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VICTORIA — Sunday morning was foggy and cloudy when a crew of log loaders, all employees of the marine transport company Seaspan International, climbed aboard a vintage Grumman Goose at the Port Hardy airport for a 20-minute flight to a logging camp on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The six passengers were wearing bright orange floater jackets, ready for the water landing of the amphibious aircraft.
The charter flight, operated by Pacific Coastal Airlines, took off at 7:08 a.m. It was a regular trip and Port Hardy pilot Simon Lawrence knew the terrain well.
Bob Pomponio, the senior member of the Seaspan crew, selected a seat in the rear of the plane, next to another long-time employee, Lorne, whose last name was not immediately available last night. Their seat choices saved the pair's lives when the plane slammed into a mountainside 17 minutes later, killing the pilot and the four passengers sitting up front.
The flight plan had taken them over a densely wooded mountain range on central Vancouver Island. The plane was climbing when Lorne saw the trees, too close, out of his window. Investigators initially suggested the twin-prop engines may have stalled, but a Transportation Safety Board official said yesterday there is no evidence yet of a malfunction.
Bob Pomponio is shown with his wife Dawn in this undated handout cellphone photo. Mr. Pombonio was text messaging a friend about the whereabouts of where a small plane carrying 7 people went down on a mountainside near Port Hardy, B.C. on Sunday. The friend then relayed the information to rescue crews, but it took several hours for them to find the site of the crash. (Bob Pomponio)
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“Our information for this is that everything was working okay,” Bill Yearwood said.
“We have to look at the weather, the aircraft itself, the operation, the man-machine interface.”
Hitting a mountainside at an elevation of 600 metres, the plane burst into flames. Mr. Pomponio and his seatmate were the only two who managed to climb out of the wreckage minutes before a series of explosions consumed the body of the plane.
“They both managed to get out on adrenalin and the will to live,” Sergeant Wayde Simpson, of CFB Comax, the first rescuer to reach the crash scene, said in an interview Monday.
Lorne was in bad shape, with a broken pelvis. His jacket was burned. Mr. Pomponio was bruised and had a fractured hip, but managed to drag his co-worker 50 metres away to protect him from the flames.
“That's what they call courage – I don't know what else to call it,” said Steve Frasher, CEO of the Washington Marine Group, which owns Seaspan. He said in an interview that the loss of four employees is the single worst disaster in the company's 110-year history. Employees were asked not to speak to the news media yesterday and Mr. Frasher would not release the names of the crew, at the request of their families.
Having escaped the flames, the two survivors waited for some sign that help was on the way. But it was almost 10 a.m. before anxious workers at the Chamiss Bay logging camp called the airline about the missing flight.
Three hours after the crash, convinced they had been abandoned, Mr. Pomponio managed to limp to a peak where his cellphone reception was strong enough for him to text-message a colleague, asking for help.
“It was clear nobody was looking for them yet,” his brother-in-law, Martin Young, told CTV News outside St. Joseph's General Hospital in Comox, where Mr. Pomponio was taken for treatment, but declined to be interviewed. “He loads barges for a living. … He's a very humble guy and he doesn't want anybody to think he's a hero,” Mr. Young said. He added, “I consider him a hero.”
Search-and-rescue teams struggled throughout the day to hone in on the weak, intermittent signals from Mr. Pomponio's cellphone. It was virtually their only hope: The thickly wooded terrain hid the wreckage, and the aircraft's emergency beacon was destroyed.
At times they were close – he would send a text message saying he could see the search aircraft. But in that rugged terrain, Sgt. Simpson knew the odds of finding them were not high. A veteran of roughly 40 search-and-rescue missions involving plane crashes, he said this was the first time he'd ever found himself relying on text messages for guidance.
The break came when Billy Ternes, a search master aboard a Squadron 442 Cormorant helicopter, spotted a burn mark in the trees at 4:32 p.m., just north of Port Alice. “You almost had to be right on top to see it,” said Sgt. Simpson, the search-and-rescue team leader.
There was nowhere to land, so Sgt. Simpson and his team lowered themselves by rope 45 metres down to a spot nearby. The wash from the props sent trees crashing down around the medical crew. It was, he said, “a nasty spot.”
He found Mr. Pomponio waving his scorched, but still-bright, floater jacket. Injured, but walking, he led the search-and-rescue crew to where Lorne lay, drifting in and out of consciousness.
The body of the plane was still smouldering, but had been reduced to ashes by now. Sgt. Simpson wanted to check for other survivors. “I said, ‘Have you heard other voices?' Bob looked at me and said: ‘They are all gone.'”
The rescue team concentrated on getting the survivors airlifted to hospital.
They would return before dark to retrieve the remains of the other five.
“It weighs pretty heavy on you,” Sgt. Simpson said. “To the families who have lost loved ones, at least we have found them.”
With reports from Anna Mehler Paperny in Vancouver and Caroline Alphonso in Toronto
