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CALGARY
-- The mother of a pilot who died in a Canadian
Forces helicopter crash is confident the air force
has taken the necessary steps to keep a similar
tragedy from happening again.
But High River resident Candys Mackenzie warns that
more lives will be lost if other users of the Bell
CH-146 - called Griffons by the Canadian military -
don't learn from the accident.
Capt. Juli-Ann Mackenzie died July 18, 2002, when
the Griffon she was co-piloting crashed in the
Labrador wilderness.
"We want people who use this helicopter to know that
it's not if 'this will happen again but when,'
because it will," she said.
"We do not want another family to go through this
kind of thing ... not so much with the Canadian
Forces, but there are 29 other militaries in the
world that use this same machine and 116 private
companies." |
A
report released by the air force this week
determined the crash, which also killed Capt. Colin
Sonoski and critically injured two other crew
members, was caused by a crack in the craft's tail
rotor.
The crack was so minuscule that specially trained
crews would've required a magnifying glass to spot
the problem area in time.
As a result, the air force has implemented a series
of maintenance guidelines, such as cutting the time
between inspections from 25 to 12.5 hours of flying
time and using magnification to find rotor
imperfections.
Candys feels those protocols make the Griffon safe
to fly but fears that unless other agencies that use
the machines are made aware of the problem, more
will die.
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