digits_ wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2026 12:27 pm
I am curious if the PIC really wanted to fly faster to blow the snow off the wings,
or if it was to have a bigger stall safety margin due to a fear of ice sticking to some parts of the wing. The latter would make more sense logically, but that would once again be more important at rotation than when you actually make it airborne.
This. For sure.
This accident did not happen in a vacuum. If there is an inquest, these facts will come out.
NWAL was on its last legs financially. The ownership did not have the in house capacity to create a business plan that recognized the need for fleet replacement and would be capable of attracting investment to finance that. It was run by a pilot and pilot engineer. Their perspective was rooted in the past, their only management decision was to cannibalize their own operational fleet down to four aircraft. Their only strength was they had a monopoly on their routes. They had spent 8 years under the spell of some blow in, with no knowledge of aviation whatsoever, and a fantastical story of his own prowess in business. This accident was inevitable, with multiple causal chains possible.
The causal chain here traces back to the lack of financial ability to finance even repairs to the deice truck.
Within two hours of the accident I received a text from a friend in Smith. "They've finally crashed. All dead". I called her to find out what she was talking about. I found out, and was shocked, although I had predicted that event. She did tell me one thing. She said she had been outside at 6:30 that morning and it was snowing. The snow was in big flakes and wet on touching the skin, she said. Even at 20 below, that can happen in an inversion if the bottom cold layer is not deep. Our friend PDW has said there was an inversion at that time.
Diavik was a major revenue source for the company. The captain would have known that. I expect that in the tactile test, he determined that he would have some ice on the wings, not just on the leading edges. The normal solution to that, the deice truck, was not available. To cancel the crew change, for a reason tracing back to financial incapacity to ensure a proper result for a predictable safety challenge, might have lost the contract.
So the quote from Digits is spot on. That makes more sense. But that decision was not necessarily fatal. The decision to pair the captain and first officer was. It manifested in the lad calling the hung gear, and then directing the captain to slow down. Neither of those things would have been in his training or in any SOP. It is an example of his belief that he knew more than the captain, and of his marginal abilities as a first officer. Those were known to flight ops. Flight ops expected them to work out their incompatibility themselves. That beggars belief.
In fairness, it is not certain that the captain did reduce power. There is no verbal on that, and the statement that he did seems to be based on a couple of prop speed flickers.
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience often comes from bad judgment.
