Northwest Territories plane crash | First details about victims

Cdv’s Judy Trin is joining us from Yellow knife with the latest on that story uh Judy is good to see you what more can you tell us about this entire tragic incident o the Transportation safety board has just announced that they are sending four investigators to the Fort

Smith crash site they will be analyzing the debris they will be taking a look at uh whether or not there was a possibility mechanical failure they will look at uh whether or not there was pilot error so those are all part of the investigation I’m here in uh Yellow

Knife which is also the head office of the davic uh mine uh this tragedy has impacted uh this uh this region far and wide and today we are finally getting a sense of who some of the uh the victims were uh we know that uh four passengers

Employees of uh Rio Tinto diic diamond mind uh perished on that plane along with two uh flight crew members they were on Route uh to the davic mine uh they had just taken off from the Fort Smith airport when something happened to their plane and actually I spoke to uh

The family member of H Ben benwell and what he told what they told me was that uh he has he had just turned 30 on January 4th he was a young man he had worked for the diamond mine for nine years and he was a truck hauler so he

Would take uh debris rocks and raw diamonds back and forth in these trucks at the mine uh he is also right before um the moment uh where he died he actually sent a photo uh on Snapchat to his sister it was a picture of uh the

Airplane wing and which he posted uh on my way back to Lac De so we are hearing some of these tragic stories we know that there is is one Survivor in hospital here and because so many residents of uh Fort Smith work for the mine this tragedy will be felt far and

Wide and will have deep impact and we’ll continue following this story over the next few days actually right this indeed Judy of course such a tragic story and the fact that you were telling us we have some details about how we and how he just turned 30 about 20 days ago in January

He put a picture up on social media as well uh now we know that there were at least four passengers two crew members who have perished in this incident of course we’re showing pictures of how we at the moment uh what do we know about the Lone Survivor and his condition who

Is in the hospital there what we do know is uh that uh he is um on social media he appears to be has a young a young child he has a partner uh he is uh at the hospital here he was treated first in Fort Smith and then then taken airlifted to the

Hospital here because there is uh much more medical expertise uh we understand that he is suffering from severe burns uh we don’t know uh his exact condition uh but at this point the coroner’s office says uh he is a Survivor and he is being treated in hospital uh Judy quickly if you could

Also of course we have heard from the coroner’s office on this tragedy uh but what about the airline itself uh what is Northwestern saying about this we haven’t heard yet from uh Northwestern the but what we do know is that when we speak to our Aviation analysts they said that this Aerospace

Uh jet stream uh plane was built for this type of weather we are here in yellow knif right now when we landed it was uh minus 22° uh that was under kind of a heavy fog so this is the type of circumstance environment in which these Pilots are

Used to Flying this Charter flight also appears to be a regular flight uh when I spoke to Ho’s sister she told me that he was on his way back as he usually is after working uh two two weeks on two weeks off so they take these Charter

Planes Back in Forth uh from the mine to Fort Smith so this is a regularly traveled route so so the tsv will be looking at this uh and they will be analyzing all aspects of it AE all right Judy we appreciate all the reporting their jwy train in Yellow Knife thank you for

This you’re welcome

CTV News’ Judy Trinh has the latest from Yellowknife after a plane carrying workers to a diamond mine crashed, leaving six people dead.

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