QUEBEC CITY, Aug. 25 (UPI) — The bodies of six people, killed when a single-engine sea plane crashed in a remote part of Quebec’s North Shore, have been recovered.
The regional Air Saguenay charter plane crashed Sunday near the town of Les Bergeronees, after taking off from Long Lake, near Tadoussac. Four people aboard the plane were from Britain, the British Foreign Office reported. A fifth passenger was French and the pilot was Canadian, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. confirmed.
Although conditions for the 20-minute flight Sunday were described by an Air Saguenay official as “excellent,” the search was hindered by bad weather and difficult terrain. Investigators parachuted into the area to find the plane, a De Havilland Beaver utility plane.
The plane was built in 1956 but had a new engine, the airline said.
“What we noticed at first sight is that there is not a horizontal trajectory that entered the trees. We have trees that are intact and we have a plane that is on the ground that crashed vertically, between the trees. There was a post-impact fire. There was a fire in the cabin area,” said Pierre Gavillet, an investigator for Canada’s Transportation Safety Board.
The airline had a fatal accident in 2010, with a similar aircraft: four of six people aboard a plane died in a crash after the pilot took off in bad weather.
