A man who survived a white-knuckle emergency landing on a glacier near Whistler Sunday afternoon says the plane “took a wrong turn.”
“What happened was, instead of passing Whistler, we took the valley to the right too soon and the valley took us out of the course, the direction,” says passenger Peter Jedynakiewicz.
Three men were on board the plane, which was piloted by 81-year-old Vern Hannah, who has about 40 years of flying experience.
The three people in the Beechcraft Musketeer aircraft took off from Pitt Meadows airport, east of Vancouver just before 8:30 a.m. Sunday. The aircraft was reported missing on Sunday afternoon and was finally spotted Monday night.
Jedynakiewicz said once the plane entered the glacier valley, it didn’t have enough speed to get out.
“The altitude in the valley is 3,500 feet,” Jedynakiewicz, who has his ultralight pilot’s licence, said.
He said the valley was like a “huge cul-de-sac” and the plane did not have enough air under the wings to lift it out of the valley and over the mountains.
“We tried to speed up, but like I said, we had no speed under the wings and we started dropping,” he said.
“We tried to accelerate but there’s not much we can do because we couldn’t get up speed.”
The pilot landed the plane safely on the glacier, “like a pillow,” said Jedynakiewicz, who said there was not a scratch on the aircraft.
He calls Hannah “a hero” for landing the plane safely. Hannah said they got into trouble when he misjudged the route. He said he lowered the nose of the plane to increase flight speed in order to jump what he calls rock piles, before running out of room and speed and stalling on the glacier.
After trying to radio for help and discovering the radio didn’t work, the three men decided to try and move out of the glacier as it was too cold to stay there.
However, the walk soon proved to be too much for the 81-year-old pilot. So the men decided to hunker down with blankets and hope someone would come help them.
Luckily, a snowmobiler had spotted an aircraft earlier and took a photo of it. This tip led the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre to go and look for the missing plane in that area.
“I’m very grateful,” said Jedynakiewicz.
All three men suffered some dehydration but are otherwise fine.
One expert says Hannah did many things wrong that led to this emergency landing and the three men are lucky to have such a positive outcome.
Gordon Dupont, an investigator for the Transportation Safety Board, said Hannah did not file a flight plan (which is not required by law) and that was a mistake. He also said they had deviated from their intended flight, between Pitt Meadows and Pemberton, and that led to searchers looking in the wrong area.
Dupont also said the three men shouldn’t have left the plane and it should have had an emergency transmitter on board, but it did not.
“Either this one didn’t have one or he didn’t activate or it was a malfunction,” said Dupont. He also said Hannah lacked mountain flying experience as a pilot should never fly towards rising ground and should angle towards it.
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