It’s a heartbreaking story First Air flight 6560. It breaks your heart because it is haunted by the question: could that tragedy have been avoided? Investigations established that the disaster was caused by human error, which triggered a series of chain reactions. The carrier had 15 people on board, including 4 crew members: 12 of them lost their lives. However, this tragedy contributed to improving, indeed almost perfecting, aviation safety in Canada.
The flight and the accident
It’s August 20, 2011, First Air Flight 6560, a Boeing 737-210Cfly from Yellowknife to Resolute Bay to Canada, transporting humans and cargo. Departure takes place at 9.40 local time, the captain is called Blair Rutherfordwhile the monitoring pilot is David Hare. Both received a report indicating worsening weather conditions, however, together with the crew, they decided not to detour. The journey itself does not reveal any problems, but at 11.41 the carrier turns to align itself with the runway at Resolute Bay airport: however, there is too windytoo much fog. So the plane ends up parallel to the landing strip, crashing to the ground shortly after a go-around, breaking into three sections and catching fire.
The rescue
The soldiers of the Air Force were near the plane crash.Operation Nanook with their radars and temporary fire-fighting structures which were not usually placed in the area: the soldiers believed it was an incredibly realistic exercise (they were in fact training for future cases of maritime or air disasters), intervening in any case promptly and discovering how instead it was a real accident.
The victims and survivors
As mentioned, the victims of First Air Flight 6560 were 12 out of a total of 15 people on board, including crew, and they were all Canadian nationals. ItcNews recalled the stories of some victims. One of them, for example, was the scientist Marty Bergmanndirector of Natural Resources Canada’s Polar Continental Shelf program. Another one was called Chesley Tibbo and in 2008 he survived another plane crash: that day was his birthday, and he was returning from his sister’s funeral in Newfoundland. Among the dead was a 6-year-old girl, Cheyenne Eckalookinseparable with his sister Gabrielle Pelkya year older: the latter, however, survived, together with two other people, the 23-year-old Nicole Williamson (who suffered a crushed foot and a fractured pelvis, remaining lucid and remembering everything that happened) and the 48-year-old Robin Wyllie (who had suffered serious injuries). Pelky, who had a broken leg, was helped by Williamson and he told her candidly: “This was my first plane crash”.
The conclusions of the investigations
The Boeing 737-210C had equipment that made it capable of landing on unpaved runways, but it wasn’t that equipment that didn’t work: in reality, as the Transportation Safety Board of Canada as of January 2012, there had been no problems maintaining the aircraft. Nor had the airport’s instrument landing system experienced any malfunctions, as it had been used by another aircraft about twenty minutes after the crash.
The investigation finally established in 2014 that the responsibilities were to be attributed to the late decision of the crew to begin the descent: the workload, burdened by the wind as well as the speed and therefore the loss of altitude, influenced the crew performance and correct tracking of parameters. The autopilot that made the approach was set correctly, but it disengaged during the turn. Meanwhile, however, the orientation system had been set incorrectly and had not been recalibrated – which is necessary when you are so close to the North Pole, due to phenomena related to magnetism – thus altering the perception of the track. Only too late did the ground proximity warning system, and therefore the go-around it was not enough to avoid the collision. In other words it was a human error.
To this we must add a communication problem between Rutherford and Hare. In fact, the latter would have noticed that something was not going right, going so far as to use his colleague’s first name to get his attention: “Blair, I don’t like it”. However, perhaps his doubts were underestimated in the heat of the moment, as Medium reports, although Hare could have acted independently, carrying out the go-around himself when necessary.
Many things have changed, with the hope, to paraphrase Pelky’s words, that that first plane crash could be the last at least in Canada. In fact, after the disaster of First Air Flight 6560, the company established that any crew member can perform a go-around at any time.
It also implemented the clarity of guidelinestraining on the use of the autopilot, check procedures and maintenance of the flight data recorder. So much so that, net of perfectibility, there have not been such serious plane crashes in Canada since then.