Tony Mainwaring was falling trees in his Bowen Island yard when he saw a helicopter flying “out of control" above him.
“It just all of a sudden rotated upside down and then it came up over our house,” he says. “It was definitely rotating and out of control,” he tells Glacier Media.
Mainwaring lives near Mount Gardner and says he watched the helicopter crash just before 10 a.m. on Friday morning.
“I just couldn’t believe it was going down right behind our place and then it hit the ground,” he recalls, adding he was one of the first people on scene. "It didn’t explode, thank god."
He jumped into his truck with his friend Gordy Percer to go search for the helicopter.
“We went up into the rhubarb and started searching until we finally found it," he says.
“I just screamed and there was a guy up there and I went, ‘Oh my god, are you the pilot?’ And he said, ‘Yes,’ which totally shocked me.”
Mainwaring notes the two pilots were standing and seemed in good spirits.
“It’s just hanging there. One of the rotors is sitting right in front of the cockpit, which is totally gone, I don’t know how they got out.”
The helicopter landed on a massive tree, stopping it from going over a cliff. The two pilots were transported to the hospital.
“I did have a quick whisky afterwards,” Mainwaring says.
According to the local resident, the pilots were heading to Cypress Mountain on a job. This information has not been confirmed by officials.
