Just over a week ago, Mount Gardner residents watched a helicopter crash. A few days later, they watched it take flight again – sort of.
Tony Mainwaring was one of the first people on scene March 5 after a Bell 212 crashed onto the west side of Bowen Island. He and a couple of other Mount Gardner residents found the two pilots who had miraculously survived the incident. A couple of days later Mainwaring was back on the mountain, helping clear the area around the cliff face where the fuselage had landed so that it could be lifted away.
But how does one remove a 57 foot, 6,500 lb. aircraft sitting on the edge of a cliff?
What happened after the crash?
The Airspan Helicopters Bell 212 crashed on a Friday. The next day a Transportation Safety Board was on-scene performing part of the "field phase" of its investigation.
Last Saturday, while deployed at the site of a Bell 212 helicopter accident on Bowen Island, #BC, our investigators examined & photographed the wreckage as part of the field phase of the investigation. https://t.co/xs3xBSZMeS pic.twitter.com/m8ghOJtMDt
— TSB of Canada (@TSBCanada) March 9, 2021
The day after that, Mainwaring was back up on the hillside. As a tree faller, he was contracted along with Bowen Tree Service to help with the salvage operations – clearing the trees off of the helicopter, stabilizing the helicopter and the tail section with ropes so that they could be extracted.
“Otherwise it would’ve just rolled off the cliff,” says Mainwaring.
The extraction team came March 8 and took off the skids and got the site ready to lift the helicopter pieces onto a waiting barge in Galbraith Bay.
“It was a very technical extraction – it took us the whole weekend since the crash,” says Mainwaring. He watched from below as the fuselage rose into the air once more, suspended from a Bell 214. (See videos from Mainwaring's daugher and wife below).
"The recovery of the aircraft went well," said Airspan Helicopters' safety manager Nolan Edwards in an email March 13. "We were able to recover the aircraft largely intact and send it on its way to TSB for further analysis."
Both of the pilots are recovering well at home with minor injuries, said Edwards. They're expected to make a full recovery.
Neither the Transportation Safety Board nor Airspan have released information about what may have caused the crash.
The tail of the Bell 212 that crashed March 5, 2021, is lowered onto a barge. By Courtesy of Irene Paulus
A community response
Both Mainwaring and his wife, Irene Paulus, note that the response to the crash was a community effort.
Immediately following the crash, Mount Gardner residents placed themselves along the roadside, pointing fire trucks on to where they’d watched the helicopter spin down into the woods minutes earlier.
“Just all of a sudden it rotated upside down and then it came up over our house,” said Tony Mainwaring.
— Alanna Kelly (@AlannaKellyNews) March 5, 2021
He was the first person at the scene of a helicopter crash on Bowen Island. https://t.co/esvGBLpk61 pic.twitter.com/TvehR2ECxN
Mainwaring in particular stresses the response time of the fire department. "I could hear the sirens when I got to the crash site," he says. More than a dozen volunteer firefighters answered the call that came in just before 10 a.m. on an otherwise quiet Friday morning.
Though Mainwaring became the go-to media guy, Mount Gardner residents Gordy Percer and Dave Conn too searched among the rhubarb and brush for the downed aircraft and the three of them found the pilots.
When the TSB investigators came to examine the site, Paulus recalls them commenting on the community interest and involvement.
“Everybody’s family in a way,” she says.
