C-GPTO Harv's crash

[atc_is_god]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatch ... -9.7350997

[Deadcat]

Two keen pilots, 50% lunar illumination, flat ground, rural lighting, a 172 that flies itself if you let go of everything and trim….puzzling. And it took a long time to find.

No expectation the mandated ELT is going to work, but what about sat tracking, pinging the pilot cel, radar?

What are we teaching these days, and with all the new tech why aren’t we safer?

[atc_is_god]

Not sure when you last flew in southern SK at night, or anywhere on the prairies outside their major centres for that matter, but there's SFA when it comes to rural lighting. The widely-spaced farm lights can easily merge with the stars at the horizon and next thing you know you're upside down or entering a spiral dive. And that's assuming there wasn't an overcast layer obscuring those stars.

It's a black hole out there. Perhaps it bit these two souls.

[revilo]

Flying into wx at night will kill you. Look at their flight radar path, right into a cloud. Poor guys.

[Deadcat]

Why would flying at night kill you? It is done all the time by students. An instructor I follow a syllabus and stage evaluation, they can all do a 180 on instruments to get out of any inadvertent IMC. That’s a basic Commercial license skill.

I’m more concerned with the lack of operational control. Aircraft crashes on a night flight, nobody knows until 10:30 am, not found until 6pm - in rural Saskatchewan. That’s a pretty big hole.

[atc_is_god]

Looks like they landed YQR at 1:35 AM CST and then departed an hour later at 2:36AM CST. Deliberately late to gain night time I'm assuming? I wonder what their rest periods were like before the flight?

Screenshot 2026-09-23 130039.jpg (66.7 KiB) Viewed 752 times

[Blackdog0301]

Looks like they landed YQR at 1:35 AM CST and then departed an hour later at 2:36AM CST. Deliberately late to gain night time I'm assuming? I wonder what their rest periods were like before the flight?

Screenshot 2026-09-23 130039.jpg

Which would have been 3:36am Winnipeg time where they started their day. I'm a little surprised that a flight school would allow a couple students to fly all night long. Guaranteed one of them was sleeping

[godsrcrazy]

Some people on this site amaze me. The bodies aren't even cold yet and you are speculating and placing blame. To about HEARTLESS.

[phillyfan]

Why the talk about Operational Control and Rest Time?
These poor buggers were just trying to build time from what I can see? Is there an insinuation that this was a Commercial flight somehow?