Quebecair Flight 255

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Quebecair Flight 255
Quebecair F27 CF-QBA.jpg

An identically constructed Fairchild F-27 from Quebecair
Accident summary
Accident type Loss of control after uncontrolled engine damage
place Sainte-Foy , CanadaCanadaCanada 
date March 29, 1979
Fatalities 17th
Survivors 7th
Injured 6th
Aircraft
Aircraft type United StatesUnited States Fairchild F-27
operator CanadaCanada Quebecair
Mark CanadaCanada CF-QBL
Departure airport Québec City Jean Lesage International Airport , CanadaCanadaCanada 
Destination airport Montreal-Dorval Airport , CanadaCanadaCanada 
Passengers 21st
crew 3
Lists of aviation accidents

The quebecair Flight 255 was a Canadian domestic airliner of regional airline quebecair , on the one on March 29, 1979 Fairchild F-27 crashed. The machine crashed after an engine exploded and partially torn off during take-off. 17 people were killed in the incident and there were 7 survivors.

machine

The aircraft affected was a Fairchild F-27. The machine from the American manufacturer Fairchild-Hiller was a type of aircraft created by Badge-Engineering under a license manufacturing contract, which was identical to the Fokker F-27 .

The machine destroyed in the accident was built in March 1959 and had 36 seats. It was the 47th fully assembled machine of this type. The aircraft was registered with the manufacturer until June 8, 1959 with the aircraft registration N2711R . On July 27, 1959, the machine was delivered to Quebecair, where it has since been in operation as the C-FQBL . The twin-engine short - haul aircraft was equipped with two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprop engines .

Passengers and crew

On the day of the accident, the aircraft was to be used for a flight from Québec City Jean Lesage International Airport to Montreal-Dorval Airport . 21 passengers had started the flight, and there was also a three-person crew on board. The flight captain André Bessette was a former pilot in the Canadian Air Force .

the accident

Shortly after the plane took off from Québec Airport at 6:45 p.m., the pilots declared an air emergency and reported that they had problems with an engine. They were given clearance to return and land at the airport. The pilots turned back and flew two traffic laps over the airport. When they flew over a restaurant, eyewitnesses could see that the right engine of the machine was burning. When the pilots steered the Fairchild into the final turn on the final approach, they lost control of the machine. At around 6:50 p.m. local time, the plane crashed 1.3 kilometers from the airport against a snow-covered hill near the railway line in the Québec suburb of Sainte-Foy (incorporated in 2002). As a result of the impact, the Fairchild broke in three pieces and caught fire.

Rescue operation

A local resident reported that he heard a loud bang, ran out of the house and saw the crash site with the burning machine. Another resident ran to the scene of the accident and found the bodies of 13 severely bleeding people scattered in the snow. She reported that most of them were not dead at the time, but that numerous victims died from their injuries within the first half hour after the accident. There were severed limbs at the crash site, and about three quarters of a woman's leg was severed.

Ambulances reached the scene of the accident from the other side of the train tracks. Within a few minutes of the crash, fire brigades arrived at the scene of the accident, but were initially unable to get as far as the machine due to the strong fire and the heat. The two pilots were locked in the cockpit of the machine and could not be released from it in time. Their bodies could not be recovered until the morning after the crash. The police finally paved the way to the crash site with tracked vehicles .

Victim

The three-man crew and 14 of the 21 passengers died in the accident. Among the fatalities was the well-known Montréal attorney Robert Jodom, who had authored an expert opinion on the Eastman bus accident on August 4, 1978. In the accident, a coach with a group of people with disabilities fell into Lac d'Argent , killing 41 people. The report was published hours before the crash by the Canadian Minister of Transport Lucien Lessard. Of the seven survivors of the plane crash, six suffered serious injuries such as broken bones and burns. One person was not injured.

root cause

When investigating the accident, the investigators were initially unable to explain why the machine crashed after the engine damage, as the machine was designed in such a way that its flight altitude can be maintained even after an engine failure.

It was found that the impeller of the low-pressure compressor of engine no. 2 had broken when it started. After the engine damage, the front part of the engine was torn off. A loose propeller blade slit through the outer skin of the machine and severed a cable harness that also led the cables for the control of the landing gear. The landing gear remained extended, which increased the aerodynamic drag of the machine. In addition, parts of the engine nacelle were caught on the landing gear, which further increased the air resistance. In this configuration, the pilots were not able to avoid obstacles, nor could they maintain the flight altitude while flying the last right turn. Due to the engine stall and the extended landing gear, the center of gravity of the machine increasingly shifted to the rear. The airspeed fell to a critical value, which was below the VMCA , whereby the controllability of the machine was lost and the Fairchild finally crashed.

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