News
TSB report completed in First Air crash

March 25, 2014, Ottawa – Two and a half years ago, a Boeing 737 slammed into a hill
near a remote Arctic airport, splitting into three pieces and flinging
flaming wreckage across the rugged tundra.

Eight passengers and four crew members died. Three passengers miraculously survived.

The Transportation Safety Board is to
release its long-awaited report Tuesday into what caused First Air
flight 6560 to crash near Resolute, an Inuit hamlet in Nunavut.

An interim report by the board said the
First Air plane had been preparing to land using its navigation
instruments because the weather — fog, cloud and drizzling rain —was
preventing the crew from seeing the landing strip.

That report said the crew aborted the landing two seconds before the plane into the hill, about 1.6 kilometres from the runway.

Several lawsuits have already been filed
over the disaster. The suits cast partial blame on the Canadian Forces,
which had taken control over the small airport on the day of the crash,
Aug. 20, 2011.

The military was holding an annual
manoeuvre, one that ironically included a mock plane crash, and had
established a temporary air traffic control tower to guide in all
planes. The airport was normally an uncontrolled airspace and pilots
navigated themselves onto the runway.

The suits claim the military did not have
enough people on duty to handle the air traffic and those working the
tower were not briefed or properly trained to navigate civilian planes.

The suits further detail how soldiers gave the First Air crew permission to land. | READ MORE