‘I thought I was dead,’ plane crash survivor says
FOND DU LAC, Sask. — Moments after the plane took off, 15-year-old Lyman Fern felt it rocking back and forth, and knew something was terribly wrong.
“On the fourth time, it just went down and the engines cut off, too. It was just dark on the plane,” he said.
“I just closed my eyes. I didn’t know what to do. I never even got knocked out.”
When he opened his eyes, he was lying on a bunch of branches, as his seatbelt had come off and he wasn’t in his seat.
“Once I looked around at everything, for a second, I thought I was dead,” he said, as the plane was quiet and dark.
“The plane was just moving up and down, side by side,” said Willie John Laurent, a band councillor with the Fond du Lac Dene Nation who was also on the plane. “The last I remember is it touching the ground. That’s the last I know.”
Laurent, his wife Helen and their daughter Amanda were among the 22 passengers — including an infant — and three crew aboard the West Wind Aviation turboprop that crashed Wednesday around 6:15 p.m. in the boreal forest of far northern Saskatchewan. It was scheduled to travel 80 kilometres east to Stony Rapids, then on to Wollaston and Prince Albert.
With cuts on his hands, a gash on his head and a headache, Fern said he’s grateful to be alive. He was checked out at a nearby clinic and the nurses told him he was OK.
Darryl McDonald said his 70-yearold mother, Ernestine, suffered a broken jaw and facial injuries when the plane went down about a kilometre from the airstrip. His sister also suffered injuries to her leg.
Laurent, who was bruised on one side of his body, remembers hearing screaming as the plane went down.
“People yelling, yelling, yelling,” he said. “Then you smell a lot of fuel … Good thing there was no spark.”
A photo of the crash site shows the damaged aircraft partly on its side in the trees, with a wing jutting up in the air at a 45-degree angle. The cause of the crash isn’t known yet.
Ivan Adam was the first person to arrive at the scene. A Northern Ranger, he heard the crash from his house and sprung into action, driving his Ski-Doo to the crash site.
“I just said, ‘Oh my God. I hope there are survivors,’ ” he said.
“All I said was ‘Hello?’ As soon as I said that, there were people asking for ‘Help! Help!’ ”
Adam went to get help and asked someone to post on Facebook that there was a plane crash, there were survivors and that people needed help right away.
“About five, 10 minutes later, there were people coming in with blankets and everything,” Adam said.
Within an hour and a half, Adam said, rescuers were able to get most of the people out, but he said some passengers took longer to remove than others. One boy required a loader to be removed.
On Thursday morning, Rick Philipenko of West Wind Aviation said the cause of the crash was unknown.
Fond du Lac Band Councillor Ronnie Augier said the entire community was shaken by the crash.
Transportation Safety Board operations investigator David Ross said two investigators are on site.