Two Dead As They Fought Forest Fire

A Lockheed Electra, used as a firefighting attack aircraft, crashed Wednesday with two people aboard while fighting a forest fire near the town of Cranbrook in eastern British Columbia. Capt. Alex Schenk of the Rescue Co-ordination Centre here said he was told the plane, a four-engine Lockheed Electra, may have exploded on impact. Under those circumstances it's unlikely the crew survived, said Peter Murphy, acting regional manager for the federal Transportation Safety Board.

"It seems unlikely at this point, but I am not going to jump to that conclusion," said Murphy. "They have to confirm that."

Indeed, the deaths have now been confirmed. No names have yet been released.

"This is a very large aircraft and it cruises at a pretty good clip." Schenk said he'd been told by RCMP that the effort was a recovery operation, not a search-and-rescue effort.

But a Cranbrook RCMP spokesman said he could not confirm Schenk's information nor whether the crew had been killed. Murphy said the crash apparently happened just after the plane dumped a load of flame-retardant materials.

Tankers normally fly low to the ground during fire-fighting runs and the plane could have had as much as 8,000 kilograms of fuel on board, said Murphy. He said it was too early to speculate on what might have caused the crash but added crashes by this type of plane are rare.

The aerial tanker was owned by a Air Spray Ltd. of Edmonton, which owns fire-suppression planes in British Columbia and Alberta. The locally based plane was helping fight a forest fire in the area at the time of the crash.

"We understand one of our aircraft has crashed and we are trying to get the details now and find out who the crews are," Air Spray manager Richard Covlin said from Edmonton. "Our crew was working at Cranbrook."

Covlin said it was believed two crew members were aboard but their identities would not be released until their families were notified. "All of our crews are extremely experienced people," said Covlin. "They have to be to work in those circumstances."

According to the company's Web site, Air Spray owns and operates 35 aircraft, providing forest-fire protection for the Alberta and B.C.
governments.

The crash occurred about six miles southeast of the Cranbrook airport, an area where several small fires were burning. "There is another small fire because of this crash," said Cpl. Chris Faulkner of Cranbrook RCMP. "I don't crash was accessible by logging roads and he understood there were other fire crew workers on the ground at the time of the crash.

FMI: www.airspray.com