By Ian Holmes

Historic Nanaimo plane crash remembered 65 years later

Oct 17, 2016 | 4:57 PM

NANAIMO — The worst aviation disaster in the history of the province, at the time, happened 65 years ago Monday on Mount Benson.

A Queen Charlotte Airlines Canso Flying Boat crashed into the front face of the mountain just west of Nanaimo killing all 20 passengers and three crew members aboard while en-route from Kitimat to Vancouver.

President of the Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society Jerry Vernon said the plane, which took off three hours late at 3 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1951, ran into darkness and poor weather. He said the pilot should have landed somewhere along the way earlier before darkness set in.

“The pilot was not qualified to fly instrument after dark and the airplane itself had not been returned to Canada very long, it was not certified (to fly in the dark) either,” Vernon said.

The events of what led to the plane going down are detailed by author Jim Spilsbury in the book Accidental Airline. Spilsbury owned Queen Charlotte Airlines at the time.

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“Apparently he (the pilot) called the tower and said he was 20 miles off of Vancouver, and he was actually more like 40 miles, so he’d been blown off course, it was late and he was in the dark, Vernon said. “He didn’t exactly know where he was I guess. They think he was doing a turn to the west to line up with the Vancouver runway and he flew into the mountain because he didn’t realize he was over Nanaimo and not over the water.”

Vernon said apparently the plane clipped a snag a couple hundred feet away prior to going down. A newspaper report at the time stated that the plane hit a mountainside cliff, burst into flames, then fell 500 feet to a ledge. Hundreds of pieces of wreckage from the plane remain on the mountain, accessible via an unmarked trail.

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Vernon recalled the incident becoming a large regional and national news story at the time and took attention away from a visit to Canada from Princess Elizabeth. He added passenger air crashes in Canada to the magnitude of the Mt. Benson disaster were rare.

“At that time, passenger carrying aircraft weren’t that big. There were bush plane crashes and things like that. But 23 people killed in one crash was significant.”

Visible remnants from the wreckage cover about 50 metres on Mt. Benson – a fact that Vernon is intrigued by.

“I’m surprised that it’s still lying there,” said Vernon. “I guess it’s remote enough that people haven’t gone in and scrounged stuff out of there.”

ian@nanaimonewsnow.com

On twitter: @reporterholmes