MID-AIR COLLISION
One dead after planes strike in Carp
Two small planes collided in midair near the Carp airport on Sunday morning, sending one of them plummeting into a field in a residential area, where the pilot was found dead.
Witnesses said the two planes had been in a holding pattern, circling the airport, when they struck. Witnesses couldn’t specify whether the larger twin-engined Piper Cheyenne aircraft had struck the Cessna or vice versa. However, they said the impact from the larger craft, which was above the Cessna, pushed the Cessna downward.
The airspace around the airport in Ottawa’s west end is not controlled by air traffic controllers. It is the responsibility of pilots to follow federal rules and regulations governing flight and to talk to one another in order to safely use such smaller facilities. The closest controlled airport to Carp is the Ottawa International Airport.
Ottawa paramedics found the smaller aircraft and its occupant in an area near McGee Side Road. The person was dead after suffering critical injuries, paramedics said in a statement.
The second plane was diverted to the Ottawa airport and landed safely between 10:30 and 10:45 a.m. No passengers on that plane were injured.
Recorded audio captured a plane telling the tower at the Ottawa airport it had been struck at the Carp airport, with someone on board saying: “Somebody ran into the bottom of me, I didn’t see them.”
“Roger, are you declaring an emergency at this time?” the tower responds.
“Not at this time, I’ve got a 1,000 pounds of fuel, two souls on board,” the plane says.
Following that, it landed safely at the airport.
Transportation Safety Board investigators were on the scene Sunday night, but offered few details about what had happened.
“We’d like to express our condolences to the family of the one pilot that was deceased,” said Capt. Beverley Harvey, a senior investigator with the TSB.
“We’re at the site, we are going to look at the wreckage. We want to take the aircraft to the laboratory in Ottawa,” she said. “We’ll be looking at the aircraft, we’ll be looking at the operations of the companies, or the people involved, we’ll be looking at the history of the pilots, we’ll also look at the environmental factors such as weather. If there’s anything of real safety significance that comes out, that we notice right away, we’ll inform the public.”