Charges dismissed in fatal air ambulance crash
An Ontario court judge has found that Ornge air ambulance service was not negligent for failing to provide night-vision goggles to two pilots killed in a helicopter crash more than four years ago.
Capt. Don Filliter, co-pilot Jacques Dupuy and flight paramedics Dustin Dagenais and Chris Snowball of Burlington were killed on May 31, 2013, when an Ornge Sikorsky S76 helicopter taking off from Moosonee in pitch darkness crashed shortly after takeoff.
In a decision highly critical of the safety regulations governing air ambulance services, Justice Bruce Duncan told a Brampton court Friday he was dismissing three charges under the Canada Labour Code that Ornge failed to ensure employee safety at the northern Ontario outpost on James Bay.
“The law requires that decisions be made in a dispassionate and objective manner. However, the unavoidable result of that is the proceedings may appear to be technical, analytical and maybe even cold,” Duncan told the court.
“I want to assure, particularly the families and friends and the public as a whole, that the tragic loss of life here has not been forgotten.”
In dismissing two of the counts related to Ornge’s decision not to outfit the pilots and helicopter with night-vision goggle capability, the judge ruled that “no reasonable operator” in 2013 would have introduced the visual aids for several reasons:
They were not required or urged by regulator Transport Canada.
Their use was not common practice in Canadian helicopter emergency medical services at the time.
The helicopters and the crew at Moosonee were all capable of flying on instruments alone.
The life expectancies of the S76s, already more than 30 years old, could not justify the public cost to retrofit them.
Duncan also spoke out on the remaining count, targeting Ornge’s decision to eliminate the position of base manager at Moosonee — a move the Crown argued deprived the operation of a vital safety check.
Duncan wrote that in his view the presence of experienced pilots and employees, including Filliter himself who had been base manager for a helicopter EMS company that operated out of the airport prior to Ornge, collectively filled any void in responsibility.
“There was also evidence that pilots as a group are very safety conscious — for obvious reasons — it is their lives that are at risk. There are no risk-taking heroes or cowboys among them,” he wrote in his 33-page decision.
“In this atmosphere and with all the responsible senior people around (with nothing else to do in Moosonee) it seems to me that there would be little additional pulse-taking role for the base manager.”
While Justice Duncan dismissed the three charges, his ruling was in many ways a clear rebuke of the current regulatory framework.
He noted that as of 2013, Transport Canada did not require nightvision goggles for helicopter EMS operations or helicopter flights in general. “And of this writing in 2017, it has still not done so!” Duncan wrote.