Riley Browne ©WCH

West Coast Helicopters general manager Sean Smyth was in his hangar at the company’s ­headquarters in Port McNeill on Tuesday ­morning, about to make his morning coffee, when his cellphone rang. On the other end of the line was West Coast Helicopters’ dispatch. One of the company’s helicopters had crashed in rugged terrain in the remote Loughborough Inlet area, between Knight Inlet and Bute Inlet, which is steep and heavily forested. It was 6:20 a.m. and the crash had taken place just minutes earlier, at about 6:13 a.m. Three men were onboard the Hughes 500 helicopter when it went down: a pilot from West Coast Helicopters named Riley Browne and two forestry engineers from Campbell River-based Crowhurst Forest Management Group. Smyth was told that two of the people involved in the crash were unresponsive. The survivor had radioed the information to the logging camp where the men were based, who then called dispatch.

Also covered in Chek News by Liz Brown: ‘It’s gutting’: North Island community mourns the loss of one of their own following Tuesday’s helicopter crash