Police have identified the five people who died after a small plane crashed in the snowy terrain near Wainwright Friday. It was the second fatal flight involving an Edmonton engineering firm in five months.
The Joint Rescue Centre at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Ontario said controllers first grew concerned when a single-engine plane disappeared from their radio screens around 8:10 a.m. Friday morning.
The owner of the plane, A.D. Williams Engineering Inc., an engineering consulting company in Edmonton, has identified three of the victims.
They are:
- Reagan S. Williams, 40, company president
- Phill Allard, 33, chief financial officer
- Rhonda Quirke, 36, director, Business Integration and Strategy
Police have now identified the other two victims as 30-year old Trevor Korol and 35-year-old Shaun Stewart.
In a cruel twist of fate, it is the second time in five months that both the company's president and chief financial officer died in a plane crash.
In October 2007, the founder of A.D. Williams, Allen Williams, died when his Cessna aircraft crashed near Golden, B.C. Reagan Williams was his son.
The company's chief financial officer, Steven Sutton, was also killed. The elder Williams' three-year-old granddaughter, Kate, was the only survivor of that crash.
The girl dangled upside down for about five hours before rescuers from Golden and the Canadian Forces could land a helicopter at the wreckage site and reach her.
Sue O'Connor, spokeswoman for the firm, said the tragedy is hard to comprehend.
"It's obviously incredibly difficult and impossible to imagine," she said. "(Our staff) is coming together. The company will be sourcing grief counselling for the staff but at this time everyone is still in shock."
The company has not yet released the names of the two other passengers, but say they did not work for the firm.
A plane goes down unexpectedly
The Army and RCMP quickly dispatched a helicopter and a rescue aircraft from Winnipeg about an hour after the plane took off from the Edmonton municipal airport around 7:40 a.m.
Controllers said the plane appeared to descend and then disappeared from their screens about 225 kilometres southeast of Edmonton about 30 minutes later.
Crews reportedly noticed the plane flying erratically and attempted to contact the pilot. The person flying the plane then radioed the aircraft was having technical problems.
It took crews about three hours to locate the wreckage, located about 12 kilometres northeast of Wainwright near Battle River.
Capt. Nicole Meszaros, spokeswoman for the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre, told CTV News the airplane debris were spread out over a 1.5 kilometre range.
Transport Canada records show the plane was a Piper PA-46 Turbo Malibu.
