Owners of air taxi services, meanwhile, were typically bush pilots themselves, and they tend to run their businesses with the same hard-driving attitude, expecting their pilots to fly on a shoestring and to get the job done regardless of weather, fatigue, or cargo load. That they often operate in remote locations further erodes the government’s ability to oversee them.

Erik Vogel understands the perils as well as anyone. Standing six feet three, with broad shoulders, a full head of dark hair, and a neatly groomed moustache, he’s the picture of confidence in uniform. Today his uniform is a firefighter’s, but twenty-five years ago, in 1984, it was that of a rookie pilot with Wapiti Aviation, a small air taxi operation in northern Alberta. That year, his ten-seater Piper Navajo Chieftain slammed into a shrouded ridge, killing provincial ndp leader Grant Notley and five other passengers. (Disclosure: one of the four survivors of the crash was my father, Alberta housing minister Larry Shaben.)

Vogel hadn’t wanted to fly that night. The weather was bad, and his co-pilot had been bumped to accommodate another paying customer: Notley himself. Vogel had lost twenty-five pounds in the five weeks he’d been with Wapiti, and had flown seventeen flights the previous week. He’d also been on call for medevac flights. And he didn’t trust his plane. Its autopilot system had been acting erratically, one of its wing de-icers had broken during a flight earlier that day, and one of its automatic direction finders was also malfunctioning. Getting into the small, uncontrolled airstrips along his flight path would be treacherous. He was in way over his head, and he knew it. He also felt he had no choice but to fly. If he refused, he risked losing his job. Thirty-three pilots had quit or been fired from Wapiti in the previous year.

The crash ended his career. “There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about it,” he says, seated at a small table at a Vancouver Starbucks. Among the firefighters at Station 4 in Burnaby, he is known as Mr. Safety — a reputation that doesn’t bother him. “I don’t ever again want to be the one to have something bad happen on my watch,” he says.

Vogel still experiences déjà vu when news of other airplane crashes hits the media — for example, the Sonicblue Airways accident in January 2006 near Port Alberni, BC, in which the pilot of a small plane died along with two of his seven passengers. After the crash, the pilot’s father, Jonathan Huggett, com-plained publicly about conditions at Sonicblue, alleging that his son had been abused, grossly underpaid (junior co-pilots with the company normally earned a meagre $28 for a fourteen-hour shift, amounting to about $7,300 a year), and forced to fly in dangerous conditions. “It was Wapiti all over again,” says Vogel, shaking his head. Like Wapiti, Sonicblue had a history of safety violations, though Transport Canada did not suspend the carrier’s licence until after the fatalities occurred.

Whereas the Sonicblue crash was caused by a faulty engine part, Vogel acknowledges he made a mistake the night of his crash, descending below the minimum en route altitude through a bank of thick cloud in an attempt to spot the dim lights of a snow-covered airstrip. Talking about it, he curls his hands into fists then opens them wide, splaying his fingers. “Arthritis,” he says matter-of-factly. When he felt the trees hitting the plane, he instinctively raised his hands in front of his face. They were mangled in the crash, and he’s been losing feeling and mobility in them ever since.

“I run into burning buildings now, and I think my new career is much safer,” Vogel says. To support his three children, he also drives an eighteen-wheeler on his days off. When he’s trucking, he notes, he’s subject to constant checks to ensure he doesn’t exceed his duty time of fourteen hours a day, and his rig can be spot checked at any scale.

During the public inquiry into the crash, he asserted that Transport Canada was partially to blame for allowing airlines like Wapiti to cut corners, push their pilots, and put lives at risk. Then, in a precedent-setting case in 1990, the widows of two men killed in the crash sued the federal government and won. The judge in Swanson v. Canada (Minister of Transport) ruled that Transport Canada was one-third responsible for the deaths, having failed to sanction Wapiti for its repeated violations in the years preceding the crash.

Vogel hoped things would change for the better after Swanson, but he doesn’t think they have — a belief confirmed by “Jason,” a young pilot who declined to give his real name for fear of being blacklisted. Jason affirms that many of today’s bush pilots are cowboys, and says that those who promote a culture of safety are often dismissed. Last year, for example, he shared the cockpit with the owner and chief pilot of his company, during which he was expected to fly perhaps ten metres off the water with a planeload of passengers. “I told my boss I wasn’t comfortable flying below the minimums,” he says. His boss told him to lower them. This season, the company didn’t hire Jason back, saying he “hadn’t been helpful.” Another rookie pilot, who Jason says flew “like an idiot,” remained on the company’s roster.

THE WHISTLE-BLOWER

“Swanson meant a lot to me,” reflects Hugh Danford, a former aviation system safety inspector and course instructor with Transport Canada. Danford, who lives on a peaceful tract of farmland forty minutes from Ottawa, along the Rideau Canal, once taught new inspectors about Wapiti and the Swanson case as part of Transport Canada’s basic aviation enforcement course. “I used it as an example of why inspectors need to do their jobs,” he says, surveying his recently planted plot of garlic. Looking back, he now believes that Swanson, rather than ushering in an era of government responsibility, actually created a chill, marking the beginning of his department’s efforts to get out of the enforcement business.

Before he went to work for the government, Danford was a pilot. His career spanned thirty years and took him to places as far flung as the Arctic and Antarctic, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Maldives. Sixty-two, with a ruddy complexion, blue eyes that sparkle behind wire-rimmed glasses, and a full head of white hair, he’d be a shoo-in for a shopping mall Santa — if, that is, he weren’t so angry.

Danford started at Transport Canada in 1998. Shortly after being hired, he was appointed to a tri-national safety working group of Canadian, American, and Mexican aviation experts seeking to determine the root causes of North American airplane crashes. In 25 percent of the Canadian accidents he reviewed, lack of regulatory supervision appeared to be the problem. One of those accidents involved the “controlled flight into terrain” (literally, flying a plane into the ground) of a De Havilland dhc-6 Twin Otter off Davis Inlet, Labrador, in 1999. Marcel Jaspar, the pilot in command on the flight, which killed its twenty-two-year-old first officer, Damien Hancock, had been in four previous crashes and had a lengthy enforcement record with Transport Canada.

In spite of this, the department took no action against the pilot or the airline immediately following the Davis Inlet crash. Nor did it investigate the incident (it wasn’t until 2002, after Danford submitted a report, that Jaspar’s licence was suspended). The accident report released by the Transportation Safety Board in 2001 stated, “In certain areas of commercial operations, the safety oversight efforts of Transport Canada have been somewhat ineffective.” As a result of these findings, in June of that year the tsb issued Recommendation A01-01, which Danford calls one of the most important safety regulations in years. It urged that “the Department of Transport undertake a review of its safety oversight methodology, resources and practices particularly as they relate to smaller operators and those operators who fly in or into remote areas to ensure that air operators and crews consistently operate within the safety regulations.”

When he checked the government database that tracks Transport Canada’s responses to tsb recommendations (which the department is required to submit within ninety days), Danford found that the department was on record as having satisfied Recommendation A01-01. One of the initiatives cited as proof was a plan to implement a new safety protocol known as sms. Another involved the hiring of a consulting firm to conduct a comprehensive review of the department’s safety oversight program for commercial operations.