Into the Abyss

by Carol Shaben

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2012 Carol Shaben

  Flight route based on an original, copyright © 1984 Library and Archives Canada.

  Canadian Aviation Safety Board Civil Aviation Occurrence Report, Wapiti Aviation Ltd.

  Piper Navajo Chieftain PA-31-350 C-GXUC, High Prairie, Alberta, 20 mi SE, October 19, 1984.

  Report Number 84-H40006, Appendix B.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Grand Central Publishing, a division of the Hachette Book Group, and in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Publishers Limited. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Shaben, Carol

  Into the abyss : how a deadly plane crash changed the lives of a pilot, a politician, a criminal and a cop / Carol Shaben.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36024-3

  1. Airplane crash survival—Alberta, Northern. 2. Commuter aircraft—Accidents—Alberta,

  Northern. 3. Aircraft accidents—Alberta, Northern. I. Title.

  TL553.9.S53 2012 363.12′4 C2012-902072-9

  Maps by Andrew Roberts

  Cover Design by Mario Arturo

  Image Credits: Joni Niemelä

  v3.1

  For Riyad

  SOUTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA COAST

  OVERLAND RESCUE ROUTE AND CRASH SITE

  Flight route based on an original, copyright © 1984 Library and Archives Canada. Canadian Aviation Safety Board Civil Aviation Occurrence Report, Wapiti Aviation Ltd. Piper Navajo Chieftain PA-31-350 C-GXUC, High Prairie, Alberta, 20 mi SE, October 19, 1984. Report Number 84-H40006, Appendix B.

  It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  PART I DEPARTURE

  IMPACT

  PART II FLIGHT

  WAPITI

  PART III THRESHOLD

  BURIED

  FIRE

  MISSING

  CONFESSION

  SEARCH

  ABORT

  CRIMINAL

  ICE

  RESCUE

  Photo Insert

  PART IV HERO

  INQUEST

  AFTERLIFE

  FATE

  ATONEMENT

  RETURN

  EPILOGUE: SURVIVORS

  NOTES

  IMAGE CREDITS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  I first learned of my father’s plane crash from the Jerusalem Post. I was twenty-two and working as a journalist in the Middle East. The crash happened on October 19, 1984, but I didn’t find out about it until two days later. I was sitting at my old metal desk with a cup of mint tea and the morning paper. That day it wasn’t regional conflict or politics that caught my attention, but the headline of a short news item buried at the bottom of an inside page: Party Leader Killed in Alberta Plane Crash.

  The article was tiny—fewer than fifty words—but its impact was staggering. “Grant Notley, leader of the New Democratic Party in Alberta, and five other people were killed in the crash of their twin-engine plane,” the Associated Press reported in the opening line. I read on in disbelief. Four survivors had spent the night and much of the next day huddled in deep snow and sub-zero temperatures before being rescued. Among them was the provincial housing minister, Larry Shaben: my father.

  I dropped the paper, grabbed the phone. My brother James picked up.

  “Dad’s fine,” he assured me, but for some reason I didn’t believe him.

  “Put Mom on,” I practically yelled.

  “He’s okay,” my mother told me. “We were going to call, but it’s been crazy and, well … we didn’t want to worry you.”

  I was crying, feeling very far away. “I’m coming home,” I said.

  It was Christmas before I could get time off work to return to Canada. Two months had passed and my father’s physical wounds had healed. Inside, however, something elemental had changed. He was subdued, quietly haunted, in a way I had never seen before. He’d lost a close colleague that night and had seen others from our town and the surrounding communities die.

  My family had experienced the event firsthand and assimilated its extraordinary details. The survivors of the crash—a rookie pilot, an accused criminal, a cop taking him to face charges, and my dad, a prominent politician—had boarded the plane as total strangers. Men from wildly different backgrounds, they had helped one another survive a long, bitter night in the Canadian wilderness. The story had a mythical quality that tested the bounds of reality.

  Distance, the crash’s impact on my father, and the unlikely friendships that formed between the survivors lodged the event firmly in my psyche. Who were these men? What had they experienced on that snowy, fog-drenched night as they struggled together to cheat death? How had it altered them? If I faced a similar near-death experience, would it change me? Would I continue to live my life as I had been living it?

  My curiosity was insatiable. Though I peppered my dad with questions, his answers were disappointingly vague or simply not forthcoming. The crash had affected him deeply, but how remained a mystery he kept largely to himself. He refused to discuss the people who had died or what he had shared with the men who had survived.

  “It was a long, cold night,” the Edmonton Journal quoted him as saying shortly after the crash. “We talked about things, private things I’d rather not discuss.”

  “He has nightmares,” was all my mother would say.

  In the months and years following the crash, my father forged extraordinary bonds with his fellow survivors, especially Paul Archambault, the twenty-seven-year-old criminal on the plane. Every so often, the scruffy drifter would arrive unannounced. No matter how busy my father’s schedule was, he always had time for Paul. My dad would talk about these meetings with delight and obvious affection. Their relationship was important to him in a way I never fully understood. He cared deeply about how Paul’s life was progressing and worried during his long absences, as a father would for an itinerant son. After one visit, my dad spoke enthusiastically about a dog-eared sheaf of papers that Paul had brought with him, a manuscript he was writing about his experience that night.

  My dad also kept in touch with Erik Vogel, the young pilot who had flown the plane. Every year on the anniversary of the crash, Dad would call him to talk about how lucky they were to be alive. Erik had been just twenty-four—two years older than I was at the time—when the crash occurred. Years later, though juggling the demands of parenthood and my own business, I felt compelled to seek him out. I found him working in a nearby city as a firefighter and living with his family on a quiet tract of land less than an hour’s drive from my home.

  I arranged a meeting and drove out to Erik’s farm. The former pilot’s first words to me were “I’ve been waiting years for you.” Over coffee in his kitchen, within sight of a solid wood butcher-block table on loan from Sco
tt Deschamps, the fourth crash survivor, Erik shared his story. Though almost twenty years had passed since the ordeal, he cried as he recounted the events of that night. They had never left him. Nor had his burden of guilt over the deaths of six passengers. When I drove away hours later, I carried his dust-covered leather flight bag—a tote the size of a small suitcase in which he had filed away his pilot logbook, years of airline rejection letters, court documents, photos and every newspaper clipping he had seen about the tragedy or those involved. Sifting through the contents of Erik’s flight bag was like opening the door to a lost world. All of a sudden an event that had seemed surreal came into sharp, dramatic focus. My dad, it turned out, was not the only one to have been transfigured by what happened that long-ago night.

  Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist who coined the phrase “follow your bliss,” wrote extensively about man’s quest for meaning. According to Campbell, all heroic journeys, from the time of the ancients to the present day, begin with a call to adventure—a challenge or opportunity to face the unknown and gain something of physical or spiritual value. This call often comes in the form of a transformative crisis, an event that kicks out our foundations of complacency and makes us examine universal questions of existence: Why was I born? What happens when I die? How can I overcome my fears and weaknesses and be happy?

  Few of us will ever face the kind of life-and-death trauma experienced by the men in this story. Their ordeal forced them to confront the precious and limited nature of their existence on earth. In the words of Campbell, they entered the forest “at the darkest point where there is no path.” How these four men found their way forward that night and in the years that followed is both remarkable and inspirational.

  Scott Deschamps—the rookie RCMP officer who had boarded the flight handcuffed to Paul Archambault—was no exception. Unlike Erik, however, it took me three years to persuade Scott to be interviewed. Perhaps more than any of the survivors, he had deliberately, painstakingly, rebuilt his life as a result of his experience. His resistance to share his story, Scott told me, was rooted in its deeply personal nature. He had spent more than a decade trying to understand what had happened to him the night of the crash. He eventually agreed to be interviewed only because of my family connection to the story.

  Researching Paul Archambault’s life was far more difficult. How does one go about unearthing details about a vagabond who’d been drifting since he was fifteen? Thinking it was a long shot, I placed ads in newspapers on either side of the country—one in the city where Paul was living at the time of the crash and the other in the town where he’d grown up some 3,800 kilometres away. To my amazement, my phone started ringing almost immediately. Those who called not only remembered Paul, they told me that he had made a lasting impression on them. Though Paul’s parents were dead, an aunt in his hometown of Aylmer, Quebec, contacted me. When I met her, I soon realized that she and her husband hadn’t been close to Paul since he was a child. Nor were they in touch with other members of his family, with the exception of a younger brother who had been institutionalized for much of his early life. They didn’t know the brother’s whereabouts, but told me that he called from time to time.

  “When he does, could you give him my number?” I asked without hope. Months later Paul’s brother called. Miraculously, in his possession was the tattered sixty-page manuscript my father had spoken of a quarter century earlier.

  By that point, the story had sunk its hooks into me. At its underbelly was a compelling and dangerous truth about the commuter airline industry. Across the globe, barely a week passes without news of a small plane crash. Contrary to public perception, commuter airlines represent the largest sector of commercial aviation in North America and perhaps the world, accounting for more than half of all domestic flights. In Canada, a country characterized by its sparse population and rugged, remote terrain, small planes are a lifeline for residents in isolated, northern communities like the one in Alberta where I grew up. Commuter operations are the workhorse carriers that connect thousands of people to larger population centres and provide a vital source of supplies and medical support.

  Bush flying, as it is still known in Canada’s north, has always been a dangerous business—a hard-driving, high-risk profession ranked as one of the deadliest in North America. The pilots are often young and idealistic, driven by a desire for freedom and adventure. With few exceptions they are trying to work their way toward careers with major airlines. First, however, they must pay their dues by building logbook hours flying for small airlines. Some pay with their lives. Inside Erik’s battered flight bag, he’d kept a file thick with articles on dozens of small plane crashes that had occurred in the years since his tragedy. “It’s frustrating to see it happen over and over again,” he told me.

  The more I read about the commuter airline industry, or heard about yet another small plane crash, the more shocked I became. A major investigative report on Canadian aviation incidents between 2000 and 2005—before the federal government reduced public access to its aviation occurrence reports—noted that during that five-year period there were literally thousands of reported incidents involving danger or potential danger to aircraft passengers. How was it that the flying public wasn’t in an uproar?

  Typically it’s only when large jets fall from the sky that people take notice. Outraged by the body count, they demand government investigations and seek ironclad assurances that the airline at fault addresses safety concerns. Meanwhile, small passenger planes continue to crash with frightening regularity. But apart from the loved ones of those who die, few sound the alarm. When they do, it’s a faint cry in the wilderness that goes unheeded. Even fewer consider the pilots in these crashes—often young and frequently scared—who battle fatigue, terrain, weather or mechanical malfunction on a daily basis.

  As is sadly the case when one tries to apportion blame for the vagaries of fate and circumstance, I came to see Dale Wells, the owner of the airline involved in my father’s crash, as the villain in this tragedy. It took me years to summon the courage to talk to Dale. Our eventual rendezvous at an Edmonton restaurant completely reversed my opinion. Dale was both humble and forthright. Like Erik, he had also kept meticulous records. After our meeting he walked me to his car in the parking lot and handed over a massive box filled with files and documents.

  “Say hello to your father,” he said as we parted. “I always thought he was a wonderful man.”

  My father didn’t live to see me finish this book. In April 2008 he was diagnosed with cancer. He died less than five months later. As I was preparing to board the flight home to Alberta to be at his bedside, I asked him if there was anything he wanted me to bring.

  “Your manuscript,” he said.

  I’d written only a few rough chapters, but it didn’t matter. He insisted.

  I spent two days at the hospital. And during those two days I read to him. It was the last time we were together.

  This book is my tribute to my father, Larry Shaben, and to Erik Vogel, Scott Deschamps and Paul Archambault. Their strength, courage and dignity are an inspiring example of how individuals can journey from the depths of tragedy and loss to the riches of lives begun anew.

  PART I

  Fate rules the affairs of mankind with no recognizable order.

  LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA

  DEPARTURE

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1984

  Erik Vogel was in over his head and didn’t know how to get out. There were half a dozen reasons why the twenty-four-year-old rookie pilot didn’t feel comfortable flying tonight, but with his job at Wapiti Aviation on the line—or so it seemed to him—none of them counted. Erik had been in and out of cloud for most of his outbound flight from the small northern Canadian city of Grande Prairie, Alberta, and had watched wet snow continue to fall. The wheels of his ten-seater plane had touched down at the municipal airport in Edmonton, Canada’s most northerly provincial capital, just as the last light of day was leaving the murky sky. He was r
unning behind schedule and working hard to make up time. Standing 6′3″ with a lean, athletic build, warm brown eyes and a wavy crop of dark hair, Erik appeared every inch a young, attractive and confident aviator. Inside, however, he was scared.

  After unloading his passengers and their luggage, he’d crossed the tarmac to the terminal building to collect his outgoing passengers. He glanced at his watch: 6:40 p.m. That gave him only twenty minutes for ticketing and check-in, refuelling, and loading the luggage and passengers for the return flight north. There was no way he’d be off the ground by his scheduled departure time of 7:00.

  His only hope was that tonight would be a repeat of last night and that there wouldn’t be passengers bound for the small communities of High Prairie and Fairview, which had tiny airports with no air traffic control. He also prayed that by some miracle he’d pick up a co-pilot. As he approached the check-in counter Erik was overjoyed to see Linda Gayle, Wapiti’s Fort McMurray agent, already selling tickets. Wapiti retained Linda on a part-time basis for the Fort McMurray flights and she wasn’t obliged to help out pilots flying other routes, but tonight she’d decided to do him this favour.

  “What have we got?”

  “We’re fully booked,” she replied.

  “So no chance of a co-pilot?”

  Linda shook her head. The seat had been sold to accommodate another passenger.

  His stomach churning, Erik asked the question that had been plaguing him ever since he’d talked to the pilot who’d flown the morning schedule. “Any passengers bound for High Prairie?”

  “Four,” Linda told him. “Plus two on standby.”

  A town of 2,500 people 365 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, High Prairie was on the other side of a high ridge of rugged and densely wooded terrain known as Swan Hills. Because the airport had no control tower, regulations dictated that pilots could fly into High Prairie only in visual conditions, meaning when the weather was clear. The pilot on the a.m. sked had warned Erik that there was a lot of snow on the runway and he’d had a hard time taking off.