Investigation into fatal Air Tindi crash will look into why pilots took off

The investigation into a fatal Air Tindi crash that killed two pilots has offered up a suggestion for why the plane went down — the failure of a key instrument.

Now one of the questions investigators will look into is why the pilots decided to take off, knowing the instrument wasn't working.

In January, Will Hayworth and Zach McKillop died after their King Air 200 crashed near Whati, N.W.T. The failure of both of the plane's attitude indicators could be a key factor in the crash, according to the Transportation Safety Board (TSB).

The board's investigators say one of those indicators wasn't functioning when the plane took off and the flight crew knew that when they took to the air. The attitude indicator is a vital piece of equipment that tells the pilot where the aircraft is relative to the Earth's horizon.

"It's challenging, I'm not sure we [can] make sense of it," said Al Martin, the president of Air Tindi. "We recognize what we were told: that the pilots knew that was the case. What were they thinking? I don't know."

Air Tindi requires its pilots to complete safety checklists before every flight, Martin said. That checklist includes making sure all equipment is in good order.

Both pilots were safe, professional flyers and the only way to know for sure why they decided to fly that day is to listen to the voice recorder, which the TSB has in its possession, Martin said.

"Both were very good pilots, it's hard," he said.

"To be able to hear a copy of the voice recorder would give us more information, but that's really for the TSB only." 

Equipment malfunction

Jon Lee, manager of regional operations, western with the TSB, provided an update on the investigation last week in Yellowknife at an aviation conference.

It was during that update that he revealed one attitude indicator was not working at takeoff, while the other failed mid-flight. About 90 seconds after that malfunction, the plane crashed, according to Jeremy Warkentin, a technical investigator with the TSB.

At the time of the crash, the plane descended rapidly — at a rate of about 32,000 feet per minute — and travelling about 700 km/h when it hit the ground. For the King Air 200, the normal rate of descent is about 1,000 to 2,000 feet per minute.

The decision to take off is a key point in the investigation as it moves forward, he said.

"We've recovered the cockpit voice recorder and that's providing us with some very key information," Warkentin told CBC. "We'll try and come up with a sequence of events and try and understand what the crew were reasoning when they dispatched out of Yellowknife.

"It's too early at this point to say what the reasoning was behind that decision [to fly]," he said.

'No pressure' on pilots to fly

Almost six months after the crash, Martin says he cannot understand why they decided to take off.

Air Tindi pilots are allowed to ground a flight if they feel it is unsafe and there are no repercussions for pilots who choose to do so, he said.

"We spend a lot of time making sure there's no pressure put on pilots to fly. It doesn't affect their pay in any way," Martin said. "Quite regularly, if someone's made a decision not to fly, I'll go and thank them. It's the right thing to do. No pressure to fly."

Since the crash, Air Tindi is co-operating with the TSB and is following all of its recommendations. The airline also added more training for its pilots and is continuing ongoing upgrades to instrumentation on its fleet of planes.

"We're just trying to make sure we can do everything we can," he said.

The TSB investigation into the crash is expected to continue into the summer, as investigators will head out to the site again to collect pieces of wreckage missed during the first recovery due to the snowfall.