05 August 2012

Not Good

The crash of a light aircraft is never a good thing, but some crashes are worse than others and this one seems to be in that category.

On 4 August 2012 Neil Herland tweeted about the crash of a Zenair CH601XL near Carp Airport and provided some pictures:

The 601 looks pretty badly damaged, but the good news is that reportedly the pilot survived, although there is no information provided about injuries. The crash looks serious enough that injuries would have been likely.

The bad news is that the aircraft was unregistered and thus also presumably uninsured.

Herland reports the aircraft carried the US registration N59PA and a check of Airliners.net confirms that this is the same plane. Airliners.net also notes that the aircraft was imported to Canada in 2011.

A quick check of the FAA aircraft registry shows that the Zenair was stricken from the US registry on 27 July 2011, more than a year before the accident. Running the serial number through the Canadian Civil Aircraft Register shows it wasn't registered here, of course, since it still had its US registration numbers painted on it.

So since it was in Canada over a year there are lots more questions that hopefully Transport Canada and the Transportation Safety Board will ask, such as whether it had a current annual inspection? Hopefully it will be investigated, as it wasn't listed in the CADORS.

Why do people do this sort of thing?