Into the Abyss (13 page)

Giffin was just putting his head down to catch a moment’s rest when the phone rang. His spouse answered it, and a look of concern creased her brow.

“It’s Premier Lougheed,” she said.

Giffin was instantly awake as he grabbed the phone.

“Grant Notley is on that plane,” Lougheed told him.

Giffin started to remind his boss that he’d checked with Ray Martin, when the premier cut him off. It was Martin himself who had called the premier to give him the news.

After hanging up the phone with Giffin, Martin had tried to locate Notley. Unable to do so, he’d called Grant’s secretary. She’d told him that her boss had received a last-minute call from Wapiti Aviation saying they had a seat for him.

Despite more than two decades in Canada’s north, Sandra Notley was still surprised by how fast and fiercely winter arrived. Raised in Concord, Massachusetts, the vivacious civil rights activist had set out from Edmonton on Friday afternoon to make the 550- kilometre drive
north to her home in Fairview. Though her husband, Grant, had planned to accompany her, his work had kept him in the city and she’d had to face the five-hour journey alone.

An hour north of the city, she started having car trouble. She’d pulled into a service station in the tiny hamlet of Sandugo where an attendant checked things over. She’d set out once more, and driven another hour when her car broke down. Luckily, she was near Fox Creek, the only town for miles along a barren stretch of Highway 43. She’d managed to get a tow into town, and had then checked into a hotel. Snow had continued to fall heavily through the evening and Sandra, exhausted but relieved to be safe and off the treacherous highway, decided to turn in early. Before she did, she’d called home. No one had answered. Then she’d contacted an NDP aide who’d told her that
Grant had caught a flight out of Edmonton and that his plane was believed to have landed at the High Prairie airport, but had been delayed due to engine trouble. Wearily, she’d crawled into bed and fell asleep.

After talking to Luella, Dale Wells had called Peace River Flight Services and the nearby town of Whitecourt to make sure Vogel hadn’t diverted. But neither had heard from 402. His heart racing, Wells had quickly fuelled up Wapiti’s Cessna 182 and taken to the air. As he flew east toward High Prairie, he still held a thread of hope that his pilot had diverted to another airport and that he and his passengers were unhurt. Dale recalled the terrible look on his dad’s face as he’d told him the plane was late. Dale would have liked nothing more than to be able to return to his father with good news.

Though Delbert Wells was the president of Wapiti Aviation and had been its chief of flight operations for eight years, he was scared to death of flying. In 1953, his best friend, a northern doctor, had
been killed in a small plane crash while transporting a polio victim from Grande Prairie to Edmonton. When the plane went down in the forest 320 kilometres southeast of Grande Prairie, it had triggered the largest air search in the province’s history. Despite these efforts, no one was alive by the time rescuers found the plane. The pilot, the patient and Del’s lifelong friend were all dead.
Del had not wanted to get on a plane since.

The tragedy also had an impact on Dale, who was seven at the time. Unlike his dad, he’d been drawn to flying, and from the moment he took his first lesson, had known he would be a pilot.

With 12,000 hours of flying experience, most of it in the north, Dale flew the Cessna by feel. He knew the contours of the land as well as those of his own face. He kept the single-engine four-seater just above the cloud, advancing steadily toward the High Prairie airport. Dale trained a close eye on the instruments, but his mind was on his missing pilot. Vogel was no greenhorn. On the check rides that he’d flown with him, Dale had found his handling of the airplane well above average—even excellent. He had appeared sharp on procedures and his accuracy had been very good. He’d logged more hours in the cockpit than almost any pilot Dale had hired and
had demonstrated strong airmanship, the ability to think on his feet, and a good awareness of what was going on around him.

Still, in the past few days, Vogel had seemed off his game. Dale thought of the flight documentation Vogel had left behind earlier that day. A pilot forgetting the aircraft journey log was like a priest forgetting his Bible.
During passenger check-in Dale had briefly considered taking the flight himself, but the thought had disappeared as quickly as it had come. He was on standby for a medivac and needed to stick around. But the problems with Vogel concerned him. The blown starter. The forgotten props. They were small things—not enough to turf him—though troubling nonetheless.

Dale was beginning to think that the young man was no different from the other
prima donna pilots who’d come and gone over the years. They arrived with their big egos and macho attitudes, thinking little operations like Wapiti were beneath them. Dale had invested a lot of time and money giving rookie pilots darn good training and what did he get in return? The bigger airlines snapped up the hotshots and the others were gone the minute something better came along. Erik Vogel had come to him with more hours than most, but Dale knew that he, too, was just building flying time with Wapiti. Dale had also heard that Vogel’s dad was a political bigwig out on the coast. As far as Dale was concerned, privileged kids like Vogel had no idea what hard work was or what it took to run a successful airline.
They wanted everything handed to them on a platter.

As he neared High Prairie, Dale pushed these unsettling thoughts to the back of his mind and radioed Luella.

“
I’m in the vicinity and I’m going to try to locate the ELT signal,” he told her.

Luella, who had been dividing her time between operating the radio and taking weather observations, had her hands full. Having Wapiti’s chief pilot searching the area was the last thing she needed. Just after 10:00 p.m. she’d taken her third observation, a cumbersome process that involved walking 100 metres beyond the terminal’s parking lot where a small beacon sat on a fence post. Luella plugged in the beacon—little more than a lamp with a strong beam—and retraced her steps to the parking lot. Using a handheld ceiling projector, she lined it up to where the light hit the bottom of the clouds and read the measurement on the projector’s instrument scale. Then she walked back to the field to unplug the lamp. The whole process took the better part of ten minutes and Luella found that she’d no sooner finished one observation than it was time to start another.

Inside her trailer, the phone had started ringing off the hook. News of the missing plane had swept through the town as fast as a grass fire across parched prairie. Locals were calling to find out what was happening and to offer help.

The scene was the same at the local High Prairie RCMP detachment. Just after 9:30, Sergeant Marvin Hopkins had arrived to find his station in an uproar. Known as “Hoppy” to his friends, he was a fit, 5′10″ bear of a man in his late forties. His light brown hair was styled in the same Brillo pad brush cut he had sported since he was a teen in the fifties, and beneath heavily furrowed brows his blue eyes were keenly alert. He’d been at home with his feet up when one of his members had called.

“Get in here, boss,” he’d said. “
All hell’s breaking loose.”

Hoppy soon learned that the Rescue Coordination Centre in Edmonton had launched a MAJAID and that the Canadian Military Command Centre in Trenton, Ontario, was already monitoring SARSAT—the international search-and-rescue satellite system designed to pick up distress signals of emergency locator beacons.

He also discovered that the High Prairie RCMP detachment was being pressed into action. Due to perilous flying conditions, and the presumed proximity of the crash site to the town, the Rescue Coordination Centre had requested the RCMP organize a ground search party to stand by in the event that military planes couldn’t get in.

Then came more disturbing news: Minister Larry Shaben, the region’s MLA, and others from High Prairie were on the missing plane. For a moment Hoppy was at an uncharacteristic loss. Then he rocketed into action.

He knew several RCMP officers who owned their own snowmobiles, and called to alert them that they and their machines might be needed. Hoppy also called the Peace River detachment, which had a handheld ELT homing device, and asked someone to drive it to High
Prairie as fast as possible. He’d barely hung up the phone when the Rescue Coordination Centre dropped another bombshell: John Tenzer, the Alberta government’s chief pilot, had just called to say that government opposition leader, Grant Notley, was also on the plane.

Hoppy lit a cigarette and dragged on it deeply. No matter how it ended, this crash was going to cause a shit storm.

Just up the street, Dave Heggie, a thirty-eight-year-old father of two, was surprised to walk out of the High Prairie movie theatre and find Maurice Pacquette waiting for him. A fellow pilot and volunteer member of Alberta’s Civil Air Rescue Emergency Services, or CARES, Pacquette told him what had happened. Heggie dropped his young sons at home and the two men hurried to Heggie’s pharmacy to gather and brief a small cadre of local volunteer pilots before they all hightailed it out to the airport.

In his day job Heggie ran the High Prairie hospital pharmacy, but his true passion was flying. Ten years earlier he’d volunteered for CARES to finagle time in the cockpit. Now he was High Prairie’s sector commander for the civilian organization designed to backstop the Canadian military’s air search-and-rescue system. Heggie well understood the challenge search-and-rescue personnel faced. The small elite military force had the colossal task of covering more than 10 million square kilometres of land, as well as the world’s longest coastal waters extending offshore to the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Nationally, the Canadian Forces’ aeronautical domain extended from the US border to the North Pole, and from approximately 600 nautical miles west of Vancouver Island in the Pacific to 900 nautical miles east of Newfoundland in the Atlantic. When asked what advice he, as a CARES sector commander, would give to other pilots, Heggie’s response was chilling:
Don’t crash
.

When they all arrived at the airport just after 11:00, Luella was visibly relieved to relinquish her post at the UNICOM. She’d had only Edith to help with the phone and had been running—Luella would later write, “walking wasn’t fast enough”—to record weather observations and operate the radio. She told Heggie that Dale Wells, Wapiti’s chief pilot, was already in the area, and the military was preparing to dispatch one of its Hercules military transport aircraft from Canadian Forces Base Edmonton.

Southeast of the airport, Dale circled his plane through thick cloud. After he’d radioed Luella, he’d continued southeast along the flight path that Erik Vogel would have been on. Flying toward Swan Hills for several minutes, Dale had picked up a faint distress signal. He’d felt the air being sucked from his lungs. It had to be 402.

He sat numbly at the controls as the signal grew louder and then began to fade again. He banked sharply and turned, his focus fully on locating the downed plane. For the next forty-five minutes he flew a search pattern over the area. During one pass, Dale saw the flare of an oil well torch, but other than that, thick cloud and fog made it impossible to see the ground. The ELT signal was distorted, fading in and out, but he managed to narrow down the crash area to between 30 and 40 kilometres south of High Prairie. It was close to 11:30 when he radioed High Prairie, saying he was going to attempt a landing at the airport. Luella stepped outside to take a look at the cloud ceiling. It had dropped dramatically and was now down to between 50 and 100 feet above the runway. She relayed the information to Dale.

Though supremely experienced at flying in difficult conditions and intimately familiar with the area, even he couldn’t argue with tonight’s weather. With a heavy heart he banked and, turning the plane toward Grande Prairie, headed home.

I
n the snow-draped wilderness 32 kilometres southeast of High Prairie, four men huddled around a feeble campfire. Snow tumbled wetly upon their heads and the burning wood sizzled and crackled, sending wisps of smoke into the air. A wan moon had risen above the trees and though obscured by thick cloud, its faint light stole the night’s inky edge.

Erik surveyed the bloodied faces of the surviving passengers, Paul to his left and Larry to his right, both smoking silently. Scott lay on the ground next to him, the topcoat draped over him speckled with snow. Inside the plane, five passengers were dead and another critically injured. Erik was overcome with guilt and remorse.

Tell them. Tell them who you are
.

His lips moved soundlessly, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud. Blood still dripped from the open gash on his forehead, darkening the snow at his feet. Finally, Erik got it out, his voice thick with emotion. “I’m the pilot,” he said.

Scott had not stirred since being set down, but now asked, “How long will it take before they start looking for us?”

Erik glanced reflexively at his wrist, but saw only a deep gash the metal watch strap had sliced into his flesh. The watch itself was gone. He had no idea how long they had been on the ground, but he’d radioed his position just before he’d veered out of controlled airspace. Air traffic control would have been expecting him to contact them and when he didn’t, would have sounded the alarm.

Erik explained that the plane’s ELT would lead rescuers to them within a few hours. What he didn’t appreciate was how difficult the task of pinpointing the crash site would be that night.

Scott checked his watch. They’d been on the ground for two hours and he wondered how long they could last. Like all RCMP officers, Scott was trained in first aid. He’d noticed Erik’s laboured, shallow breaths and had taken this as a bad sign—probably a punctured lung and internal bleeding.
He’d diagnosed his own condition as a flail chest: a life-threatening injury in which a segment of rib cage breaks in multiple locations, becomes separated from the chest wall and moves in opposition to it.