The preliminary investigation report into a plane crash that killed three men northwest of Sundre last fall has been completed and is now being reviewed, says John Pearson, senior investigator with Transportation Safety Board of Canada Air Branch.
A Cirrus SR-22 slammed into a cattle pasture about eight kilometres northwest of Sundre and burst into flames on September 24, 2010.
Chuck Matson, 51, of Calgary, Stephen Brosseau, 43, of Spruce Grove, and a 42-year-old Edmonton man died at the scene.
“The report is in the interested party and draft review stage,” Pearson said Thursday. “We will then deal with the comments, have a final review, and then the publication. It would be nice to have it out by the end of September.”
In preparing the report, investigators looked at the aircraft and its maintenance records, the weather at the time of the crash, personnel and other factors.
He explained that the investigation has been particularly technical because there was no ‘black box' flight recorder on the aircraft.
“In this case we had some good data from the on-board recording system in the airplane,” he said. “The navigation system recorded some data points and we had some pretty good data points. There is no black box but this is the next best thing to it. It gave us some pretty good information to establish some characteristics of the last flight.”
As to the exact cause of the crash, Pearson says some questions may never be answered.
“There are still some things that are going to be a mystery,” he said. “We have a pretty good idea of what happened. We have a pretty good idea of how the aircraft was behaving, but why it got into that position, we'll probably never know, what the personnel in the aircraft were actually doing.
“We don't want to say a great deal at this time because after the draft stage things can change as well. Some small things could be altered and people could have some comments on the technical aspect of the report and we have to revise things.”
The investigation itself involved many hours of work, he said. “There was a fair amount of time spent in our lab in Ottawa,” he said. “The boxes that recorded the information, the flight information, were damaged pretty severely.
“One of them was damaged to the point where we couldn't get anything out of it; that would be the one that recorded the engine parameters. But the flight navigation one was accessible with a fair amount of technical work. We had to do some cloning of computer chips that held the non-volatile memory and put those chips into a good unit down in Florida and read the data off that.”
An eyewitness to the crash, Lance Dejax, said he saw the plane spiral into the ground. A massive fireball followed immediately after the crash.
