COMOX, B.C. – A man is dead after his home-built plane crashed into a heavily wooded area Wednesday morning while doing aerobatics near Courtenay on Vancouver Island.
Bert Smit, co-owner of Smit Field, a small airfield near the base of Mount Washington on Forbidden Plateau, was found by search crews a few hours after his F-11 Jodel aircraft broke up in mid-air, plummeted to the ground and burst into flames.
Smit, the sole occupant of the two-seater plane, is the second pilot of a home-built Jodel aircraft to crash in the area in less than a year.
An investigator from the Transportation Safety Board is expected to be on scene Friday to look for clues as to what caused the crash.
“We’re concerned that a lot of information might have been lost in the fire,” said TSB spokesman Bill Yearwood. “We’re looking to see if CFB Comox was able to capture the last moments of the aircraft on radar.”
The coroner’s office is investigating but it’s unclear if the TSB will carry out a full investigation – much depends on whether there are similarities with recent crashes involving Jodel aircraft.
On Aug. 2, 2009, another amateur-built, two-seater Jodel aircraft crashed into a Courtenay neighbourhood, narrowly missing a home with a family inside. The pilot died but no one on the ground was hurt.
“If we find the failure is related to a similar failure . . . then we would elevate the investigation,” said Yearwood, adding he found it “quite surprising” a second crash has occurred within such a short time involving the same model aircraft.
Neither aircraft had recording equipment on board. Pieces of the wreckage will be transported to the TSB’s offices in Richmond.
Shannon Gorman was outside pruning her raspberry bushes a little before 9 a.m. when she heard the plane and looked up over the trees.
“It looked like he was going to give me a real neat show with a swoop,” said Shannon Gorman. “As he started to come down, yellow pieces just flew everywhere. He just exploded and then crashed down.”
Another eyewitness said she saw the plane do a couple of loops just before its left wing blew apart and the plane went down.
Dan Annand, Smit’s partner in the airstrip, said the pilot only finished building the two-seater Jodel aircraft a few months ago. Smit, 75, took the plane out for a spin most mornings, he said.
“It’s built well, but we don’t know at this point what caused it,” said Annand.
If he had to go, Smit would have wanted to be soaring through a beautiful blue sky when it happened, said Annand.
“He loved to fly, he lived to fly,” he said as he fought back tears. “That was always his dream.
“He was in Holland as a youngster and at the end of the war, when the Allies came over to bomb (the) Germans he was cheering and he wanted to become a pilot because they were his heroes. He finally got to the stage where he could do that.”
Times Colonist/Comox Valley Echo
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