Two dead after small plane crashes in Northwest Territories

POSTMEDIA NEWS

A small plane crash has left two dead in the Northwest Territories.

Four people were aboard a Cessna Caravan, owned by Air Tindi, which crashed 200 kilometres east of Yellowknife Tuesday afternoon, according to a Transportation Safety Board official.

“Our hearts ache for the families of the two individuals who have lost their lives in this tragic incident and our prayers are with the two injured survivors,” Air Tindi president Chuck Parker said in a written statement.

N.W.T. Department of Transport spokesman Earl Blacklock said two aircraft, a helicopter and a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, were on site with rescuers and a medical team.

“The survivors are being transported from the site as soon as they are stabilized,” he said.

The condition of the two survivors is not known.

They crashed in rocky terrain 32 kilometres west of Lutsel K’e, a small community on the eastern end of Great Slave Lake. The TSB will be sending two investigators to Yellowknife Wednesday, where they will travel to site of the crash to determine the cause.

The single-engine aircraft left Yellowknife shortly after 11 a.m., and was scheduled to arrive in Lutsel K’e around 11:24 a.m.

Blacklock said the Stanton Hospital in Yellowknife “implemented their code-orange mass causality protocol to deal with the survivors as they come in.”

RCMP received a report that an Air Tindi flight scheduled to travel to Yellowknife had turned back to Lutsel K’e, located about 200 km east of Yellowknife. All radio contact to the aircraft was then lost.

A spokesman at Canadian Forces Base Trenton said a C-130 Hercules airplane had been dispatched to the area.

with files from the Edmonton Journal