Australian investigators probing a seaplane crash that killed a British family and their pilot on New Year’s Eve will look into a 2015 accident in Quebec that involved the same model of aircraft.
The victims of Sunday’s crash, near Sydney, were Richard Cousins, the 58-year-old chief executive of FTSE 100 firm Compass Group, his fiancee Emma Bowden and her 11-year-old daughter, Heather, and Cousins’ sons Richard and Will. Canadian-born pilot Gareth Morgan, 44, also died.
Morgan was flying the family back to Sydney after lunch during a sightseeing trip when the aircraft went down over the Hawkesbury River, off Jerusalem Bay, north of Sydney. A witness said the plane, a De Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, appeared to nosedive into the water. Air crash investigators say they don’t yet know the cause of the accident.
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Aaron Shaw, the CEO of tour company Sydney Seaplanes, described Morgan as an extremely experienced pilot, with more than 10,000 hours of flight time, CTV News reports. The crash is similar to an accident involving another DHC-2 Beaver that crashed in Quebec in 2015, killing a British family of four, a French passenger and the pilot, says Sky News.
The seaplane model is generally reliable, a transport safety officer told The Sydney Morning Herald. However, investigators do not know if the Sydney plane had been installed with a warning system recommended by Canadian authorities after the 2015 crash.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau hopes to recover the wreckage by the end of the week, reports ABC News.
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