The Transportation Safety Board has repeated its call for the equipage of charter and small airline aircraft with flight data and voice recorders after it was left guessing about the cause of a B.C. crash that killed four people in 2016. The Cessna Citation went down on a mountain shortly after takeoff from Kelowna Airport on Oct. 13. Among those killed was former Alberta Premier Jim Prentice. The lack of onboard recorders, which were not required on the crash airplane, left investigators with only the radar track and partial wreckage to try and figure out what caused the crash. 

TSB Chair Kathy Fox said their best guess is the pilot, who was not current in night flying, became disoriented and reacted inappropriately with control inputs but without the precise data a recorder would have provided investigators can’t be sure. “We aren’t much closer to knowing with certainty what caused this accident,” Fox told a live-streamed news conference in Calgary.