A small bird is being blamed as the cause of the Snowbirds crash in May that killed former Quinte West resident Jennifer Casey.
Captain Casey, the Snowbirds’ Public Affairs Officer, and Snowbird pilot Captain Richard MacDougall were taking off from the Kamloops Airport in British Columbia on May 17, 2020 when the bird went into the engine of Plane 11.
The plane crashed in a subdivision, with MacDougall landing on a roof, with Casey striking a tree.
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(Photo: RCMP)
The DND report indicates it was a compressor stall and loss of thrust. From there, Captain MacDougall began a climb away from an adjacent Snowbird plane, and attempted to return to the air strip, when the plane entered an “aerodynamic stall and the pilot gave the order to abandon the aircraft”.
The report adds that MacDougall and Casey were too low and were “outside safe ejection seat operation parameters”.
Director of Flight Safety for the Royal Canadian Air Force Colonel John Alexander says the loss of power could not have come at a worse time, due to the low altitude, airspeed, proximity to the other Snowbirds and the population below. He added that it reinforces the importance of training pilots do for emergency situations.
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(Photo: RCMP)
Commander Brigadier-General Denis O’Reilly of 2 Canadian Air Division says in emergency situations, pilots have to make split second decisions, process a lot of information, deal with a lot of stress, g-forces, and other environmental factors.
The report makes five preventative and safety-focused recommendations, three of which are focused on operations and two on the aircraft and its systems, with the aim of minimizing the potential for a similar accident to occur in the future.
Jennifer Casey was a 35-year-old Captain with the Snowbirds, and previously spent time with the CF-18 Demo Team, was a Public Affairs Officer at CFB Trenton, and a journalist here at Quinte News.
She moved to Quinte West in 2012, before relocating to Saskatchewan in 2018.
The Snowbirds were travelling across Canada as part of Operation Inspiration, which focused of providing cheer to Canadians dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. The week prior, the Snowbirds spent more than 24 hours in the Quinte region on the trip.
(Photo: Jennifer Casey at an event in Belleville in 2014)
