Fugitives died aboard unlicensed aircraft

Transport Canada says plane not cleared for commercial flights

Transport Canada has confirmed that a B.C. plane that crashed in Ontario with two gang-linked fugitives aboard was not licensed for charter flights.

Postmedia revealed Monday that another B.C. pilot had reported Abhinav Handa to the government agency last December for operating an illegal air taxi service.

Handa flew out of Boundary Bay airport on April 23 aboard a four-seat Piper Cherokee. Six days later, the plane crashed near Sioux Lookout, Ont., killing Handa, Richmond pilot Hankun Hong, accused hitman Gene Lahrkamp, and wanted B.C. gangster Duncan Bailey.

How Handa ended up flying the fugitives across the country is part of several ongoing investigations.

Four months earlier, flight instructor Azam Azami reported Handa for advertising a charter service on Facebook Marketplace despite the small aircraft not being licensed as a commercial plane.

Transport Canada initially told Postmedia that it had received the complaint about an unnamed air taxi service last December but would not provide more details and said the probe was continuing.

Late Monday, senior communications adviser Sau Sau Liu confirmed that neither Handa nor his fledging company A&T Flights Inc. had “a valid Air Operator Certificate,” needed to fly commercially.

She said that under Canadian aviation regulations, a holder of a commercial pilot's licence can provide a commercial air service, but only on a plane “of a class and type in respect to which the licence is endorsed.”

And “to carry passengers for hire or reward, an individual or company must apply to Transport Canada for an Air Operator Certificate (AOC),” she said. “Once the AOC is issued, the air operator then has to apply for a domestic licence to operate an air transport service between points in Canada with the Canadian Transportation Agency.”

Meanwhile, there has been lots of talk in B.C.'s tight-knit flying community about the ill-fated flight that killed the two young pilots and two underworld figures. Lahrkamp was wanted for the murder in Thailand of United Nations gangster Jimi Sandhu.