Search crews have found the bodies of two pilots of a cargo plane that crashed in the North Shore mountains on Monday.
According to the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre, the dead men were located Tuesday near the wreckage of the twin-engine Swearingen SA-226 that disappeared en route to Prince George.
"The scene is a fairly extensive one," Naval Lt. Paul Trenholm said of the crash site.
Officials are in the process of notifying the pilot's family, and the B.C. Coroners Office is investigating. The Transportation Safety Board will be probing the cause of the crash.
Rescuers spent Tuesday morning searching in an area of Lynn Valley Headwaters Park known as the Needles. A Cormorant helicopter surveyed the scene from the air, while North Shore Rescue workers and the RCMP are searching on the ground.
"There are a few things hampering our search. One of them of course is the adverse terrain. They've had some overnight precipitation, so the snow is very difficult to deal with. The crews have mentioned that it's difficult to move around," Trenholm said.
The area being searched is about 5 km north of Mount Seymour.
Fuselage and a wing of the plane were found late Monday, when low cloud cover and turbulence made the search difficult.
The plane had departed 91原创 for Prince George at 6:35 a.m. that day, but air traffic controllers lost contact with the aircraft at 7:10 a.m.
It was a chilly night in the North Shore mountains. Temperatures dipped to lows of between -4 and -6 degrees overnight, according to Environment Canada, and between 15 and 20 cm of snow fell in the higher elevations.
"The weather conditions have improved drastically, but there's a lot of fresh snow in that area," North Shore Rescue team leader Mike Danks said as his crew headed out Tuesday morning.
"We're talking about a lot of steep and technical terrain in that area."
No information has been released about the pilots.
