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What should have been a pleasant June afternoon for a group of local Vancouverites turned into a terrifying brush with death this past weekend. On Saturday, June 8, a seaplane attempting to take off from Vancouver Harbor T-Boned a center console motorboat on the water, tearing off the boat's canopy and nosediving down into the water on the other side. This dramatic eyewitness video of the nail-biting collision has surfaced online as investigators attempt to determine what led to this dangerous accident:
For a high-speed collision involving a boat and a place, this could have been much worse. Though the footage (shared here by @abcnews ) looks violent, CBC News reported that only two of the boat's passengers were hospitalized, and all six persons on board the seaplane are "uninjured and safe," despite the rough water landing . Fortunately, CTV News reported that the two passengers' injuries were "described as minor," and thanks to nearby vessels who immediately came and helped at the crash site, rescue efforts were already underway by the time Coast Guard arrived.
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The exact series of events leading up to the plane crash has yet to be determined. According to CBC News , the small plane from Vancouver's Harbour Air crashed with the sightseeing tour boat just before 1 pm Saturday, shortly after taking off from the nearby seaplane terminal. The Transporation Safety Board is reportedy conducting witness interviews and working on recovering the aircraft wreckage to get to the bottom of this hair-raising accident.
History Repeating Itself
As many online have noted, this isn't the first time a dramatic seaplane accident has happened in Vancouver's Coal Harbor. According to the Vancouver Sun , in 1999, a landing seaplane collided with a boat carrying two tourists near the same part of the harbor as Saturday's accident. Once again, the tourists in the boat were injured (though not killed, thankfully), but the passengers in the seaplane were entirely unharmed.
In the 1999 accident, the seaplane was cleared to land by the sole air traffic controller working in the nearby tower at the time. The controller didn't see the boat in the plane's path, and investigators speculated that lighting contrasts in that part of the harbor and the stern of a large cruise ship might have blocked the boat from his view.
Online, some speculated that the harbor cruise boat from the Saturday accident caused the accident by crossing into the plane's path and not taking sufficient evasive maneuvers. Still, it'll be up to the investigators to determine who was really at fault in this case.
According to the Vancouver Sun , there are between 60,000-70,000 seaplane takeoffs and landings in the harbor every year. Despite the high seaplane traffic in their harbor, and the relatively unpredictability of boaters in the area, Vancouver Harbour has so far only had two major seaplane accidents in its history, and neither of them were fatal.
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