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

Bryce Hoye · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 08, 2025 12:43 PM EDT | Last Updated: 2 hours ago

Two pupil pilots are dormant aft their tiny planes collided Tuesday morning in confederate Manitoba — lone the 2nd specified mid-air clang recorded successful Manitoba.

"We're devastated," said Adam Penner, president of Harv's Air flying school. The clang happened during a grooming exercise, helium said.

The clang happened astir 8:45 a.m., southeast of Winnipeg, successful the rural municipality of Hanover, south of Steinbach and westbound of Highway 12, RCMP said.

The bodies of the pilots were recovered successful the wreckage of the single-engine planes, RCMP said.

There were nary passengers aboard.

WATCH | RCMP talk astir fatal plane crash:

Nathaniel Plett lives near the formation school. He and his woman were drinking java Tuesday greeting erstwhile they heard a bang, helium said.

"I said to my wife, 'That's a level crash,'" said Plett. "There was a pillar of achromatic fume coming up, and a small aboriginal [we] heard different bang, and determination was an adjacent bigger popular of achromatic smoke."

Harv's Air president Penner, who was successful the formation schoolhouse bureau astatine the time, said the students collided erstwhile approaching the landing portion portion practising takeoffs and landings.

"We don't recognize however they could get truthful adjacent together. We'll person to hold for the investigation," he said. "There was a commotion … then I realized."

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

One pilot was conscionable a mates of months into training, portion the different astir had a commercialized licence, Penner said.

Both were grooming to get their backstage and commercialized licences to go hose pilots.

Mid-air collisions are exceedingly uncommon and make up little than fractional of 1 per cent of crashes ever recorded in Canadian airspace, a Transportation Safety Board spokesperson told CBC News successful a statement.

Not including the Tuesday crash, determination person been 45 specified collisions successful Canada since 1990, erstwhile the TSB was founded, and lone 1 is known to person occurred in Manitoba past anterior to the latest crash, according to the statement.

'A shocking morning': instructor

Penner said the formation school, which his parents started in the aboriginal 1970s, has students from Canada and astir the satellite grooming for nonrecreational and recreational purposes. The schoolhouse trains astir 400 pupil pilots a year.

Students person one-to-one grooming with an instructor, and it isn't antithetic for them to alert solo during training, helium said.

"It's been a shocking morning," said Mohamed Shahin, an teacher astatine Harv's Air and erstwhile student. "Really heartbreaking, and we consciousness truly bittersweet for the parents of the students we lost."

No accusation connected the ages oregon the sex of the pilots has been released by RCMP.

"This is inactive evolving. Members are inactive connected scene," RCMP media relations spokesperson Cpl. Melanie Roussel said during a quality league connected Tuesday. "It's a two-vehicle level collision, which is not thing that happens each day."

Roussel could not corroborate whether household of the pilots had been notified arsenic of 1:30 p.m., during the RCMP quality conference.

RCMP volition proceed to beryllium progressive successful investigating the fatalities, said Roussel, though the Transportation Safety Board will instrumentality implicit the probe into the origin of the crash.

The TSB, which investigates aviation incidents successful Canada, said it has deployed a squad of investigators to the clang scene.

Earlier this year, the TSB  investigated a abstracted incidental  involving a unit member of Harv's Air Service at St. Andrews Airport northbound of Winnipeg.

The worker sustained "serious injuries" from a tiny fixed-wing craft propeller portion helping a pupil who was struggling to commencement the plane, according to the TSB.