By Thia James

Icy windshield forces Transwest plane to make emergency landing

Nov 21, 2014 | 1:24 PM

A build-up of ice on a Transwest Air plane’s windshield forced pilots to make an emergency landing at Stony Rapids Airport on Thursday evening.

The plane had two pilots and five passengers – four adults and one child – on board. It landed without incident at around 8 p.m, and no one was hurt. The flight was en route from Stony Rapids to Fond-du-Lac, Sask.

It was the second emergency landing by a Transwest Air plane in as many months. A mechanical malfunction with a GPS unit forced a plane to land at Prince Albert airport on Oct. 21.

Garrett Lawless, chief operating officer of Transwest Air, said the pilots decided to turn back because Fond-du-Lac’s airport didn’t have the resources to deal with icing. The de-icing mechanism on the plane only clears an eight-inch strip, which meant the pilot could only see out of a narrow, clear opening on the window. The pilots did two flyovers over the Stony Rapids Airport to get a feel for what the runway would look like when he made the landing.

“There was a point, I think where the pilot was on final approach and he turned the aircraft sideways, just to get a better look at the runway through the side window and then turn back and put the runway in front of him and looked at it again through that narrow strip.”

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Lawless said the pilots declared an emergency. When this happens, emergency services meet the plane at the airport when it lands.

“And this is probably where I’m most proud of them, like pilots, we tend to be a proud breed, we never want to declare emergencies, because we don’t want to, like, draw attention to ourselves or something like that. But these guys, you know, very humble, declared an emergency that way if, if, anything did go wrong on the landing there would be the emergency crews already there on standby.”

In a Facebook post, the wife of one of the passengers wrote about her husband’s experience: “thank you God for saving all the passengers, my husband just phoned me from [S]tony, crash landing, thank you God…”

Transwest maintains that the landing was not a crash landing. Lawless described it as a normal “soft” landing. The base manager met with the passengers, to see how they were doing. The base manager reported that no one was physically injured, but some of the passengers seemed shaken up.

He provided the passengers with explanations of what they saw during the emergency landing, according to Lawless.

Transwest is already zeroing on an explanation for the cause of the ice buildup on the plane’s windshield. Lawless said they believe the build-up was caused by a frontal weather system that came in. But the forecasts, he said, suggested there wasn’t going to be any icing.

Two other Transwest planes flew into Fond-du-Lac prior to the Piper Navajo’s flight. The weather forecast and reports from other aircraft indicated there wouldn’t be a problem with icing.

The incident could be seen as indicative of the challenges the airline faces operating in the province’s North. Lawless identified two main ones: a lack of infrastructure and a lack of accurate weather reporting.

Improvements to infrastructure at Stony Rapids Airport may be on the way. The provincial and federal governments are contributing a combined $10 million to upgrades at the airport. 

Lawless is hopeful part of that will mean better weather reporting for this area.

“The better weather reporting we have, the better an idea we will then have of what we’re going into, and then this kind of thing won’t happen.”

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames