Investigators search for answers in First Air crash

JORDAN PRESS
Postmedia News

OTTAWA — It will take at least 60 days to provide some answers about what went wrong with First Air flight 6560 and a full report on the crash could take a year or two to produce, the Transportation Safety Board said Monday.

About 30 board personnel will invest likely thousands of hours in the coming days and weeks to sift through data from the plane’s black boxes, interview witnesses and the three survivors of the crash as well as comb through the wreckage itself.

The board’s director of air investigations Mark Clitsome said it’s too early to say what caused the plane to crash Saturday, killing 12 people and injuring three others.

“There could be a lot of things,” Clitsome said.

“We are in the business of determining what happened and why, and if we find out anything that can prevent this from happening again, we’ll get that out.”

The two steel, flight recorders that hold sounds and flight data from the last moments of the doomed flight were flown to Ottawa Sunday for analysis.

The information stored in the protected memory sticks will be downloaded and translated from binary code for investigators.

Clitsome said it could take a few days to get all the information from the black boxes — two beat-up looking, steel, orange cases, one containing the last 30 minutes of sound from the plane’s cockpit, the other holding a minimum of 25 hours of flight data — that could answer many questions about the crash.

He also said that investigators will interview the three survivors of the crash. Survivors, he said, are usually good sources of information about a crash.

“It’s important to interview witnesses as soon as you can while it’s still fresh in their memory,” Clitsome said.

The Boeing 737-200 combi aircraft — a combination cargo and passenger plane — crashed about eight kilometres from the Resolute Bay airport shortly before 1 p.m. local time Saturday. The last communications with the flight were at 12:40 p.m., about 10 minutes before the plane crashed.

The chartered flight was heading north toward the runway when it crashed, Clitsome said.

Clitsome said the plane is in three pieces on a hillside by the airport with the wreckage spread out over an area of about one square kilometre. The wreckage suggests the plane was coming in for a landing when it crashed, although it’s too early in the investigation to say that’s a certainty, he said.

He said that there was a fire when the plane crashed on Saturday, but he couldn’t say for certain whether the fire started before the plane crashed.

The Transportation Safety Board had eight personnel in Resolute Bay as part of the military’s annual northern exercise, known as Operation Nanook.

Four additional investigators were flown out Saturday and three more Sunday to speak with witnesses and airport staff, Clitsome said.

The plane’s manufacturer, Boeing, is helping in the investigation along with the engine manufacturer, Pratt & Whitney, Clitsome said.