Seneca Recently Repaired In Landing Gear Collapse

The pilot who flew his Piper Seneca into a British Columbia apartment building Friday had two previous accidents in the last decade, according to a report by CTV News in Canada.

The Canadian Transportation Safety Board says the plane flown by Peter Garrison, 82, was recently repaired following a gear collapse on landing at Pitt Meadows in February 2006.

CTV News reports Garrison was involved in another accident in 1998 in Bellingham, WA, just south of British Columbia.

As ANN reported, Garrison was killed when his plane hit the ninth floor of the 15-story building on Friday with such force that it stopped just short of the elevator shaft in the condo building in Richmond, B.C. Two people in the building were injured.

Garrison was a member of the Royal Air Force during World War II, first learned to fly when he was 18, and had flown across the Atlantic Ocean eight times in the accident plane. The Canadian Press reports the aircraft was on a short flight from Vancouver International Airport to nearby Pitt Meadows, when witnesses saw the plane flying erratically.

Officials began sifting through the tangled wreckage on Saturday investigating the cause of the crash.

Transportation Safety Board spokesperson John Cottreau said that the investigation will take time and that it's too early to "say anything definitive."

"We're going to have to continue with phase one and gathering the data and hopefully in the weeks and months ahead we'll have some analysis that will tell us what happened and why it happened," Cottreau said Saturday.

FMI: www.tsb.gc.ca/