Into the Abyss (5 page)

Larry looked at the altimeter once more: 3,000 feet. He knew the airport’s elevation was just under 2,000. They
had
to be close. He turned to the window and pressed his forehead against it, cupping his hands around his glasses to blot out the light from the instrument panel. His lenses were inches from the window as he strained to see the lights of home.
Where were they?

Erik radioed High Prairie, but once again received no answer.
Where the hell was Luella?
He didn’t pause to consider that an error in his calculations had put him further back than he thought and that distance as well as the rising terrain he was rapidly approaching were obscuring radio transmission. He had other things on his mind. He’d been
so preoccupied with his dead reckoning calculations that he’d paid scant attention to the windshield. It had become opaque and the world outside blurred behind a frosty film. He could hear ice breaking off the props and banging against the plane as if someone was hurling rocks at the fuselage.

Erik sucked at his moustache with his bottom lip.

Jesus, there must be a hell of a lot for it to be doing that
, he thought. Still his exhausted brain didn’t register that that amount of ice would have slowed the plane’s speed, and that he was 20 nautical miles short of his destination. Instead, his concentration was focused on the task ahead. When he flew past the High Prairie non-directional beacon the needle of his ADF would swing behind him. At that point, he’d look for the airstrip and if he didn’t see it, he’d throttle the power back up and be gone. First, though, he had to pass the beacon.

The needle should swing any second now
, Erik thought.
It’s going to swing by. I’m right there.
Why isn’t the needle swinging?

Then the thought occurred to him that he’d been fixated on getting into High Prairie. How the hell was he going to get
off
the runway if it was snowed over, his plane was overweight and his wings iced up?

The Navajo was moving fast now, lashing through cloud, making up time. The power was right up and Erik was sweating. He glanced at the altimeter: 2850 feet.

Holy shit
, he thought.
I’m going to hit my 2800-foot minimum and the needle hasn’t swung yet. I’d better level out
.

Erik started pulling back on the controls just as snow-covered treetops loomed suddenly out of the blackness.

W
apiti Aviation Flight 402 hit the treetops 75 feet above ground at 175 nautical miles per hour. The plane screamed forward another 104 feet before its right wing slammed into a bank of trees. The trees sheared 8 feet from the wing and took off part of the plane’s right aileron. With the wing gone, the plane rolled to the right, crippled wing down, hitting a large clump of poplars. They clawed off another 30-inch piece of the right wing along with 18 inches of the vertical stabilizer. Banking sharply, the plane crossed an open swath of cutline, and then entered a second stand of trees, which tore off an engine cowling, the right-side fuselage windows and frames, and additional portions of the wings. Finally, at the end of a wreckage trail 538 feet long, the plane hit ground. By then it had rotated a full 90 degrees.

The fuselage plowed nose down through three feet of snow. Ground impact caused the final separation of engines, nacelles and remaining portions of the wings. Cold air gushed into the cabin, chased by snow and debris, which smashed through the damaged aircraft like a tsunami, snapping off seats in the plane’s mid section. Broken trees and
airplane parts followed, slashing seats and shaving back the roof like the lid from a sardine can. The fuselage bounced and skidded another 146 feet, ripping metal from the plane’s right side. Cargo stowed in the obliterated nose cone broke loose, careening through the cabin and blowing out the rear of the aircraft where it was strewn along a wide wreckage path.
The plane finally came to rest upside down 684 feet from where it had first hit the trees.

Paul Archambault had been rolling his second cigarette, planning to stash a series of them on his body before he was again taken into custody, when the plane’s wing clipped the trees. The second he felt the violent shake of the plane, he dropped his pouch of tobacco and papers.
Jesus Christ
, he thought,
I’m going to die
.

Paul had been in several serious accidents in his life and recognized the sensation of time slowing down. He wasn’t going to wait for death to grab hold of him. As the plane shuddered violently through the trees, he heard the sound of ripping metal all around him. He was jolted forward and an excruciating pain gripped his stomach. By the time the plane hit the ground, he was already fumbling for his seatbelt. Luggage and briefcases flew toward him through the cabin, and cargo and bodies tumbled crazily. Something hard smashed the side of his face. Clawing madly, he found the buckle release and pulled it. Paul sailed through the air as the plane flipped upside down. He circled his arms wildly, swimming above the onslaught of snow and debris like a skier caught in an avalanche. When everything stopped, Paul was lying on top of a jumble of luggage and broken wreckage. He was only still for a heartbeat. The smell of fuel overwhelmed him and he thought:
This thing is going to explode!

In his past dozen years of nomadic, on-the-edge existence, Paul had learned when it was time to get the hell out. He lurched blindly
toward the cool air cascading from a broken window and quickly pulled himself through it and out into the frigid wilderness, immediately sinking up to his thighs in deep snow. The sickening stench of fuel filled his nostrils and he waded, as if through quicksand, away from the wreckage. Only then did he turn to look at the plane.
Holy shit
, he thought, as he stared at what was left. The plane was upside down and both of its wings had been ripped completely off. His next thought was disbelief, followed by anger. The pilot had crashed.

“
You dumb, fucking asshole!” His words rang into the night as he put distance between himself and the wreckage, his legs punching deep into the snowpack. “What the fuck were you doing, you stupid son of a bitch?”

His fear sailed skyward with every word. Pain ripped through his stomach and he felt blood, warm and wet, flowing from a gash on his forehead as he stumbled through a void of darkness. Dense walls of gnarled, leafless trees pressed in from all sides, and above them was nothing but an oppressive cloak of weather. Paul turned his face to the sky and gulped the sharp night air. His heartbeat hammered in his ears as he began to search for a way forward.

A single word pulsed through Paul’s frightened brain:
escape
. His immediate thought was to put distance between himself and the plane. It was bitingly cold, but he was oblivious. He’d slept on the street so often he was accustomed to the bitter chill of night. He had also spent his fair share of time in the bush, both during his training as a naval cadet when he was a teenager, and in his ten years kicking across the country. He scanned the dense brush that surrounded him for a clearing. The terrain was rugged, and the snow was shockingly deep. Still, he was a survivor. He thought briefly of his duffle bag somewhere in the wreckage. In it were his wallet, five changes of clothes and a few personal effects—his life’s possessions. He pushed the thought of losing them to the back of his mind. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d
headed out with nothing but the clothes on his back. He also thought about the pouch of tobacco and the rolling papers he’d had on his lap; gone, too. Stopping in the thigh-deep snow, Paul shoved his hand into his jean jacket pocket and fished out the single cigarette he’d rolled before the plane had crashed.
One end was wet, so he tore it off and, pulling out the lighter he’d stashed in the front pocket of his jeans, he lit the other end.

Paul stood still for a moment, inhaling deeply. As smoke snaked into his lungs, he tried to settle his raw-edged nerves. He’d head in the direction the plane had been travelling. He reasoned that the town they were bound for couldn’t be that far away if they were coming in for a landing. Once there, he’d hit the road, hitchhiking, as he always did to put distance between himself and his troubles. If he left now, no one would miss him.

E
rik Vogel came to his passion for flying honestly. Vogel means “bird” in German, and Erik grew up in the slipstream of flight. His father, William Vogel, was a senior pilot with Air Canada, Canada’s largest commercial airline. From an early age, Erik had watched his dad don a crisp white shirt, navy blazer and captain’s hat, shoulder his enormous leather flight bag, and head off for work. While most of his friends’ fathers were bound for nearby offices, stores or work sites, Erik’s dad was winging across the country or around the world.

William Vogel, however, was more than a pilot—he was a prominent political figure. In 1973, when Erik was thirteen, his dad successfully ran for public office and became a civic counsellor in Surrey, a growing municipality forty minutes’ drive southeast of Vancouver. By the time Erik graduated from high school in 1978, his dad was mayor. Bill Vogel had a reputation for scheduling his flights around council meetings and the multi-tasking mayor’s expectation that his oldest son would make something of his life was high.

Though Bill had urged his son to pursue flight training with the military as he had, Erik chose a different route. Two months after
he graduated from high school, the eighteen-year-old began his pilot’s education at Trinity Western College, a nearby small Christian liberal arts school. Erik selected Trinity not because of any religious devotion, but because its aviation program was considered more prestigious than many of the smaller private flying schools in the area. Largely owner-operated, most local flight schools provided little more than the requisite forty-five hours of instruction required to certify for a private pilot’s licence. Trinity, by contrast, offered a five-semester program from which graduates emerged with a commercial pilot’s licence. For Erik, this was to be his fast track to becoming a pilot for a major commercial airline.

After a discouraging desk-bound semester studying avionics and the principles of flight, Erik was allowed to take to the sky. His training took place in a Cessna 150—a trim two-seater with dual controls. Unlike the jetliners his father flew, the cockpit of the Cessna was like a steamer trunk with windows. The top of the console was level with Erik’s eyes, making him feel like a small child who couldn’t quite see over the dashboard.

Erik folded his lanky frame into the tight cockpit and stared nervously at the controls—an unsettling array of dials, levers, switches and knobs. Though he’d studied avionics on paper, the instruments crowded in front of him seemed like confusing clock faces in a surreal Dali painting. He was practically thigh to thigh with his instructor, a squat nugget of a man with a weathered face and thick meaty hands, which he jabbed toward the instruments, asking Erik to identify them in turn.

Airspeed indicator. Artificial horizon. Altimeter. Turn and bank indicator. Heading indicator. Vertical speed indicator. Compass
.

Then Erik was nervously ticking his way down the pre-takeoff checklist and run-up procedures.

Priming engine. Fuel mixture: full rich. Fuel selector: on. Carburetor head: cold. Throttle: one-quarter
.

His instructor, seemingly satisfied, hit the ignition switch and after a few creaky turns, the propeller blurred into motion. The heavy hum of the engine filled the cockpit while Erik sat stiffly, awkward and oversized in the small space. He felt compressed, surrounded by a flimsy bubble of metal and Plexiglas, and held the control yoke in a death grip.

“Lightly on the controls,” the instructor counselled, inviting Erik to follow his movements. “Same with your feet. Lightly on the pedals.”

The instructor punched a button on the NAV/COM panel and requested clearance. His communication with the control tower, clipped and precise, sounded like a rapid-fire exchange in a foreign language. As soon as the tower cleared them, the instructor throttled forward and the plane began to taxi toward the runway. “Hardest thing to master, taxiing,” Erik remembers him saying.

Beneath the soles of his running shoes Erik could feel the pedals gently moving, first one, then the other. The instructor deftly aligned the plane with the centre line of the runway awaiting final clearance. When he got it, he opened up the throttle in a smooth practiced movement. The engine roared and the plane accelerated down the runway. The control yoke eased back beneath Erik’s hands. Then, without effort or warning, the small craft was airborne. It climbed steadily, and as it rose, the buildings of the airport appeared below, grey and brick-like, and the sound of the engine seemed deafening despite Erik’s headset. The plane steadily gained altitude and in the co-pilot’s seat, Erik let the instructor’s movements at the controls radiate through his hands and feet. Exhilaration surged through him.