In the tightly knit aviation community that makes up St-Hubert Airport, the prevailing mood among many is outrage over a tragedy that should have been averted.
“We are angry. It’s an accident that never should have happened,” said a manager at an airline charter company who did not want to give her name. “That flight should never have taken off.”
The regional airport is composed of a handful of flight schools, maintenance hangars, charter companies and refuelling sites that encircle the three runways and a control tower located 20 kilometres east of downtown Montreal.
Most in the industry know each other, and knew Pascal Gosselin well, and fondly. He was the owner of Aéro Teknik aviation company at the airport and a father of three. And he piloted the ill-fated trip to the Îles-de-la-Madeleine that resulted in the death of all seven aboard, including former federal cabinet minister Jean Lapierre and four members of his family, and the co-pilot, Fabrice Labourel. A pilot in training since he left university in 1993, Gosselin attained his official pilot’s licence in 2010.
Although Gosselin’s aviation colleagues remembered him well, it did not temper their incredulity that a pilot they said had relatively little experience in a plane known for being difficult to handle for the untrained, particularly in winter, would have attempted a flight under such adverse weather conditions.
The usual minimum “cloud ceiling” — the distance between the runway and the lowest clouds — to allow a safe, legal landing at the Îles-de-la-Madeleine airport is 458 feet, said the manager of the airline charter company. On the day of the flight, the cloud ceiling at the Îles-de-la-Madeleine airport was at 200 feet, a finding the pilot would have known about by radioing in to the control tower. Air Canada and Pascan Aviation cancelled their flights to the islands that day due to the weather.
Winds at the airport were from the east-northeast at 37 kilometres per hour gusting to 56, according to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.
“Even if it was a sunny day, with those winds, many pilots would have said I’m not going in,” she said, adding that a crash of this nature is harmful to the aviation industry as a whole.
Ultimately it’s up to the pilot to decide whether or not to fly, she said.
Aviation consultant Charles-Éric Lamarche contends the plane Gosselin was flying is not suitable for Quebec’s winters and said few commercial pilots in Canada operate the aircraft.
“The plane is built for speed, it has very small wings and doesn’t respond well when its aerodynamic profile is altered,” he said.
Lamarche said it appears there were icy conditions over the islands as the plane attempted to land. “The plane is going to fly into those clouds that are filled with water and as soon as the water will touch the airplane, it will freeze,” he said.
He said airplanes are built to withstand a certain amount of ice, but too much ice will increase the weight and the stall speed.
Lamarche questioned whether Gosselin had enough experience as a pilot to tackle the difficult weather conditions on Tuesday.
“The pilots from Air Canada Jazz are used to going there three times a day,” he said. “They know the island by heart, they know the challenges. If you don’t fly too often, you don’t have the same reflexes as someone who goes there everyday, who knows the temperature and the weather.”
A statement released on behalf of Gosselin’s family Wednesday said it was “struck down by an immeasurable grief, and it offers its condolences to the Lapierre family, with which it shares deep ties of friendship.”
Commercial airlines will often cancel flights if weather conditions are questionable so as not to waste money, noted Thierry Dugrippe, operations manager at the Air Richelieu Montreal Flying Club based out of St-Hubert Airport. There is nothing illegal about what Gosselin did, Dugrippe said, adding that the pilot is allowed to fly in to check the conditions, and pull out if he can’t see the airport. Why Gosselin’s plane crashed four kilometres before the Îles-de-la-Madeleine airport “is best left up to the Transportation Safety Board to determine,” he said. Considering there are 200,000 takeoffs and landings annually at the St-Hubert Airport and another 300,000 at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal, crashes are very rare, he noted.
Based on witness accounts, others in the airport community were speculating the pilot was attempting to slow his speed before landing and stalled the plane, causing it to crash.
At Gosselin’s company, Aéro Teknik, the planes were grounded Wednesday as mourners gathered inside. Bouquets of flowers were stuck in the chain-link fence surrounding the parking lot, with cards bearing condolences. In their statement, the family said it did not want to make any announcements in order not to interfere with the investigation, and to be able to live their grief in peace.
(culled from montrealgazette.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment