Review fails to uncover cause of fatal flight-school crash northwest of Calgary

The Transportation Safety Board says it doesn’t know what caused a plane operated by an Alberta university’s flight school to lose control and crash, killing two instructors with the program.

Pilot Jeffrey Bird and co-pilot Reynold Johnson from the school at Mount Royal University in Calgary were about a half hour into a flight on Feb. 13, 2017, when the Technam P2006T aircraft started spinning for unknown reasons.

The men managed to get the plane out of the spin, but by then there was not enough altitude to recover from the ensuing dive.

Elizabeth Evans, dean of the university’s faculty of business and communication studies, said it’s unfortunate the safety board could not pinpoint the cause.

“Nevertheless, we will carefully review the TSB report to see where we can further underline and embolden our safety procedures, erring on the side of supreme caution as we continue to focus on being one of the leading aviation schools in Canada,” she said in a statement Thursday.

The wreckage was found near a road about 50 km northwest of Calgary Springbank Airport. Ground scars and damage to the plane were consistent with a high-speed collision while the aircraft was near vertical. The plane burned after it crashed and the fire consumed almost all of it.

The safety board said given the damage, it could not determine whether there was any system failure or malfunction, but said there was nothing wrong with the components it did manage to examine.

On the day of the crash, Bird, a former Royal Canadian Air Force training pilot, had been undergoing multi-engine training with instructor Johnson, a retired airline pilot. That training requires stall exercises, the safety board noted in its report.

A stall is when the aircraft is angled in such a way that airflow over the wings is disrupted and lift is reduced. Pilots must know how to spot the signs of an impending stall and how to get the plane back into the right position if one happens.

The board noted that Mount Royal’s flight training material mentions two types of recoveries: one for when a plane is approaching a stall and one when it’s already in one. But Canadian and U.S. regulators both advise that the same technique — reducing the so-called angle of attack — should be used in both scenarios.