Cover
Also by Peter Pigott
Air Canada: The History (2014)
From Far and Wide: A History of Canada’s Arctic Sovereignty (2011)
Sailing Seven Seas: A History of the Canadian Pacific Line (2010)
Canada in Sudan: War Without Borders (2009)
Canada in Afghanistan: The War So Far (2007)
Royal Transport: An Inside Look at the History of British Royal Travel (2005)
On Canadian Wings: A Century of Flight (2005)
Wingwalkers: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Other Airline (2003)
Taming the Skies: A Celebration of Canadian Flight (2003)
Wings Across Canada: An Illustrated History of Canadian Aviation (2002)
Flying Canucks III: Famous Canadian Aviators (2002)
Flying Canucks II: Pioneers of Canadian Aviation (2002)
National Treasure: The History of Trans Canada Airlines (2001)
Wingwalkers: The Story of Canadian Airlines International (1998)
Flying Colours: A History of Commercial Aviation in Canada (1997)
Flying Canucks: Famous Canadian Aviators (1996)
Gateways: Airports of Canada (1996)
Hong Kong Rising: The History of a Remarkable Place (1995)
Kai Tak: The History of Aviation in Hong Kong (1988)
Dedication
For my wife, Donna
“Behind every great man …”
Okay, well, I’m not that great,
But she certainly is.
Introduction
The idea to write about the unthinkable — the reasons for twisted pieces of airplane scattered about a fuel-soaked field and charred flesh being bagged for the morgue, in short, a book on air crashes — was born at a postcard-perfect scene: the view of the Ottawa River from the Britannia Yacht Club.
Every November 11, I join other members at the club to honour those who lost their lives in defence of Canada. Facing Lac Deschênes, we gather at the flagpole and unsuccessfully attempt to shelter against the biting wind while “In Flanders Fields” is recited. In 2014 at the ceremony’s completion, an elderly lady hearing of my interest in aviation asked if she could speak to me. As a girl, she had seen a plane crash not far from where we stood.
On a July afternoon in 1945, she and a number of local children watched a Canso flying boat do “touch and goes” on the lake. It circled over Shirleys Bay, then lost altitude to bounce down on the Ottawa River, taxied toward Britannia Beach, and took off again. The yacht club harboured the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) “crash boat,” which usually performed circles on the lake for pilots to gauge the water, but the old woman couldn’t recall if it had been in use that day.
The Canso was part of the RCAF’s 162 Squadron, which had just returned home to Sydney, Nova Scotia, from Reykjavik, Iceland. Having survived the war, the aircraft and crew were sent to RCAF Station Rockcliffe, Ottawa, to be outfitted for a photographic survey of Baffin Island. That sunny afternoon, as they were practising landings on the lake, Death’s scythe reached out to them. The children watched in horror as the Canso touched down on the river and its wing tipped into the water and tore off. The aircraft then flipped over and began sinking. Holed in the fuselage and so close to the Deschênes Rapids, it went to the lake bottom within minutes, trapping the crew inside.
Wreckage of the Canso flying boat brought ashore, Lac Deschênes, July 1945. Library and Archives Canada.
By the time boats from the yacht club got to the crash, the scene was marked by floating logbooks, oil slicks, and bodies. Killed were five crew members, with two men injured. What was left of the flying boat was dragged up onto the shore, and the wreckage was sent to the RCAF station at Trenton. The squadron was disbanded a month later, and in the euphoria of VJ Day, what happened that summer afternoon on the Ottawa River fell through the cracks, remaining only in the memories of those who, like the old woman, had witnessed it.
Air disasters were much in the news in 2014, as the death toll in commercial aviation multiplied four times over the previous year’s numbers. The tragedies that befell the two Malaysia Airlines aircraft in March and July had resulted in the deaths of all 537 people on board. By year’s end, when 1,183 passengers and crew had died in air crashes, one could be forgiven for assuming 2014 was the worst year in aviation history.
But that wasn’t the case. It is just that people have short memories. In 1998, there had been 1,242 fatalities; in 1996, 1,845; and in 1985, 1,283 were killed. Even worse were the 1970s, when in both 1972 and 1973 aviation deaths topped 2,000. With the Internet and satellite-feed television coverage, there is nothing more telegenic than the shattered, smoking remnants of an airliner with the passengers’ personal effects strewn about the landscape. It is little wonder that aviation is thought of as inherently unsafe. Perhaps humans weren’t meant to rattle around in a metal tube at 33,000 feet, and the fear of flying (especially fear of crashing) affects us all. A high-risk endeavour such as this, we tell ourselves, was never meant to be error-free or entirely safe.
I knew the statistics better than anyone: that the death risk for passengers on commercial airlines is 1 in 45 million flights, that flying is the safest mode of transport, and that you’re more likely to die from falling out of bed than in a plane crash. As sociologist Barry Glassner noted in his book The Culture of Fear, in the entire history of commercial aviation, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Four times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year. With the Malaysian Airlines tragedies following each other so quickly, the electronic media discovered what newspaper editors had known since the 1920s: that because air crashes are so infrequent (compared with the daily carnage on the highways), when they do happen, they make for gut-wrenching, fear-inducing headlines and dramatic images. We live in a world of the visually sensational rather than intelligent discourse, and every story of planes crashing due to metal fatigue, turbulence, or just vanishing only serves to confirm our sense of flight as unnatural, uncomfortable, and inevitably catastrophic.
The reality is that, despite the increased speeds of aircraft today and the traffic density on airways, the risk of accident occurrence has lessened dramatically. In the short history of commercial aviation, safety began with the introduction of jet airliners in the late 1950s, which were more reliable and easier to fly than the complex piston-engine aircraft that preceded them. With so many redundant systems, aircraft today are designed to fly themselves, making accidents highly improbable. When they do occur, accidents are the result of a series of interconnecting events — mechanical or human failures that, had they happened alone, wouldn’t have caused the crash.
The game Jenga is a good metaphor for the complex probabilities of an air crash. Every time a block is pulled from the stack, it has subtle interactions with the other blocks, loosening or tightening them. The missing blocks — human, organizational, and mechanical — are the weaknesses in aviation that inexorably bring the plane down. It was this unforeseen sequence of events, what accident investigators call the “tight coupling” of complex interacting systems, that killed 1,183 people in 2014.
While the present level of safety has come about through radar, the flight data recorder, computers, and crew resource management, less acknowledged is the debt owed to accident investigators