Robert Murray Heath

By Rosemary Westwood - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

illustration by team macho

Robert Murray Heath was born Nov. 7, 1957, in Mississauga, Ont. His father, Robert, was an engineer and his mother, Betty, was a telephone sales operator. Robert Sr. owned a hobby plane and Robert spent as much time as he could beside his dad in the cockpit, falling in love with planes.

Robbie to his parents and one older sister, Gail, “Bob” to most everyone else, he attended Mississauga’s Allan A. Martin Public School. When he was 12, he joined the Air Cadets, where he learned to fly gliders, then small planes, and earned his pilot’s licence. After graduating from Gordon Graydon Memorial Secondary School, he moved to Moncton, N.B., to do commercial and instructor flight training.

In 1985, Bob took a job with Sabourin Airways in the small community of Red Lake, in northwestern Ontario. He flew small planes—the Beechcraft 99 and Piper Navajo Chieftain—mostly to remote reservations and on hunting and fishing trips. On a medevac flight, he met Lucy Geno, a dark-haired nurse who worked at the Red Lake hospital. She was 10 years his elder, and he courted her with gifts of doughnuts and rabbit-trimmed hats. Lucy was the mother of three grown children when the couple met, and Bob soon became Papa to them all. The couple married on Nov. 17, 1990, in a Twin Otter flying at 5,280 feet—exactly one mile—above Red Lake. Lucy wore an embroidered red parka; Bob wore his flight suit. Continue…

Early report suggests plane in deadly Nunavut crash landed hard, overran runway

By The Canadian Press - Friday, December 28, 2012 at 7:35 PM - 0 Comments

SANIKILUAQ, Nunavut – An initial report into the deadly crash of a passenger plane in Nunavut suggests the aircraft landed hard and ended up shooting past the end of the runway by as much as 200 metres.

The crash happened at the airport in Sanikiluaq last Saturday evening. Six-month-old Isaac Appaqaq was killed. The two pilots and six other passengers were all injured, but survived.

The Transport Canada occurrence report from the crash says the plane, a Fairchild twin-engine turbo prop en route from Winnipeg, was on its second approach that night.

“The aircraft touched down hard and a runway overrun ensued,” reads the report, posted online. “The aircraft came to a stop approximately 150 to 200 metres past the end of the intended runway surface.”

The report notes that the information is preliminary and subject to change as the investigation continues.

The Transportation Safety Board has said there was some blowing snow at the time of the crash, but hasn’t said whether it played a role. The Transport Canada report doesn’t mention anything about the weather conditions.

Nunavut’s coroner, Padma Suramala, has told media in the North that the child suffered head injuries when he was thrown from his mother’s lap on impact.

Airlines recommend children be held on the shoulder rather than on the lap during landings, but Suramala said she didn’t think that would have made any difference in this crash.

Sanikiluaq is a community of 800 located on the Belcher Islands in the southeastern corner of Hudson Bay. As in all Nunavut communities, flying is the only way in and out.

The flight was chartered for Keewatin Air, which schedules three trips a week between Winnipeg and Sanikiluaq. The aircraft belonged to Winnipeg-based Perimeter Aviation.

Some of the passengers on board were in Winnipeg for medical appointments and were on their way home.

Two dead, several seriously hurt in dual plane crashes in Manitoba and Alberta

By The Canadian Press - Sunday, November 18, 2012 at 9:08 PM - 0 Comments

SNOW LAKE, Man. – Rescue crews on snowmobiles had to beat a path through thick bush in northern Manitoba on Sunday to reach the survivors of one of two fatal plane crashes which took place on the Prairies over the weekend.

Low cloud cover meant a rescue helicopter was unable to reach seven people who were injured after a plane enroute to Winnipeg from Snow Lake, Man., went down just after 10 a.m. local time on Sunday.

The crash which killed one person came after a separate aircraft went down in northern Alberta on Saturday evening, killing the 52-year-old pilot, who was the plane’s sole occupant.

In Sunday’s incident, authorities said a Cessna 208 Caravan went down in a remote area about 10 kilometres from the town of Snow Lake, Man., which is some 700 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

Police said the pilot, a 40-year-old man from Snow Lake, was killed and that seven others were injured, some seriously.

RCMP spokeswoman Sgt. Line Karpish said a passenger on the plane used a cellphone to call 911 and alert authorities about the crash.

A Canadian Forces Hercules helicopter was dispatched and rescuers on board had parachutes they could use to reach the survivors, but Karpish said crews weren’t able to jump because the cloud ceiling was so low.

That meant the RCMP, volunteer firefighters, wildlife officers and other locals had to use snowmobiles to reach the scene.

“Just to get to the plane crash, basically it took over an hour and a half to cover the six miles,” said Karpish, adding that the area is covered in thick bush.

“I’m told that they ended up having to push a trail. They did end up accessing (the site) using snowmobiles and rescue sleighs to get to them safety.”

The injured were brought to a small health centre in Snow Lake, but poor visibility at the time meant that medevac flights that would have carried them to larger hospitals couldn’t land.

Clarence Fisher, the mayor of Snow Lake, said Sunday afternoon that while the sky appeared to be clearing, fast-approaching darkness would have likely made it difficult for planes to land.

A decision was made to transport the injured by ground ambulance to Flin Flon, The Pas, or Thompson, which were all between two and three hours away.

“We have a local hospital here but people with serious injuries would need to be medevaced out,” Fisher said.

There’s been no word on the conditions of the injured.

Snow Lake, a mining community with gold, zinc and copper deposits in the vicinity, has a population of just over 800.

Karpish said many people in the community chipped in to help with the rescue.

“In the north, it’s not unusual when something happens like this, it hits home very closely,” Karpish said. “At the end of the day everybody just joins in and helps out and gets these people to safety.”

Meanwhile, authorities said in Saturday’s crash in nothern Alberta, the single-engine turboprop entered an area between La Crete and High Level where visibility was reduced to less that 100 metres due to low cloud cover and heavy fog.

RCMP said an emergency beacon was detected by the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Trenton, Ont., which notified police.

Authorities found the plane a few kilometres northeast of the La Crete airport, about 670 kilometres north of Edmonton.

The Transportation Safety Board will be investigating both crashes.

Board spokesman Chris Krepski said that the plane that crashed near Snow Lake went down not long after taking off from the community. Investigators were on their way to the community and he said more information wouldn’t be available until Monday.

Fisher said the plane was operated by a local charter company, Gogal Air Service. He said he wasn’t able to provide any details about who was on board.

Air France Flight 447: Lack of training led to crash, report finds

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, July 6, 2012 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

More than two years after Air France Flight 447 fell out of the sky over the Atlantic, French investigators have determined that a lack of pilot training played a key role in the harrowing nighttime crash that killed all 228 aboard.

This week the French BEA authority released its final report into the accident, which occurred on June 1, 2009 as Flight 447 was en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The 224-page document concluded that the plane plunged into the ocean after a series of events led the crew to stall the plane near its cruising altitude and “the lack of any actions that would have made recovery possible.”

The long-awaited report confirmed what many in the industry had suspected: the current training regime for pilots is insufficient for dealing with so-called “loss of control” incidents that result from aerodynamic stalls, which are caused when a plane’s wings lose lift—usually because the plane is flying too slowly or trying to climb too steeply.

Needless to say, such accidents aren’t supposed to happen. Stall prevention and recovery is part of a pilot’s basic training. In general, the rule is to point the nose of the aircraft down and increase thrust until the plane’s airspeed is sufficient to restore lift to the wings. However, a Maclean’s investigation last year found that many pilots faced with a fatal mid-air stall not only failed to respond properly, but often appeared to do the exact opposite of what they were supposed to. The Maclean’s investigation also revealed that a combination of factors may be responsible for the seemingly unthinkable behaviour, ranging from the way pilots are trained in flight simulators to the increasing complexity and automation of today’s modern jetliners.

In the case of Air France, the sequence of events that led to the crash began when the plane flew through a band of thunderstorms. The pilots slowed the aircraft in anticipation of turbulence and then suddenly lost their airspeed indicators after the plane’s external sensors, called pitot tubes, failed—likely because they had become clogged with ice. But while the loss of accurate airspeed readings presented the pilots with a mid-air crisis, it should not have been fatal. French accident investigators found that the Air France pilots responded to the emergency in a disorganized fashion and unwittingly put the plane into a stall after the autopilot clicked off, as it was designed to do in the absence of accurate airspeed readings. More importantly, the co-pilot who was at the controls when the plane went down (the captain had left the cockpit on a rest break, only to return in the final minutes before the crash) repeatedly tried to point the plane’s nose upward despite the fact that the plane’s stall warning system kept sounding, albeit intermittently. The aircraft might have been saved had he done the exact opposite.

Among other things, French investigators recommended key changes to how pilots are trained to recognize and respond to stalls, including improved training when it comes to flying an aircraft manually at high altitude. The report also suggested changes to the design of some of the Airbus’s cockpit safety systems to make it easier for pilots to recognize when they’ve entered a stall. That includes the addition of an angle-of-attack indicator that shows the angle of the wing relative to the air flowing around it. “Only a direct readout of the angle of attack could enable crews to rapidly identify the aerodynamic situation of the aeroplane and take the actions that may be required,” the report said.

Three feared dead after weekend’s second deadly plane crash

By Richard Warnica - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Three people are thought to have died after a small plane crashed in the B.C. interior Sunday, the second deadly plane crash in the West in a single weekend.

From the Vancouver Sun:

The plane, a privately owned aircraft, left Pitt Meadows earlier in the day with five people on-board, but began its return flight with three. Late Sunday night, officers at Victoria’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre had yet to confirm any deaths.

Horrified motorists on the Okanagan Connector highway phoned 911 after they saw the single-engine de Havilland Beaver crash into the trees around 6:45 p.m. about 30 metres from the side of the highway near the closed Brenda Mine.

“When I came around the corner and saw the plane in the air, I thought, ‘Whoa! That’s low, by the tree line,’ and then it just disappeared,” said eyewitness Chris Koebel.

The crash came just a day after two small planes collided in the air above Saskatchewan, killing five people in all, including an 11-year-old boy.

Russian plane carrying hockey team crashes, killing 44

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

A plane crash near the Russian city of Yaroslavl carrying the local professional hockey team has left 44 people dead, including teammates of former Vancouver Canuck Pavol Demitra. According to local authorities, the plan lilted left as it took off from the Yaroslavl airport, crashing just 500 metres away. An official told Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency that only one person survived the plane crash. The incident led to the cessation of the KHL’s first regular season hockey game of the year partway through the first period. League president Alexander Medvedev said “the players of both teams considered playing after their friends and colleagues died to be absolutely impossible.” The team’s roster consists of several former NHL players and league prospects. Former Calgary Flame Brad McCrimmon, who won the Stanley Cup with the Flames in 1989 and the team’s coach, was among those killed.

Vancouver Sun

78 people killed in Moroccan military aircraft crash

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 12:11 PM - 0 Comments

Seventy-eight people have been killed and 3 severely wounded, in a Moroccan military aircraft crash Tuesday, the BBC reports. The plane took off from Dakhla in the Western Sahara, and was on its way to Kinitra in Northern Morocco, when a local resident says a thick fog caused it to crash into a mountain. The plane was attempting to make a scheduled stop at a military base when it went down. Forty-two bodies have been found so far, while a search party persists for the others.

BBC News