The fatal plane crash in the Northwest Territories this week was rare – but the journey to remote mines is always perilous

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After a few months or years of working rotating shifts at the Diavik Diamond Mine, flying to the site can become routine.

Employees file into a twin-propeller plane, exchange small talk with the crew and then tend to put their earbuds in and try to catch some shut-eye before their shifts, says Sean Farmer, a pilot who until recently worked with Northwestern Air Lease Ltd. Mr. Farmer flew all over the North, including twice-monthly flights between Fort Smith, NWT, and the Diavik mine, about 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife.

This past week, that routine was tragically disrupted when a Northwestern plane crashed just after takeoff on Tuesday, roughly a kilometre from Fort Smith. The crash killed six people – four mine employees and the two pilots – and left a sole survivor with injuries.

Mr. Farmer, who is in his mid-20s, was close friends with the younger pilot, who was also in his 20s, and mentored by the older one. Within hours of the incident, Mr. Farmer spoke with the young pilot’s devastated parents in Edmonton. He also reached out to former housemates – who worked with him at Northwestern Air – in Fort Smith, but none of them wanted to talk much about the crash.

Like Mr. Farmer, they had to compartmentalize their grief to get back in the skies.

“At the end of the day, as pilots, we are always faced with risk and adversity. It’s true that being up north does pose more threats, but even if you’re flying, say, in the Lower Mainland, that has its own risks, too, like lots of mountains. We don’t really have that up in the north,” said Mr. Farmer, during a phone interview from Kelowna, B.C., where he had hoped his friend, the younger pilot, would join him at a larger carrier once he attained more hours with Northwestern.

“So it doesn’t really matter where you fly. It’s just a different set of adversities.”

The cause of the crash remains under investigation by Ottawa’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB). But the tragedy highlighted the difficulties that can come with mining in remote locations, including freezing temperatures, unco-operative winds and the logistical challenges of running industrial operations in sometimes harsh conditions.

Rio Tinto PLC, a giant Anglo-Australian multinational mining company, owns and operates the Diavik mine. Jakob Stausholm, the company’s chief executive, was in Australia when he heard of the accident. He immediately got a plane to Canada.

“It was important for me to come to the Northwest Territories right away, and spend some time with our employees at the Diavik mine,” he said in an interview on Friday. “To listen to what they have to say, to share their pain at this incredibly difficult time and to reiterate that we are deeply committed to Diavik.

“I have never experienced such emotions in a room,” he said through tears.

Names of the victims have not yet been officially released, but media reports identified three of the victims as Joel Tetso, a heavy duty mechanic; Howie Benwell, a truck driver; and Diane Balsillie, who also worked at the mine; and the survivor as Kurt Macdonald, an electrician.

Mr. Stausholm has been at Rio Tinto for five and a half years, and during that time there hadn’t been a single fatality. He said the mining company will work with authorities over coming months to support their efforts to understand what happened.

“It is crucial that our colleagues feel safe coming into work and we are doing everything we can to ensure their safety,” he added.

The plane, a British Aerospace Jetstream, was headed to Diavik Tuesday morning, and the crash came on the heels of another one last month linked to mine operations.

On Dec. 27, 10 people were rescued and taken to the mine after a small plane crashed near its intended destination. They were on an Air Tindi charter flight headed to a work camp to start seasonal construction on a 400-kilometre winter road that supplies the Diavik, Ekati and Gahcho Kue diamond mines. In a statement, the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road (TCWR) joint venture, which operates the road, said it did not expect the incident to affect yearly construction on the road, which is scheduled to be complete in February.

The mostly ice road is a key link for Diavik and other diamond mines. First built in 1982 to supply a gold mine in Nunavut, it runs over ice for about 85 per cent of its route, according to TCWR, which means it has to be rebuilt every year. Since 2000, the joint venture group has included Diavik.

Diamonds were discovered at Diavik in 1994 by a junior Canadian mining company called Aber Resources Ltd., which was started by Grenville Thomas, who was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in 2009. The discovery sent the shares of his company flying so high that he urged investor caution, telling The Globe and Mail at the time that this was “only one hole, and you have to bear that in mind.”

Further drilling confirmed the diamond find was among the biggest ever in Canada.

A subsidiary of Rio Tinto, which funded early exploration work at Diavik, quickly exercised its right to buy a 60 per cent share in the project from Aber.

Building the mine was an engineering, logistical and climatological challenge.

Diavik is about 200 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, at the bottom of Lac de Gras in the Northwest Territories. Space for a giant open pit was created by damming off a section of the lake.

Diavik went into production in 2003 and since then has extracted gems from the open pit and later by expanding underground. It would eventually become Canada’s largest diamond mine, and has produced more than 100 million carats of rough diamonds since its inception.

In recent years, production has slipped as the resource has been depleted. The mine is currently operating far below its peak operating years. Last year, Rio Tinto said it would spend $40-million to keep the mine open until 2026.

Rio Tinto became the sole owner of the operation in 2021, after acquiring the remaining 40 per cent share from Dominion Diamond Mines.

More than 1,200 people work at the mine, with a significant portion coming from the local Indigenous population.

Diamond mining has been an engine of the private sector in the Northwest Territories for the past two decades, but the expected closure of all operating diamond mines by 2030 will lead to a “severely diminished” mining sector, said a 2023 territorial government economic review.

Rio Tinto and other large diamond miners, including Anglo American PLC, now must not only ride waves of the economy, but growing competition from lab-grown diamonds. Synthetic diamonds have been around for decades and are baked in labs. But big improvements in technology and an increasing supply of them over the past decade has led to synthetic diamonds typically selling for about 80 per cent less than mined diamonds.

But for now, Diavik and other diamond mines remain an integral part of the northern economy. A 2023 government report said the Northwest Territories’ three producing diamond mines – Ekati, Diavik and Gahcho Kue – spent nearly $755-million in 2022 with businesses based in the territories. Those include Indigenous-owned firms that have expertise in areas ranging from catering to logistics and trucking, the report said.

Four TSB investigators continued sifting through the wreckage and interviewing witnesses this weekend. Their report outlining what led to the tragedy is expected months from now, but TSB spokesperson Liam MacDonald said the board would issue an alert to the industry immediately if investigators uncover a potential deficiency in the plane that needs to be fixed.

Fatal airplane crashes have been on a downward trend across the country in recent years, with 24 accidents killing 34 people in 2022, the last year for which the TSB has such data. In 2012, there were nearly double the number of such crashes (42) and 63 people died.

Mr. Farmer praised the flight school attached to Northwestern for rigorously training new pilots and then hiring them at the company. Roughly half of the dozen or so people flying at any given time are relatively new to the job, he said.

And he expects that pattern – of young pilots plying their trade in small planes in remote regions in the hope of quickly jumping into the cockpits of larger commercial aircraft – to continue, as well as the pattern of mine workers cycling in and out of remote sites to keep them operating through the harshest weather and adverse conditions.

In the meantime, Mr. Farmer said he and other young pilots who knew and flew with the victims are trying to wrap their heads around this immense loss.

“But, we as pilots, we have to move forward and examine what happened,” he said.

With a report from The Canadian Press