Arrow Air Flight 1285
At 6:45am, December 12th, 1985, Arrow Air Flight 1285 took off from Gander. The D–C8 with a crew of eight had been chartered to carry 248 US peacekeepers home to Kentucky. They had just finished a six–month mission in the Sinai. The aircraft stalled and crashed just after takeoff. The fire burned for four hours. This was the greatest loss of life in a plane crash in Canada.
There has been some debate since that time as to the cause of the crash. Most members of the Safety Board believed that the cause of the stall and crash could not be found. Icing on the plane was believed to have played a role. This is the official version of events.
A minority of the Safety Board felt the crash might have been caused by a blast in the cargo hold. This would have caused a fire in–flight and loss of control. Some have gone as far as to assert that the US military had destroyed their own plane. None of this has ever been proven.
A memorial to the victims was built at the crash site near Gander Lake.
