Ironically, the other crash in Canada that the controller was investigating at the time was that of a Loening Cabin Amphibian (G-CARN). On August 9 it had stalled on a turn near Beaumaris, Ontario, killing two passengers and injuring five.
Since there were no weather forecasts, radio time signals, or lighted airfields available to pilots in those days, flying in Canada was largely confined to the summer, fair weather, and daylight hours. Celestial navigation — using a sextant to locate the horizon on cloudy days — was impossible in an open cockpit with freezing air rushing past, to say nothing of trying to do that wearing heavy gloves! After years of visual navigating, the legendary bush pilots who had opened the country to aviation believed it was what you saw and felt while in the air, not what your earphones told you. Radio beams, they were convinced, would never replace “gut” instinct. IFR (instrument flight rules), they joked, meant “I Fly by the River,” the only sure highway after sunset. The novel idea that cross-country flying, especially after dark, should depend not on what a pilot could see or feel but what he heard began in 1926 in the United States when the U.S. Bureau of Standards copied a German idea to use radio not only for communication but also direction. Radio transmitters emitting beams to guide aircraft through clouds, fog, and in the dark were first tested in 1926–27 at Maryland’s College Park Airport before being employed across the country and later in Canada.
An airfield was wherever a pilot could safely take off from or land, and aviators either constructed their own or reused the convenient piece of land they descended on. In June 1919, for example, when John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown searched for an airfield in St. John’s, Newfoundland, from which they could conquer the Atlantic Ocean, they rented a meadow from a Mr. Lester. Since their heavily laden Vickers Vimy needed every inch of its 400 yards to lift off, the pair hired local workmen to clear the field of rocks and trees.[6] On April 25, 1928, when the American aviator Floyd Bennett fell ill in Quebec City and there was no airport to deliver the pneumonia serum for him, Charles Lindbergh chose the historic Plains of Abraham to land on. Today, for a country now peppered with airfields and airports, it is incredible to think that, with the exception of St. Hubert, Quebec, there were so few airfields in Canada less than a century ago. Because of the lack of any national aviation infrastructure, all air mail between Montreal or Toronto and Vancouver was sent below the border to connect with the U.S. Air Mail system and then north again from Seattle.
To build and maintain the first civil airways across the United States, the U.S. government gave the project to the Bureau of Lighthouses. Its Airways Division was made responsible for surveying the continent for suitable airfields, constructing them with runways and lighting, supplying weather information, and installing radio stations. Since Canada had no such facility, Ottawa justified the building of an airway as a defensive measure. On February 22, 1929, the Department of National Defence was ordered to construct a chain of airports from coast to coast that would be linked by beacons and eventually radio. The brainchild of J.A. Wilson and Army Chief of Staff Major-General A.G.L. McNaughton, the Trans Canada Airway had its considerable expense justified by the necessity, in case of war on the Pacific coast, to move RCAF aircraft from Trenton, Ontario, to reinforce squadrons in British Columbia. Whatever the reason, however, constructing the airway changed the country as much as the Canadian Pacific Railway had done in 1885.
| Canadian Aviation Accident Statistics in 1929 | |
| Accidents: | 33 |
| Pilots Killed: | 17 |
| Pilots Injured: | 12 |
| Passengers Killed: | 17 |
Stretching 3,314 miles from Toronto to Vancouver, with a side line north from Lethbridge to Calgary and Edmonton when completed in 1939–41, the airway connected eight public airports, 11 municipal airports, and 79 airfields. With revolving beacons and 35 radio range stations, the whole system allowed for the reliable delivery of air mail and eventually passengers across the dominion. The entire enterprise, unknown to and unappreciated by the majority of Canadians, rivalled the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, only 54 years earlier.
Commercial aviation was tied to the fortunes of the mining industry, so it was accepted that in Canada it could only pay its own way with air mail contracts. The Canadian Post Office Department reluctantly agreed to participate in this endeavour but demanded that its mail be flown at night (after it had been collected) and on a tight schedule, whatever the weather. As in the United States, in attempting to meet both requirements, Canadian pilots encountered new problems such as ice accumulation, turbulence, and loss of spatial awareness. Then there was the cold. Pilots flew in open cockpits, enduring frigid temperatures that cut their skin until they bled. Every night in the winter, so the aircraft could be used the following day, oil had to be drained out of the engine before it froze. The next morning the engine was preheated with a plumber’s “blow pot” and the oil, now an icicle, was defrosted before being reinstalled.
Dangerous in a fabric-covered aircraft, labour-intensive in below-zero temperatures, and unreliable altogether, the whole process didn’t lend itself to the efficiencies of scheduled flight.[7] The railways, as Post Office Department officials were quick to point out, were unaffected by these problems. Desperate for government largesse, the struggling air companies risked lives and aircraft to fulfill their contracts, ignoring weights and balances, weather conditions, and pilot fatigue at their peril.
Just as ancient mariners steered by the North Star, aviators relied on the Trans Canada Airway’s radio towers. They emitted steady, directional Morse code for the letter A (· -), and the letter N (- ·) so the pilot knew on which side of the airway he had strayed.
Air Canada Archives.
Although a requirement for a commercial pilot licence, flying at night in Canada, especially in the winter, had rarely been done. Before rural electrification it meant venturing into total blackness. Airfields, when you could find them after dark, were unlit, and altimeter or glide-slope information was unavailable. In the dark, pilots inevitably approached too low, succumbing to the “black hole approach.” Even today this illusion tricks pilots into thinking they are higher than they actually are, causing them to fly dangerously low approaches that end in crashes. For a pilot of the 1930s, after dark, all of Canada was a black hole. Aircraft weren’t equipped with flares or landing lights until 1932. Even then pilots disliked using flares to illuminate the runway because, when dropped over the airfield, they caused deep shadows that made landings even more confusing.
And if the pilot did make it down, runways were lit with flare pots, if the snowplow operators could get out to the airfield in time. It was no wonder that both Douglas and Boeing equipped their aircraft with landing lights in the nose and wings to give pilots (and their passengers) a reasonable chance of survival. As for the Trans Canada Airway’s new revolving acetylene beacons, they were useless in bad weather when really needed. Flying after sunset, one pilot recalled, was “like flying in a black sack.”
None of this discouraged James Richardson who, after intense lobbying in Ottawa, was awarded night air mail contracts in 1930. He renamed his company Canadian Airways Ltd. (CAL) and bought more aircraft. Safe flying was very much his emphasis. For every fatal accident, he claimed CAL had flown 410,629 miles. To entice reluctant customers, perhaps with reference to the frontier conditions his company operated in, he advertised, “Living may be Dangerous but Air Travel is safe.” Given the rail and (soon) road network in the country, air mail was still considered a fad, but the contracts did foster the growth of commercial aviation, especially in the bush. By 1930 a credible 5,685 passengers had been transported by Canadian Airways, albeit in cramped conditions. If there was a dog team, the passengers were squeezed into the cockpit with the pilot, who also had to clean out the cabin afterward. Needless to say, if a more lucrative cargo of air mail was taken on, the passengers could expect to be dumped anywhere en route. The Post Office Department’s stipulation was: “Letters First, People Perhaps.” Night flying, of course, was exclusively for mail, the reason given being: “You cannot kill a mailbag.”[8]
Fulfilling the sought-after mail contracts on a schedule took a murderous toll. On June 2, 1930, CAL’s