Airplane accident

Two people are dead after a small plane crashed near Mount McDougall Saturday.
The incident involved a Cirrus SR22, which left Springbank around 8:50 a.m. en route to Campbell River, B.C., said Liam MacDonald, a spokesperson for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.
The crash occurred about 56 kilometres southwest of Springbank Airport around 9:15 a.m.
RCMP Cpl. Matthew Howell said there were two people on board and both were declared dead.
The craft is described by its manufacturer as a single-engine plane, capable of carrying a load equivalent to four or five people and reaching a maximum altitude of 17,500 feet.
The initial calls to Mounties in Cochrane came from witnesses at the Kananaskis Country Golf Course, Howell added, with RCMP, paramedics and STARS air ambulance taking part in the immediate response.
The Transportation Safety Board is the lead agency in the investigation, supported by local law enforcement and search and rescue crews.
“We have not deployed investigators yet due to how remote it is and the difficult weather conditions at the moment,” MacDonald said when reached on Sunday afternoon.
Once the investigation begins, initial evidence collection and fact-finding can take as long as two weeks, he said, when asked to describe the typical process of examining the cause of a crash.
“We’ll be collecting perishable information while we’re there (on site),” he said. “Sometimes, we decide to recover the wreckage and bring it back to our local office. Once that’s done, we then make the determination whether to investigate fully.”
After that, the probe could take from eight months to two years to complete, with larger investigations taking as long as three years, MacDonald added.
Basic information about the crash will be shared before the probe is complete.
“Depending on the investigation, higher-profile ones will sometimes get an update after a year,” MacDonald also said.