Video: Seven dead in B.C. plane crash

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia - One man walked out alive while seven others were killed Sunday in a plane crash on a remote island off British Columbia's south coast.

The Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Victoria confirmed seven of the eight people on board the Grumman Goose airplane had been found dead.

"The great news is, some guy ... walked out and is alive and the Canadian Coast Guard found him on the beach" of Thormanby Island, said Lt. Margeurite Dodds-Lepinski of the rescue center.

Pacific Coastal Airlines vice-president Spencer Smith said the survivor was a passenger. He was taken to a hospital after telling rescuers that he scrambled out of the wreckage just before it exploded in flames. He followed a creek bed down to a beach where rescuers found him.

Smith said the pilot, who was among the dead, was quite experienced.

The victims' names weren't immediately released.

Drew McKee, a spokesman for the rescue crew that found the survivor, said the man was waving to them and looked like he was in terrible pain.

"His face was burned, his chest was burned, his hands were burned and he had some gashes on his body," McKee said Sunday night.

Coast Guard and Search and Rescue crews had started scouring the area of Thormanby Island, off B.C.'s Sunshine Coast north of Vancouver, after a resident reported hearing an aircraft in distress about 10:40 Sunday morning.

Not long afterward, the rescue center received a call from Pacific Coastal Airlines, reporting that one of its planes was missing.

The plane had left Vancouver International Airport at 10:15 a.m. on a charter flight taking personnel and supplies to an energy project under construction north of Powell River.

Capt. Rob Mulholland flew the Canadian Forces helicopter that lowered a four-man search and rescue crew to the crash site. He said the plane had cut a large swath through the trees.

"It was a very violent impact," he said. "The aircraft was broken apart into many pieces, a large debris field with many post-crash fires."

It was the second deadly crash for Pacific Coast airlines since August when another Grumman Goose went down on Vancouver Island and killed five people.

That wreckage was in dense bush and the two survivors were found quickly only because one of them clambered up a mountainside to a spot he could get cell phone reception.