Transportation Safety Board investigators were beginning an investigation Sunday to try to figure out how the two planes had managed to seemingly defy the odds and strike each other about 180 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon.
Early Saturday morning, grain farmer Eric Donovan and his son, Wade, were onboard a Piper PA-28 that was being flown by family friend Denny Loree.
The three were headed from Mossleigh, Alta. — about 65 kilometres southeast of Calgary — to St. Brieux, Sask., to pick up a part Donovanneeded for a piece of seeding equipment.
They were just a few kilometres from their destination when their aircraft with an amphibious plane flying from Regina to La Ronge, Sask.
That plane was carrying a man and a woman.
All five people were killed, but the man and the woman aboard the amphibious aircraft had not yet been identified Sunday.
Pieces of two small planes involved were scattered over more than a kilometre of terrain.
One of the planes was submerged in a small body of water, while other parts littered on grassy fields and amongst trees.
Bourgault, general manager and president of Bourgault Industries, an international air seeder company based in St. Brieux, hopped into his plane after the crash to scour the area for signs of the two downed aircraft.
He found one of the planes in slough west of St. Brieux. The two planes were found in different sloughs less than a kilometre apart.
“There was a lot of wreckage, probably pieces spread for a mile,” said Bourgault.
Donovan, who also owned a truck company, lived near Mossleigh with his wife and four children. Loree, a husband and father of an adult son, was a neighbour and friend of Eric Donovan.
“It’s tragic. It’s a big hole in our community now,” said Ian Donovan, Eric’s cousin and the region’s newly elected legislature member for the Opposition Wildrose party.
“Eric was involved in the Lions Club . . . there was nothing he wasn’t willing to go help them do all the time.
“Tragic when an 11-year-old boy gets his life cut that short, that quick.”
A relative of Loree described him as a “flying farmer” with more than 1,000 hours of experience in the air.
“It just seems so bizarre,” said Suzanne DePaoli, Loree’s sister-in-law. “In the big skies of Saskatchewan, you don’t expect this to happen.”
Ian Donovan said of his late cousin’s neighbour: “Denny was a great guy. Same thing, Denny wasn’t even done seeding himself. He stopped seeding to give Eric a hand to go get these parts.”
Loree had been flying for nine years, and purchased the 50-year-old Piper propeller plane in 2006.
Transportation Safety Board investigators were on their way to the scene of the collision.
Transportation Safety Board investigators were on their way to the scene of the collision.
Calgary Herald, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, with files from Canadian Press
May 13, 2012 – 6:45 PM ET
Last Updated: May 13, 2012 8:43 PM ET
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