FREDERICTON - Two students taking flight training, and their instructor, escaped with minor injuries after their small plane crashed north of the New Brunswick capital Saturday.
Raymond McFadgen of the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax said the twin-engine Piper aircraft went down in a densely wooded area about 40 kilometres from Fredericton.
A Cormorant helicopter and a Hercules aircraft were dispatched from Canadian Forces Base Greenwood, N.S., after authorities picked up signals from the locator beacon and received a report of an overdue local flight.
"We diverted some aircraft and luckily the beacon kept transmitting, so that's how we tracked it down so quickly," said McFadgen.
He said the Hercules locked onto the downed plane's beacon and was able to guide the Cormorant to the crash area.
"It was in dense trees, so it was hard to find," said McFadgen. "We hoisted two sartechs (search and rescue technicians) to the ground and brought out three survivors."
The search and rescue co-ordination centre said the survivors were flown from the scene to the airport in Fredericton at 3 p.m. and transferred to an ambulance to be taken to hospital.
Mike Doiron, principal and CEO of the Moncton Flight College, confirmed that the aircraft was from the Fredericton campus of the college.
He said the Piper was on a local training flight and was scheduled to return to the Fredericton airport at 11:45 a.m.
Doiron said it's part of the school's procedure to contact search and rescue when a flight is 30 minutes late.
"Fortunately Search and Rescue found them, brought them out, and landed them at the airport and they were transported from there to the hospital," he said.
Doiron said the injuries suffered by the instructor, student pilot and observer student were non-life threatening.
"They were basically bruised-up pretty good, but they're in pretty decent shape," he said. "One of them may have a broken ankle, but they are still doing tests. They are extremely fortunate."
Doiron said the student pilot, who was on his first multi-engine training flight, probably had upwards of 140 hours of training to date.
He said he was working on his commercial license.
RCMP Sgt. Claude Tremblay said the crash site is about five kilometres into the woods and is only accessible by snowmobile.
"There's a tiny bit of a clearing where the trees are not very big and it looks like the plane just dropped down into the clearing," he said.
"There's a large amount of snow, which obviously cushioned their impact and probably saved their lives or certain death for sure."
Tremblay said the body of the plane was in one piece but the wings were off the aircraft.
He said investigators from the Transportation Safety Board were called in along with an RCMP officer who is a pilot and has experience assisting with crash investigations.
The search and rescue co-ordination centre said it received an initial call at 12:52 p.m. when the aircraft was reported as overdue.
