Air Canada Flight 621

Aircraft The aircraft involved, registered as CF-TIW, was a McDonnell Douglas DC-8-63, powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT3D engines. At the time of the incident the aircraft had accumulated only 453 hours of flight time. The 60 series was a stretched version of the DC-8 that was longer than the DC-8 series models 10 through 50. Crew The captain was 50-year-old Peter Cameron Hamilton, who had logged 20,990 hours of flying time, 2,899 hours of which were logged on the Douglas DC-8. The first officer was 40-year-old Donald Rowland, who had logged 9,323 hours of flying time, 5,626 of which were logged on the Douglas DC-8. The flight engineer was 28-year-old Harry Gordon Hill, who had logged 1,284 hours of flying time, 1,045 of which were logged on the Douglas DC-8. == History ==

Captain Peter Cameron Hamilton and First Officer Donald Rowland had flown on various flights together before, and had an ongoing discussion on when to arm the ground spoilers. correctly called for the spoiler deployment as evidenced in the CVR transcript. When executed just above the runway, the landing flare procedure arrests the aircraft's descent just prior to touchdown. By raising the aircraft's nose (pitching up), lift momentarily increases, reducing the descent rate, and the main wheels may then gently contact the runway. During the flare, pilots normally retard the throttles to idle to reduce engine thrust. A squat switch within the main landing gear then signals the touchdown and automatically deploys the spoilers, if armed. This destroys any remaining lift and helps the aircraft slow down. The pilots made an agreement that, when the captain was piloting the aircraft, the first officer would deploy the spoilers on the ground as the captain preferred, and when the first officer was piloting the aircraft, the captain would arm them on the flare as the co-pilot preferred. This was not the pilots' usual routine. from the runway, the captain began to reduce power in preparation for the flare and said "Okay" to the first officer. The first officer immediately deployed the spoilers on the flare instead of just arming them. The aircraft began to sink heavily and the captain, realizing what had happened, pulled back on the control column and applied full thrust to all four engines. The crash occurred in a farm field located near what is now Castlemore Road and McVean Drive in Brampton, Ontario. Memorial and witness accounts at the time reported the crash was in Woodbridge. This was because in 1970, prior to urban sprawl and changes in municipal boundaries, the site was closer to Woodbridge than Brampton. This was the first Air Canada accident involving fatalities and the first hull loss of a DC-8 series 63. In November 1963, another DC-8 of Trans-Canada Air Lines (the precursor to Air Canada) Flight 831, also bound from Montreal to Toronto, had crashed with a loss of 118 lives. == Investigation ==

A board of inquiry was established to investigate the crash. The board published its official report on January 29, 1971, in which the accident was attributed to pilot error. == Aftermath ==

Recovery and identification of bodies proceeded slowly after the crash because of the need to excavate the crash crater to a significant depth. More than 20 of the passengers were United States citizens, all of them listed as being from Southern California. On July 30, 1970, 52 victims, 49 of whom were identified, were buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and in May 1971 an obelisk and stone monument were erected (Plot 24-1) at the site, with all 109 victims' names inscribed. In 1979, Air Canada added an additional memorial at the cemetery. In June 2002, Castlemore resident Paul Cardin, who had been inspired by a November 2001 Toronto Sun article revisiting the Flight 621 crash scene, discovered aircraft wreckage and possible human bone shards at the site. The Peel Regional Police investigated the findings, and it was later determined that the bones were not of recent origin, and had indeed come from the crash. Continuing searches of the crash site by archaeologist Dana Poulton and Friends of Flight 621 (a Brampton-based advocacy group founded by Cardin) produced hundreds of additional human bone fragments. == Memorial garden dedication in 2013 ==

Since the crash, the surrounding area of the crash site itself has experienced significant residential urbanization. In January 2007, the landowners, in conjunction with the property developers, filed an application to designate a section of the crash site as a cemetery and memorial garden. On July 7, 2013, the memorial was officially opened at the site near Degrey Drive and Decorso Drive in present-day Brampton. The small memorial park, approximately , contains lilacs and 109 markers of polished white granite arranged in a random configuration within a bed of black granite paving stones. A polished black granite plaque listing all the victims' names is mounted on a large pink granite boulder. Diarmuid Horgan, coordinator of the memorial site, said that he hoped the dedication ceremony would help victims' families find closure. == In popular culture ==

The events of the crash featured in an episode of the History channel documentary Disasters of the Century, titled "Out of the Blue". ==Notes==