It was supposed to be a routine charter. On August 20, 2011, First Air Flight 6560 took off from Yellowknife, heading for the tiny, frozen outpost of Resolute Bay in Nunavut. Resolute is one of the northernmost inhabited places on Earth. It’s a place where the weather doesn't just change—it attacks. But the pilots, Captain Blair Rutherford and First Officer David Hare, weren't rookies. They knew the Arctic. Yet, minutes before they were supposed to land, their Boeing 737-200 slammed into a hill.
Twelve people died. Three survived.
People still talk about this crash in aviation circles because it shouldn't have happened. The plane was equipped with functional radar. The crew was experienced. Most eerie of all? A massive military exercise was happening exactly where they crashed. Hundreds of soldiers were already on the ground in Resolute Bay for Operation Nanook, meaning rescue teams were literally watching the radar when the plane disappeared.
What Went Wrong With First Air Flight 6560?
Basically, it was a "perfect storm" of human error and technical drift. When you're flying in the High Arctic, the magnetic pole messes with your instruments. You can't just trust a standard compass up there. The crew had to manually "slave" the directional gyro to the magnetic compass, a routine but critical task.
Somewhere during the descent, the compass drifted.
The pilots thought they were aligned with the runway. They weren't. Because of the way the 737’s autopilot was programmed, it didn't capture the localizer beam—the electronic "highway" that leads a plane to the landing strip—because they were too far off-course. Instead of the plane turning to face the runway, it stayed on a straight path. A path that led directly into a mountain.
The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) is painful to listen to. You can hear First Officer Hare getting nervous. He tells the Captain multiple times that they are off-course. "We're three miles wide," he says. He suggests a go-around. He keeps pointing out that the GPS and the needle don't match.
But Captain Rutherford was focused. He was "task-saturated." He believed the instruments were just glitching and that he could find the runway visually once they broke through the clouds. He was wrong.
The Problem With "Pilot Flying" Culture
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) looked deep into why Hare didn't just take the controls. It’s a classic problem in aviation called "steep cockpit gradient." Even though the industry preaches Crew Resource Management (CRM), the reality is that junior officers often find it incredibly hard to override a senior captain.
Hare was polite. He was suggestive. He wasn't aggressive enough to stop the descent.
The TSB report, which is a massive document you should read if you're into air safety, highlights that the crew didn't have a clear "abort" trigger. They were in a "gray zone." They knew something was slightly off, but they didn't realize they were flying into the side of a hill until the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) started screaming "SINK RATE" and "PULL UP" just seconds before impact.
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The Operation Nanook Coincidence
You’ll hear conspiracy theorists bring up the military exercise all the time. Operation Nanook 2011 was a huge deal—a simulated plane crash rescue mission. Then, a real plane crashed.
It sounds like a movie plot. Honestly, it was just a bizarre, tragic coincidence. If anything, the military presence saved the three survivors. Because the military had medics and helicopters already idling for the exercise, they reached the crash site on the hill within 20 minutes. In the Arctic, 20 minutes is the difference between life and death by hypothermia.
The survivors—a geologist and two others—were pulled from a burning wreckage in a place where usually, help would take hours or days to arrive.
The Compass Trap in the Arctic
The Boeing 737-200 was an old workhorse. It was built for gravel strips and harsh conditions. But its navigation system was old-school. In the high latitudes, the horizontal component of the Earth's magnetic field is weak.
The TSB found that the pilot bumped the heading bug or the system drifted without them noticing. This shifted their perceived "center" by about 17 degrees. When the autopilot tried to "capture" the runway signal, it failed because the intercept angle was too sharp.
The crew didn't realize the autopilot had reverted to "HDG SEL" (Heading Select) mode instead of "VOR/LOC" (Localizer) mode. They thought the plane was steering them to the runway. It was actually steering them to the 17-degree error.
Why This Matters Today
First Air Flight 6560 changed how Arctic aviation works. It forced airlines to look at how they train for "unstable approaches."
If you aren't lined up perfectly by 1,000 feet, you go around. No excuses. No "trying to find it."
The crash also pushed for better GPS integration in older planes. We can't rely on magnetic compasses near the poles. It’s too risky.
Actionable Takeaways for Aviation Safety
If you're a pilot or just someone interested in how these systems fail, there are a few brutal lessons from First Air 6560:
- Trust the "Third Voice": If a First Officer expresses doubt three times, the protocol must be an automatic go-around. No debate.
- Mode Awareness: Always verify what the autopilot is actually doing. Just because you pressed the button doesn't mean the computer accepted the command.
- Arctic Drift: Never trust a single source of heading data when flying above the 60th parallel. Cross-check GPS, Inertial Reference Systems (IRS), and ground-based beacons constantly.
- The Go-Around Mindset: A go-around isn't a failure. It’s a standard maneuver. The "press-on-itis" that affected Captain Rutherford is a psychological trap that kills even the best pilots.
The wreckage of Flight 6560 stayed on that hill for a long time—a jagged reminder of how fragile life is in the North. It wasn't one big explosion or a mechanical failure that brought it down. It was a few degrees of error and a few seconds of silence in the cockpit when someone should have been shouting.
To prevent another tragedy like First Air Flight 6560, operators in remote regions have since implemented mandatory "Stable Approach" criteria that require an immediate climb if any flight parameter—speed, descent rate, or lateral tracking—deviates by more than a tiny margin near the ground.