Plane crash that killed dad and three kids caused by whiteout

WINNIPEG – Investigators say the crash of a small plane in western Manitoba that killed a man and three boys last year was caused by whiteout conditions.

Darren Spence, 37, was at the controls of the Cessna 210 carrying his sons, Logan, 9, and Gage, 10, that crashed in a field near Waskada, Man., on Feb. 10, 2013. A third boy on the plane, Dawson Pentecost, 9, was a friend of the brothers. All four died in the crash.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB)  released its report into the tragedy Monday.

Both the landscape of rolling, snow-covered hills and foggy weather resulted in a whiteout, which caused the pilot to become disoriented, the Transportation Safety Board said.

A whiteout is “a winter atmospheric optical phenomenon in which the observer appears to be engulfed in a uniformly white glow. Whiteout conditions may result in a poorly defined visual horizon that will reduce the pilot’s ability to visually detect changes in altitude, airspeed and position. If visual cues are sufficiently degraded, the pilot may lose control of the aircraft or fly into the ground,” the agency said.

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Spence was an experienced crop-dusting pilot. The Cessna, which he had recently purchased, was equipped with instruments to fly in zero-visibility conditions, but Spence was not trained to use them. He was only qualified to fly with visual reference to the ground.

“The pilot’s lack of instrument training and experience would have made him more susceptible to the effects of whiteout and spatial disorientation,” the TSB said.

Spence took off from a privately owned air strip in Waskada with the three boys on board at about 12:30 p.m. on a sightseeing trip. Visibility was fine when he took off, but fog moved into the area about half an hour later, the TSB said. The plane’s emergency locator, which is activated in a crash, was detected at 1:17 p.m.

Waskada is about 330 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg.