by Alec Brew
The senior pilot was to be Thor Tjontveit, an Alaskan of Norwegian descent, who was a pilot on Wien Alaska Airlines. The co-pilot was less experienced, being only 22 years old. He was Rolf Storhaug the son of an SAS captain. Finally, the navigator was 48-year old Einar Sverre Pedersen, the chief navigator of SAS, who had played an important role in pioneering the trans-Polar route ten years previously.
The aircraft was a Piper PA-23 Aztec, a widely used four to six-seat light aircraft powered by two 250 hp Lycoming O-540 engines. They named the aircraft Spirit of Fairbanks, though the flight would commence in Anchorage, and also painted on the side ‘Anchorage – Oslo, 29 Hours. First twin-engined aircraft over the Pole.’ As it turned out they had somewhat jumped the gun with this claim.
The normal range of an Aztec was 1200 miles at 200 mph cruising speed, so the flight had to be planned over several short stages, leaving plenty of reserves to reach alternative airfields if that were at all possible. From Anchorage they would go via Fairbanks to Inuvik, one of the biggest fur-trading centres in northern Canada. They would then traverse the northern reaches of Canada via the weather stations at Mould Bay, Isachsen, Eureka and Alert. They would then go via northern Greenland, to Spitzbergen and then to Tromsø in northern Norway, before heading south to Oslo. They estimated the flight would take 29 hours, including stops for refuelling.
The major concern was the navigation. Navigation aids were almost non existent in the region, and a magnetic compass was entirely useless as the magnetic pole was only 600 miles distant. There was a Loran station on the north-west Coast, but the signals from this were adversely affected by the conductivity of the permanently frozen tundra. Map-reading, the mainstay of light aircraft navigation, could not be trusted either. The only maps of the region were based on aerial photographs, and could be misleading, especially when so much of the landscape looked like an endless vista of snow-covered mountains. There are no towns or other man-made features to help identify the position on the ground, and in any case in mid-October, when they would be taking off, there were only about 5 hours of daylight in those latitudes.
The pioneering work done by the airlines that flew the route, had produced new grid maps and the Polar Path Gyro, and it was on these that Sverre Pedersen would rely on to steer their course. A forced landing was always a possibility in a light aircraft, and so the Aztec was loaded up with many days of provisions in case of this eventuality.
Having positioned themselves from Anchorage to Fairbanks for the start of the pioneering part of the flight, they took off for Inuvik on Friday 13 October, an inauspicious date on which to start. The Aztec was fully fuelled and heavily laden, and it was already afternoon when they set course for Fort Yukon on the Yukon River. Before long, darkness fell and the long hours of the Arctic night fell over the landscape. The shortness of the day meant they intended to complete most of the journey during the hours of darkness.
As they crossed the Canadian border in the early hours of 14 October, the flight had been uneventful. At about 3 am they flew over the small town of Old Crow, on the Porcupine River, at a height of 9500 feet. They reported their position over the radio, and this was acknowledged. Just after this the port engine began to run rough, and shortly afterwards stopped completely.
They considered the options, and agreed to continue on to Inuvik, which was about 170 miles from Old Crow. There was no reason to think that the other engine would let them down. They thought the fuel pump on the port engine had packed up. With a much reduced fuel load, they should be able to make it on one engine. The most serious problem, however, was that the port engine ran the dynamo, which powered the electrical system, so that the radio no longer worked, and they could not report their situation. Not only that, the gyro and other powered instruments no longer worked, and neither did the lights.
It soon became clear, however, that they were unable to maintain height on the power of the starboard engine alone. A forced landing looked inevitable, but all they could see below them was the Richardson Mountains, which reached up to over 5600 feet. A forced landing there would mean almost certain death. They decided to alter course to the north, where there was lower ground. They aimed in the general direction of a radar station at Shingle Point, where there was a small airstrip. They reasoned that even if they could not make the strip, the radar station might pick them up on their screens and then notice when they went down.
They had not been flying on their new course for more then five minutes when the starboard engine began spluttering, and then shortly afterwards it too stopped. They quickly searched the mountain landscape in the semidarkness below. Luckily, they could see an opening in the mountains, which sloped gently downwards in their direction of flight. Tjontveit aimed for this slope as they all tightened their straps and braced themselves for the landing.
They came in to land at about 80 mph, and hit the ground with a resounding crash. The Aztec careered down the slope, the outer wings snapping off outboard of the engines. Inside the three men were banged around, but luckily they did not run over or hit anything very large. Eventually, the Aztec slid sideways and then came to a halt. The fuselage was still intact, and luckily it did not burst into flames.
Once they had regained their senses, with the relief of still being alive, and not badly hurt, they examined their situation. Pedersen was the most badly hurt. He had clearly broken his arm, and also had cuts and grazes to his head and face. Tjontveit had receive a heavy blow on the back of his head and Storhaug had a black eye and a bruised foot. They set about methodically dressing their various injuries, with torn strips of cloth.
They assessed their situation, deciding to follow the first rule of Arctic survival and stay with the wrecked aircraft. They knew an air search would be initiated for them when they became overdue at Inuvik, and the easiest thing for the rescuers to spot would be the aircraft. They had two or three weeks’ of supplies, so there was no problem on that score. Their greatest problem was going to be the cold, with night-time temperatures routinely dropping to minus 15 or 20 degrees Centigrade. The interior of the wrecked aircraft did not provide much shelter, so they began a search of the valley for something better.
They noticed both rabbits and ptarmigans in the valley, which would supplement their food supply if they were there for any length of time. They had not gone beyond the treeline that stretched through the region, so there was wood to make a fire. Eventually, they set up camp about a mile from the wreck in a sheltered spot where they could keep a fire going. They hoped the smoke from the fire would help searching planes to find them.
When they went down, the disappearance had been noticed on radar screens, and a rescue centre was established at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage. The searchers faced a daunting task, co-ordinating both American and Canadian searchers over an area roughly the size of Sweden. The air search from Inuvik was led by Flight Lieutenant John Crowford of the Royal Canadian Air Force and involved up to ten military and civil aircraft.
Mrs Pedersen flew from Sweden with her 20 year-old son Sverre. On their arrival in Anchorage, they heard that a man had been spotted by one of the searching aircraft, standing next to a fire. Her hopes were quickly dashed when the pilot reported that the man was clearly a hunter. Mrs Pedersen was allowed to board some of the searching aircraft to take part in the search herself.
76 The route of the final flight of Spirit of Fairbanks.
Soon after the hunter was sighted the weather took a turn for the worse, with strong winds and snow, hampering the rescuers. The three downed men huddled in their makeshift shelter as the blizzard raged around them. They knew they could survive, even in those conditions, for some time. They were already rationing their food, because they knew they had been off course, which would mean the search would take longer than if they had stuck to their planned track.
During the first week they heard the sound of aero engines twice. They actually saw a DC-3 droning by and frantically waved and signalled with a mirror to attr
act the attention of the crew. They threw petrol on the fire and sent sheets of flame shooting into the air, but it was to no avail. They were not seen.
After nine days in the frozen wilderness they were spotted not by the systematic searching but by sheer coincidence. A Fokker Friendship, flown by Robert Shinn with Ronald Wood as co-pilot, was forced to take a more northern track by bad weather, just as they had done. This took the Friendship over an area that had not been searched, and as they scanned the ground below, Shinn suddenly noticed the wrecked Piper.
As Shinn brought the airliner round for a second low pass over the wreck, they noticed the three men frantically waving by their shelter a little way away. Knowing they would shortly be rescued, the men gave up their rationing system, and hungrily devoured their food. The following day a rescue team reached them, and after ten days in the Arctic wilderness they were taken out.
They had been extremely lucky. The forced landing had been reasonably successful; they had survived with only minor injuries, when they could so easily have been killed; and they were found by an aircraft that should not have been where it was. The decision had just been made to search more to the east, well away from where they had forced landed. Who knows what would have happened to them, if Robert Shinn had not been forced off course, and over their lonely camp.
CHAPTER 23
Down in the Oman
Many of the stories in this book have described aircraft coming down in out of the way places and the subsequent search for them, with the searchers often having scant knowledge of their exact whereabouts. This final chapter is slightly different as it describes my own search for a downed aircraft, a Vickers Valetta, in the arid mountains of Oman, though the aircraft had come down many years before.
I arrived in the Sultanate of Oman in late 1977 to work for George Wimpey & Co. on the construction of a huge police training complex at a barren site about 20 kilometres from Nizwa. This town lies on the western side of the Hajar Mountains, about 150 kilometres from Muscat on the coast. Before I left for Oman I bought a book about the country, and was intrigued by a sentence in it which read ‘On the approach to Nizwa Airport we saw the shell of an aircraft which crashed in 1958’. I resolved to look for this wreck as soon as an opportunity presented itself, and to find out what had caused it to come down.
I quickly discovered that ‘Nizwa Airport’ was just a gravel strip in the desert next to the village of Firq, with a few fuel drums next to a barasti (palm leaf) shelter. It was right alongside Wimpey’s gravel-crushing plant in the wadi, which ran parallel. As one of my duties included checking on the output of the plant each day, I was able to keep a close eye on what was a surprisingly active runway. On top of the Hajar Mountains, 6000 feet up, was the Jebel Akhdar (Green Mountain), a plateau of agricultural land round the village of Saiq. The only way up there was by donkey path or to a short airstrip that had been built by the British. The Sultan of Oman’s Air Force (SOAF) ran a shuttle service up there from Firq airstrip, mostly using Short Skyvans, but occasionally with Bell UH-1 helicopters and Britten-Norman Islanders.
77. The wreckage of Valetta, VW817, by the airstrip at Firq.
I watched them landing and taking off almost every day, as well as other occasional visitors like Taylor-Woodrow’s Twin Otter. What I could not see anywhere around the airstrip was any sign of a wrecked aircraft. Enquiries led me to discover that there were two other airstrips near to Nizwa, one by the wadi on the other side of the town, and one next to the army barracks.
Nizwa is one of the largest towns in the Oman, hidden mostly underneath a large grove of date palms, but with the souk (market), mosque and a large stone fort in the centre. During the Imam’s revolt against the rule of the Sultan, in the late 1950s, this fort had been rocketed by British Venoms, as part of the military assistance the British gave the Sultan in quelling the revolt.
The old Sultan had been greatly against western influence creeping into Omani society. As late as 1970, despite being the second largest country on the Arabian peninisula, Oman possessed only 10 kilometres of tarmac road, and fewer than 1000 Omani children went to school. The old Sultan was removed almost bloodlessly by his son, Sultan Qaboos bin Sa’id, with the help of the British, and since then huge strides have been made in modernising the country.
An investigation of the airstrip beyond Nizwa, revealed that it was long disused. There was very little open area around, in an area where a wadi ran alongside the mountains from the village of Tanuf to Nizwa. Tanuf was completely deserted, and in ruins. As part of the suppression of the Imam’s revolt the people of Tanuf had been ordered out of their village, and it was then blown up by the British Army.
The last airstrip was by the army barracks, then occupied by the Jebel Regiment. A quick look at this short strip told me that there were no aircraft wrecks around it. Not only was it very short, but at one end was the army camp and at the other there was a 800 foot cliff, which meant taking off and landing were always done in the same direction. The only aircraft I ever saw use this strip, apart from helicopters, were the Pilatus Turbo-Porters of the Oman Police, though I have been assured that both Skyvans and Caribous, with heavy loads have also used this strip.
The police operated a sizeable air force of their own, and several of their Jet Ranger and Bell UH-1 helicopters were frequent visitors to our site, as it was a police training centre. They even operated a BAC 111 airliner, mainly for communications with Salalah, the southern part of Oman, separated from the north by the tail end of the Empty Quarter.
It was clear that the wreck mentioned in the book had to be in sight of the approach to the strip at Firq, but this could include many square miles of desert. The ground looked flat before you started to cross it, but was in fact very broken, criss-crossed with wadis and various hollows, any of which could have hidden the wreck.
Our day off was Friday, and during most Fridays I borrowed a Suzuki Jeep, or if I was lucky a Land Rover, and set out to explore this area, in as systematic a way as I could. I started with the area beneath the approach taken by the SOAF Skyvans when they flew up to Firq from Seeb Airport on the coast. The going was very slow indeed. Every hundred yards or so, I would find myself on the edge of a wadi into which I would have to find a way to drive down, and then another way to drive out. The temperature was usually around 100°F in the shade, and there was no shade. Even the jeeps I usually used were open-topped. On some days in the height of the summer it reached 120°F, within half a degree of 50°C.
There was no sign of the wreck, and my frustration increased. Then my attention was diverted by tales of other wrecks in the area. I was told of one at Ibri airstrip, to the north of Nizwa. One Friday I took a Land Rover and barrelled up the gravel road through Bahla to Ibri. There turned out to be two strips at Ibri. I passed the larger one before reaching the town. There was an American registered Turbo-Commander parked on it, by the road. It was quite strange to find an expensive aircraft parked in the desert with nothing in sight for miles in any direction, except arid scrub and rocky jebels.
The wreck was by the smaller strip right next to the town. At the approach to the strip was the forward fuselage and engine of a Scottish Aviation Pioneer CC1. On the slope beyond the strip were the wings and tail-cone, peppered with bullet holes. I later found out that the aircraft was XL554, a Pioneer operated by SOAF, which had turned over in a crosswind landing on 14 April 1960. The bullet holes were because the strip was next to an army firing range, and the aircraft was useful for target practice. In fact, most Omani men in the mountains habitually carry rifles, usually Lee-Enfields, so it’s not unusual to find bullet holes in anything convenient for a bit of target practice.
When the Sultan’s Air Force was formed in 1959, Pioneer CC1 XL554 was one of the first two aircraft taken on charge, together with another ex-No. 78 Squadron Pioneer, XL518, having been previously based at Khormaksar, Aden. These two aircraft were soon joined by three Percival Provost T52s as the armed element of SOAF for anti-guerrilla operati
ons. The Ibri strip was just one of seventy-eight desert airstrips scattered throughout the Sultanate.
Discovering this wreck fired up my enthusiasm again, and the following Friday I set out to search once more for the wreck near Nizwa. I searched another huge chunk of desert, up to five miles from the Firq airstrip, but once more found nothing.
In my investigations into the Pioneer wreck I discovered that there was another Pioneer wreck by an airstrip at the village of Awabi, which was on the other side of the Hajar Mountains near the town of Rostaq. On a day long expedition there I had little difficulty finding the strip, though I could see why Pioneers were the aircraft operated from it. It was disused and seemed little longer than the football pitch that was marked out on one end of it. I was amazed when I later heard from a SOAF pilot that he once took a Skyvan into this strip. Despite the fact that the aircraft was empty, he said the subsequent take-off was ‘interesting to say the least’.
78. The forward fuselage of Pioneer XL554 by the airstrip at Ibri.
One thing was certain, there was no sign of a Pioneer wreck anywhere around the strip, though I later discovered the aircraft had been XL701, an RAF aircraft not SOAF, which had crashed there during a night landing. As the strip was surrounded on three sides by mountains, I was not surprised to hear this.
The SAS men who sometimes came down out of the mountains for a bit of R and R at our camp informed me that there was a well-known de Havilland Venom wreck near the village of Saiq. The aircraft had been attacking rebels in the area circa 1960, and had either been hit by ground fire or the pilot had failed to pull out. Armed with exact instructions about how to find one of the paths up to the plateau from near the village of Iski, I set out one Friday and got lost. After struggling for 3000 feet up the mountains I was faced with a sheer cliff, and decided to forget all about the Venom wreck.
