fault in the crash, said Const. Sarah Beckett of the RCMP detachment in Port McNeill, B.C. But Yearwood said Tuesday there's no indication "the aircraft stalled or an engine lost power."
TSB investigators have taken statements from the two passengers who survived the crash, Yearwood said.
The survivors said the pilot was turning and descending the plane before it crashed.
"The person remembered very well the positions of where people were sitting and how the aircraft was manoeuvring," Yearwood said.
The plane caught fire when it hit a mountainside, Yearwood said, and a number of explosions following the impact triggered a larger blaze.
Heavily burned aircraft difficult to remove
Investigators said they face a huge challenge to remove the plane wreckage off the hill because the fire pulverized parts of the aircraft's body.
Seaspan International Ltd., a marine transportation company in Vancouver, confirmed on Monday the passengers were employees who were being flown in to a remote logging site to load barges for transport.
Bob Pomponio, one of the passengers who survived the crash, suffered soft-tissue injuries, his brother-in-law Martin Young told reporters Monday.
The name of the other survivor has not been released, and neither have the names of the five people killed in the incident.