‘Heartbreaking’ mid-air crash leaves 2 student pilots dead near Steinbach in southern Manitoba

Two student pilots are dead after their small planes collided in mid-air Tuesday morning in southern Manitoba.

“We’re devastated,” said Adam Penner, president of Harv’s Air flying school. The crash happened during a training exercise, he said.

The crash happened around 8:45 a.m., southeast of Winnipeg, in the rural municipality of Hanover, south of Steinbach and west of Highway 12, RCMP said.

The bodies of the pilots were found in the wreckage of the single-engine planes, RCMP said.

There were no passengers aboard.

Nathaniel Plett lives near the flight school. He and his wife were drinking coffee Tuesday morning when they heard a bang, he said.

“I said to my wife, ‘That’s a plane crash,'” said Plett. “There was a pillar of black smoke coming up, and a little later [we] heard another bang, and there was an even bigger pop of black smoke.”

WATCH | RCMP speak about fatal plane crash:

Manitoba RCMP provide update after planes collide, leaving 2 student pilots dead

RCMP provide details about a crash that left two student pilots dead after their planes collided in the rural municipality of Hanover, south of Steinbach, Man., on Tuesday morning.

Harv’s Air president Penner, who was in the flight school office at the time, said the students collided when approaching the landing strip while practising takeoffs and landings.

“We don’t understand how they could get so close together. We’ll have to wait for the investigation,” he said. “There was a commotion … then I realized.”

The collision was between a four-seater airplane, a Cessna 172, and a two-seater Cessna 152, he said.

One pilot was just a couple of months into training, while the other nearly had a commercial licence, Penner said.

Both were training to get their private and commercial licences to become airline pilots.

Penner said the flight school, which his parents started in the early 1970s, has students from Canada and around the world training for professional and recreational purposes. The school trains about 400 student pilots a year.

Students receive one-to-one training with an instructor, and it isn’t unusual for them to fly solo during training, he said.

“It’s been a shocking morning,” said Mohamed Shahin, an instructor at Harv’s Air and former student. “Really heartbreaking, and we feel really sad for the parents of the students we lost.”

No information on the ages or the gender of the pilots has been released by RCMP.

“This is still evolving. Members are still on scene,” RCMP media relations spokesperson Cpl. Melanie Roussel said during a news conference on Tuesday. “It’s a two-vehicle plane collision, which is not something that happens every day.”

Roussel could not confirm whether family of the pilots had been notified as of 1:30 p.m., during the RCMP news conference.

The Transportation Safety Board said it has deployed a team of investigators to the crash scene.

RCMP will continue to be involved in investigating the fatalities, said Roussel, though the TSB will take over the investigation into the cause of the crash.

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