Investigators may spend another week at Resolute Bay crash site: TSB

This is how the site of the Aug. 20 crash of First Air flight 6560 looked this week as investigators with the Transport Safety Board scoured the site for evidence which will tell them what happened before the aircraft slammed into the hillside overlooking the Resolute Bay airport. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TSB)

Transportation Safety Board investigators have listened to the voice recordings from the last minutes of First Air flight 6560, but these won’t be made public until the TSB completes its final report on the Aug. 20 crash in Resolute Bay. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TSB)

A week after First Air flight 6560 crashed near the Resolute Bay airport on Aug. 20, investigators with the Transportation Safety Board continue to comb the crash site to gather as much information as possible about wreckage and about the site.

“We’re recovering [items], and documenting photographically the site,” said Transportation Safety Board spokesperson John Cottreau in an interview from Resolute Bay. “We’re identiying parts of interest that we want to take for further study and our team is transporting those to take back to our TSB laboratory in Ottawa for a more thorough analysis.”

Cottreau couldn’t say if the TSB will actually reconstruct parts of the Boeing 737-200C aircraft to see what went wrong Aug. 20— as has been done in some other air crashes.

“It’s really to early to say what measures will have to be taken for the investigator in charge and his crew to get an understanding of what happened at the time,” Crotteau said. “That still needs to be thought out and decided on.”

But the black boxes containing voice and flight data, retrieved shortly after the crash, have been listened to, although the recordings of conversations that went on in the cockpit are protected, and won’t come out until the final TSB report, and then, only if the information they contain is important to the investigation, he said.

That final report could take as long as a year to produce.

“We’re going to take the time we need to do a thorough report and to answer the three questions for us and for everybody: what happened, why did it happen and what can we learn to help us make sure it never happens again. we are going to do our very best to find out the answers to those three questions.”

Canadian Press reported Aug. 25 that an initial report by the TSB said “there was cloud, fog and light rain when a chartered jet crashed into a hill while on approach to land at the Resolute airport.”

The report cited by CP said there was a 60-metre cloud ceiling, fog with less than five kilometres of visibility, drizzling rain and light wind when First Air flight 6560 crashed 1.6 km from the airport’s runway.

But Cottreau says the TSB has made no report or statement about meteorological conditions at the time of the crash.

For now, he said investigators are focussing entirely on gathering as much data as they can.

“We’re not concentrating on any analysis yet. Once we leave the site, we want to be sure that we have everything we need to do a thorough analysis. That is consuming us right now,” Cottreau said.

Twenty-three investigators are now at the site of the crash. This number includes investigators from First Air, the United States National Transportation Safety Board and from Boeing, the company that manufactured the 737-200C.

The crash site continues to be a hazardous site to work in due to high winds that can blow sharp metal fragments around, Cottreau said.

The investigators are likely to spend up to another week in Resolute Bay.

Then post-field phase can take many months, as the TSB may, according to information on its website:
• examine records;
• examine selected wreckage in the laboratory and test selected components and systems;
• read and analyze recorders and other data;
• create simulations and reconstruct events;
• review autopsy and toxicology reports;
• conduct further interviews;
• determine the sequence of events; and
• identify safety deficiencies.

The TSB is looking for any photos which eyewitnesses to the crash may have taken either of the aircraft as it came in or shortly after the crash occured shortly before 1 p.m. last Saturday.

Cottreau said any photos can be emailed to him at: john.cottreau@bst-tsb.gc.ca