(FILE PHOTO)
July 14, 2000
SEAN McKIBBON
Nunatsiaq News
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IQALUIT — Simata Pitsiulak should never have taken Allen Angmarlik on the fateful ultra-light flight that took both their lives on June 29, says an official with Canada’s Transportation Safety Board.
The well-known Nunavut carver was not licenced to carry passengers on board his two-seater, ultra-light aircraft, said Marc Fernandez, the senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board office in Quebec.
"The pilot held an ultra-light pilot licence and this licence did not authorize the pilot to fly ultra-light aircraft with passengers aboard ," Fernandez said his week.
Pitsiulak and Angmarlik were found dead last Thursday at a crash site 15 miles outside of Kimirut on what a Rescue Co-ordination Centre (RCC) official said was probably a direct route from Kimmirut to Iqaluit.
Their small aircraft had no instrumentation to deal with the "instrument flight rules" — or "IFR" weather conditions they encountered on the trip, said Fernandez. Pitsiulak was only qualified to fly in weather in which visibility is good — under visual flight rules, or "VFR," Fernandez said.
Though VFR conditions existed when Pitsiulak and Angmalik took off, visibility quickly dropped to zero as the plane encountered the same low-lying clouds that hampered later efforts to find the two men.
"The weather at the time of the accident was the ceilings were between 100 and 200 feet ceilings. That’s IFR weather condition," Fernandez said.
Captain Bruno Castonguay, an aeronautical co-ordinator at the RCC, estimated the crash happened only 15 minutes into the flight, assuming the aircraft moved on a straight path and did not double back.
"The evidence the search and rescue people gathered as a team is that the aircraft stalled and crashed in the ground, so it is permitted to believe that the pilot lost control of the aircraft in clouds," Fernandez said.
Loss of control
He said that losing control in clouds is almost inevitable when a pilot can’t see and has no instruments to rely on.
"I’m a pilot myself. You loose control very fast. You have no reference with the outside. You don’t know if you are going down, up, left, right and he didn’t have those instruments on board the aircraft to tell him whether he was climbing, descending, going left or right. So he was strictly going on his senses and the senses are wrong. The inner ear especially is giving you a wrong informations, so what happens after a few seconds in clouds — they give you maximum 20-30 seconds to loose control — and what happens is you feel the aircraft is climbing too steep, so you push the nose down and then you feel that the aircraft is going to fast, you pull up and eventually you are going up and down and then you stall the aircraft and you crash," Fernandez said.
The two men were found in the very first area that was searched, said Castonguay, but he said that poor weather played a big role in the week-long search.
"There was a lot of effort to try to search out there, and initially it was difficult to go up, because there’s a lot of plateaus in there and the plateaus were the difficult part to look at. So all the valleys and stuff were done, the low ground, but the higher ground was difficult," said Castonguay, who said that the low-lying clouds made surveying the plateaus next to impossible.
A total of 79 military personnel, members of the RCMP in Iqaluit and Kimmirut and 50 or 60 Iqaluit residents helped to search close to 20,000 square miles, said Eric Doig, the manager of emergency services with the Nunavut government.
During the last four days of the search, as many as 10 aircraft were attempting to locate Pitsiulak and Angmarlik.
"We had two Hercs, two Labrador helicopters, one Griffin, three Twin Otters. We even had an ice recon jet do a fly-over," said Doig. A Coast Guard helicopter also aided in the search.
Castonguay said there were initial efforts in Kimmirut to do a ground search, but those were abandoned because the terrain was too difficult to traverse with all-terrain vehicles.
While the time taken to find crash victims can play a role in their survival, it did not in this case, said Castonguay. Both men were killed instantly in the crash, he said.
Search was difficult
Doig said that snow also made the ground difficult to search. He said it was light reflecting off a piece of metal on the downed ultra-light that caught the eye of a search crew on board a Kenn Borek aircraft.
The search could not have been as large had it not been for the military.
"We would have depleted our budgets in the first few days," said Doig. The military worked well with local people and took them on board their aircraft to act as guides. Doig said the military had three flight crews for each of their aircraft so they could run the search 24 hours a day.
Doig said the federal Transportation Safety Board would not be launching an investigation.
"Maybe it’s better for the family if they don’t look too much further into this," said Doig.
Fernandez confirmed that there would not be any further investigation, nor would there be any recommendations made.
"There is no lesson to safety really in that, since the aircraft was not equipped to fly in those conditions and the pilot was not, you know, and there were not supposed to be any passengers on board," said Fernandez.
He compared ultra-light aircraft to motorcycles or all terrain vehicles.
"It is more for pleasure craft. People purchase ultralights because they want to be free and they don’t want to be bothered by too many regulations," he said. He said that Pitsiulak had owned other ultra-lights in the past and had accidents with those vehicles too.
"I remember talking to him and telling him to be careful and get maybe the proper training and an aircraft, maybe a real aircraft," said Fernandez.
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