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Calls for help led to crash site
Friday September 5 2008
By RICHARD VIVIAN Banner Staff Writer
 
Calls for help carried across a fog-filled hay field and reached the ear of Melancthon’s Liz Carruthers early Monday morning. Not far from her 8th Line SW home lay the wreckage of a single-engine plane and three men in need of a doctor — two seriously injured.
“It was surreal. At first I dismissed the noise that I heard ... Then I could clearly hear someone call for help,” Carruthers tells The Banner, noting that inspired her to wake her husband and go looking for the source.
“It was really foggy ...  at that time, so we couldn’t really see anything at first,” she recalls, adding her husband spotted the silhouette of a man waving.
A second man was lying on the ground, while a third was trapped inside the wreckage, she says.
“He, the pilot, was still wedged in the plane,” Carruthers adds, describing his wounds as “really bad” leg and feet injuries.
The three were on an overnight trip across southern Ontario in a rented 1983 Cessna 172P when they went down for as-yet unknown reasons. Dufferin OPP say they received a 9-1-1 call at 4:50 a.m. from a man who said he was in a plane crash and didn’t know where he was — somewhere between Brampton and Collingwood.
“Unfortunately his cell phone died and we couldn’t get back to him,” Sgt. Tom Watt says.
However, Watt explains, police were able to formulate “a pretty good idea” where the man was because of the cell phone tower used in the call and had already begun searching when the wreckage was spotted by Carruthers and her husband, Wayne Robson, at about 6 a.m.
Two of the men, 20-year-old pilot Vrushank Patel and 22-year-old Matthew Jacob, were airlifted to St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto with severe injuries. The third, 20-year-old Webster George, was taken by ambulance to Headwaters Health Care Centre, where he was treated and released.
At press time, Watt says Patel and Jacob remain “in pretty bad shape.”
“Whether he’s going to pull through, I don’t know,” Watt says of the pilot.
“I think what saved them is it was a soft hay field,” he suggests of the landing.
“It looked like a ball of twisted metal,” Carruthers says of the wreckage. “One of the wings was way back in the field, the other wing was still attached to the plane, but it  ... was just kind of hanging on the plane.”
Investigators are trying to determine what lead to the crash, but have already ruled out alcohol and improper maintenance of the plane.
“The aircraft appears to have struck at a fairly shallow angle, with a reasonable amount of speed,” says Rae Simpson, regional investigator for the Transportation Safety Board. “It’s consistent with cruising speed ... There is nothing to indicate he was on a forced approach.
“What he was doing, why — we have absolutely no idea,” he adds of the pilot, who is fully licenced and qualified for night flights.
Simpson says he has yet to speak with the pilot because of the man’s medical state. Several instruments collected from the scene are currently undergoing laboratory analysis.
The plane, Simpson says, left the Brampton Flying Club between 11 p.m. and midnight, heading for Buttonville. Radar traces of the route — the plane sporadically flew below radar — show it also travelled to Wiarton. Simpson presumes it was heading back to the flying club when it went down.