Three days after a small plane went down outside Kelowna, killing the four people on board, including former Alberta premier Jim Prentice, the crash site remains in the control of the B.C. Coroner Service.
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Investigators are combing through the wreckage which includes part of one of the wings, the fuselage and some of the landing gear. But what Transportation Safety Board investigators won’t find is a so-called black box.
“The aircraft was not equipped with, nor was it required to carry a cockpit voice recorder or a flight data recorder,” Beverly Harvey, TSB investigator in charge, said Saturday.
“The initial examinations suggests the aircraft was destroyed from high deceleration forces after a vertical descent,” Harvey said. “There were no emergency or distress calls made. No emergency locator transmitter signal was received.”
READ MORE: TSB officials say no indication of distress call in plane crash that killed Jim Prentice
The small jet was en route from Kelowna to Springbank Airport, near Calgary, when it went down shortly after takeoff Thursday night, killing Prentice and his friends Ken Gellatly, Sheldon Reid and pilot Jim Kruk.
The B.C. Coroner Service has granted the TSB access to the site. Photos of the crash site were released by the TSB Saturday.
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“The team will be reviewing any electronic components on the aircraft from which we can retrieve any data to help understand the flight profile,” Harvey said.
Transport Canada says a cockpit voice recorder is only required when there are six or more seats on board a multi-engine turbine aircraft that requires two pilots during flight.
“For private or smaller aircraft, the decision to install flight recorder equipment is at the discretion of the pilot, as it is not a requirement under the CARs (Canadian Aviation Regulations),” a spokesperson for the minister of transport said. “Smaller aircraft are usually flown by one pilot so there are no cockpit conversations that would need to be recorded. Air traffic transmissions with the aircraft are recorded by Nav Canada. Therefore, the requirement for aircraft to be equipped with a CVR (cockpit voice recorder) is limited to the multi-engine turbine-powered aircraft that require two pilots and are configured for six or more passenger seats.”
The aircraft involved in the crash was a Cessna Citation built in 1974. The plane only requires one pilot and has no black box and few other digital instruments on board, which is permitted because of the plane’s age.
One aviation expert says many newer aircraft do have cockpit voice recorders, but if there’s only one pilot, there may not be a lot to record.
“If it’s just a single pilot, unless he’s talking to himself all the time, there probably would not be any useful information from a voice recorder,” Geoff Falconar, president of AEROSTUDIES, said.
“This being a private aircraft, there’s really not much going on to record. The information from these recordings is used to improve aviation safety,” he added. “Most of the information you get from the cockpit after an accident relates to improving the aircraft itself, so it doesn’t really help with an older aircraft.”
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In 1991, the Transportation Safety Board issued a recommendation about cockpit voice and flight data recorders, saying: “The department of transport expedite legislation for upgrading the flight recorder requirements for Canadian-registered aircraft.”
But in 25 years, the TSB says Transport Canada hasn’t made any satisfactory changes.
“We’ve had recommendations, or at least one recommendation, in the past,” Harvey said. “We would like to see that. It is difficult.”
“In a perfect world, to an investigator, you’d have everything recorded and you’d have all the data,” Falconar said. “It makes their job much easier for sure.”
“However, it’s just not feasible to go around and retrofit all the hundreds of thousands of older aircraft with modern technology.”
Investigators are reviewing other radar and weather data to see what else they can learn about Thursday’s fatal plane crash.
It could take a year before the investigation is completed.
With a file from The Canadian Press
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