Into the Abyss

by Carol Shaben

  It was 2:00 a.m. and the searchmaster had just received a copy of the passenger list from Wapiti Aviation, confirming that there were high-profile politicians on board. He suggested the pilot try a more westerly approach, but it proved just as perilous. Finally, he advised the pilot to try routing east of Swan Hills and attempt a landing in Slave Lake. Though the conditions were only marginally better, the chopper made it in. Once on the ground, Major Dewar and half the medical team deplaned so that the chopper could return directly to Edmonton with survivors if it could make it into the crash site and if anyone was found alive.

  After just five minutes on the ground, the Chinook was airborne once more. But with the poor weather and the threat of icing, team leader Brian Dunham knew there were no guarantees they’d be able to reach survivors. He alerted Major Dewar, who called Sergeant Hopkins in High Prairie and told him to get his RCMP ground search party ready to roll.

  Hopkins had beaten him to it. His officers were already stationed along the highway east of High Prairie awaiting exact crash site coordinates. But with news of the adverse conditions in the air, they didn’t want to wait any longer. Their plan was to head south into the wilderness, advancing in the general direction of the crash area so they could be on hand when the military pinpointed the site. The search party had also commandeered a Bombardier from a local farmer. The truck-sized utility vehicle was equipped with caterpillar tracks that could move easily over the snow, soft muskeg and gnarly underbrush, blazing a trail ahead of the snowmobiles. Carrying two-way radios and a handheld ELT homing device, the RCMP ground search party left the road’s hardpacked snow and nosed their snowmobiles into the bush, headlights dipping then rising, light tunnelling deep into the pitch-black forest ahead.

  ABORT

  Less than a mile into the bush, things began to go wrong for the ground search party. RCMP officers, riding two up on the snowmobiles, became bogged down in waist-deep snow and the Bombardier was unable to squeeze through the dense trees to lay down a track. When the officers radioed Hoppy, he cursed loudly, lighting one cigarette from the glowing butt of another. There was a lot of heavy equipment on the surrounding farms and in the town, and he put out an urgent request for it. The response came quickly. Cox Contracting, a local business run by two young brothers who knew and respected Larry Shaben, offered every available man and every piece of heavy machinery they owned. That included a wide-pad utility vehicle, a swamp cat and a bulldozer. They would clear a road through the wilderness if that’s what it took.

  Somewhere high above the soon-to-be-bolstered ground search party, obscured by a thick mattress of cloud, the giant Hercules continued to circle. It had been sweeping the area for several hours to triangulate the position of the downed plane, and had finally pinpointed the ELT. Its crew’s orders had been to drop flares to reassure any survivors until rescuers aboard the inbound Chinook helicopter got to them. In the event the SAR Techs could reach the site and hoist the injured aboard, both aircraft were to return immediately to Slave Lake. There, survivors would be transferred to the faster-flying Herc and immediately transported to an Edmonton hospital.

  The Hercules had just dropped a series of flares into the thick cloud over the crash site when the Forward Base Commander radioed its crew to advise them that the RCMP ground search party was having a heck of a time making its way in. Still, given the icing conditions the chopper was experiencing, the ground search party might have the best chance to reach the crash site. Major Dewar asked the Herc’s crew to divert north toward the RCMP ground party, dropping flares to light the way for almost a dozen men now slogging through the wilderness.

  Some 20 kilometres south of the ground search party, four survivors huddling in the deep freeze of night had been listening hopefully to the drone of the aircraft above. It had strengthened steadily and then a series of flares had exploded into the soufflé of dense cloud above them—enormous orange orbs of light ballooning into the darkness.

  “We’re outta here,” Erik yelled.

  The men whooped with joy, waving their arms in the air and clapping one another on the back. Feverishly they tossed the remaining wood and scavenged materials onto the fire, sending spires of flame skyward. They surveyed one another’s battered faces, the melted pit around the fire, and the torn fuselage of the Piper Navajo in the distance.

  “You’re wearing a pair of underwear on your head,” Paul teased Scott. “I wonder what your buddies at the cop shop would say if they could see you lying there with underwear on your head and a pair of ladies’ boots on your feet?”

  The cop flashed him an actual grin.

  Erik tilted his bloodied face toward the sound of the plane’s receding engine, expecting the aircraft to bank and begin a slow arc back. But to his surprise, he saw another flare explode in the distance.

  Why would they drop it over there? he wondered.

  A moment later a third flare glowed dimly, this one much farther away. Erik’s heart sank. “Guys,” he said, “we have a problem. They don’t know where we are.”

  “What do you mean?” Paul asked. “They dropped that fucking flare right on our heads.”

  “I know, but they wouldn’t be dropping flares over there if they knew where we are.”

  Erik couldn’t make sense of why the plane that had been circling for hours hadn’t pinpointed them. An almost obsessive reader of accident reports, he recalled an article about a lost pilot whose plane had crashed a few years earlier. When rescuers found the pilot, his first question to them had been: What took you so long?

  The rescuers had told the pilot that there had been no emergency locator transmitter signal from the downed plane. It hadn’t been turned on. The horrifying thought occurred to Erik that his plane’s ELT might not have been switched back to the “armed” position after one of Wapiti’s maintenance inspections.

  Erik knew that something serious had happened to his lungs and he could feel the grip of his injury tightening on him. He needed medical attention sooner rather than later, and so did Scott and Larry. Struggling to remain calm, he shared his theory about the ELT with the others. Somehow, they needed to make sure it was working.

  Erik plodded back to the aircraft with Paul and Larry trailing. Groping along the outside of the fuselage behind the open hatch, his unfeeling hands managed to find the ELT panel at the tail section of the upturned aircraft. He clawed at its thin metal lip with clumsy fingers, but it was screwed shut. He shook his head, telling the others that without some sort of tool there was little hope of opening it.

  Paul reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the pocketknife.

  “Here,” he said, passing it to Erik.

  The pilot’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He fumbled to open the screwdriver attachment before Paul snatched the knife back, stepped in front of him and deftly removed the panel. Erik reached inside the dark opening, his hands groping for the ELT unit. He found the six-by-ten-inch box and then located a small toggle switch.

  “Is it on?” Paul asked, a note of sarcasm in his voice.

  Erik ran his fingers across it, but had no way of knowing which position was on.

  “Do you want to use my lighter?”

  “No!” The response came out more harshly than Erik had intended, but no way did he want an open flame when the smell of fuel was still so strong. He hesitated, his hand buried within the tail section’s interior, uncertain of what to do.

  “Just flip it, for Chrissake,” Paul urged and Erik felt a prickle of annoyance.

  If it was working, Erik would have a 50 percent chance of getting it right when he flipped the switch. But if he chose the wrong position, he risked cutting off their sole lifeline to rescuers.

  An idea occurred to Erik that if he toggled the ELT switch every half an hour, he could increase those odds to 100 percent. The problem was he didn’t have the strength to continue moving much longer. Scott was immobile and Larry was having increasing difficulty walking. And even if he could walk, he couldn’t see. Tha
t left Paul. Erik suspected that he’d been stealing from the wreckage and the pocketknife had confirmed it. The last thing the pilot wanted to do was place his life and the lives of his surviving passengers in Paul’s hands. But there was no other choice. Erik would have to trust him.

  Four thousand feet up and well above the weather, the Hercules flew a direct line from the crash site to the presumed location of the ground search party. As the flares exploded, trailing orange plumes through the night, Hale peered into thick cloud hoping to get a glimpse of something, anything, on the ground. It was no use. The low-sodium flares they used in heavy fog burned hot and fast, flaming out within 1,000 feet to avoid the risk of setting fire to anything—or anyone—below. Hale’s attention returned to the green glow of the cockpit instruments. Among them, he saw one of the engines’ warning lights flash red. Hale and the pilot exchanged a look of concern. Quickly, they discussed their options and decided to shut down the faltering No. 2 engine to conserve fuel. Then they radioed Slave Lake to advise Major Dewar of the situation. Though the aging Herc was capable of flying on three engines, the major wasn’t taking any chances. He told the pilot he was calling out a second Hercules crew to relieve them.

  On the ground, the RCMP search party was facing its own formidable challenges. In spite of the added equipment and manpower, progress was excruciatingly slow. Even when they did manage to clear a section of dense bush and advance several hundred metres, trying to chart a course by watching overhead flares burst in a dark, cloudy sky was difficult. After hours of exhausting work, the men were still at least 15 kilometres from the crash site. And for all its might and majesty, the massive Hercules could do nothing but circle blindly, shooting flares like aimless arrows into the night.

  Meanwhile, the Chinook had homed in on the ELT and was closing the distance between the Slave Lake airport and the crash site. Dunham hoped that if they could zero in on the signal, the pilot might be able to drop below the cloud so he and fellow SAR Tech Bill Barber could lower to the ground. When the Chinook pilot determined he was on top of the site he took the helicopter into a high hover. He remained there for almost an hour, alternating between hovering in place for ten to fifteen minutes—as long as he dared without the chopper overheating—then moving into a flight pattern. He repeated this manoeuvre several times while waiting for a break in the weather. It never came.

  Instead, something completely unexpected happened. The crew aboard the helicopter suddenly lost the ELT signal. They radioed the Hercules and they, too, had lost the signal. What the hell had happened? It was 3:50 in the morning and the pilot of the helicopter called Slave Lake to advise them of the situation. Not only had the Chinook been unable to get under the clouds, they’d lost the signal and now had only five minutes of flight time remaining before they needed to return to refuel.

  Major Dewar’s reply was swift: Go to ground. The helicopter banked steeply away from the crash area and headed for Slave Lake to wait out the weather.

  CRIMINAL

  In the deep fold of night, as the pulsing thrum of the helicopter faded first to a distant hum and then to a whisper, a pall of disappointment fell over the men huddled around the sputtering fire. For a long time, no one moved. Erik sat hunched on the briefcase, listening intently for the chopper to circle back; when it didn’t, his chest constricted. The silence the chopper left in its wake was a heavy weight on his shoulders. Cold and pain rode his bones like cruel horsemen and his mouth felt drier than he could ever remember. He wanted only to lie down, but feared that if he did he would never rise.

  He wasn’t sure how much time passed before he could bring himself to look at his passengers. To his right, Larry stood smoking, the end of his cigarette glowing red. His hand shook as he brought the cigarette to his mouth and Erik saw a shudder pass through him. He implored him to sit, but Larry refused.

  “I’m fine,” he said, but Erik didn’t believe it. A thick layer of snow now draped the coat Larry had laid over Scott, who shivered incessantly. Even Paul, who’d kept up a steady stream of chatter, had stopped trying to entertain them, and as much as his jokes had annoyed Erik, he would have done anything to hear one at the moment. Paul sat mutely puffing on a cigarette as if it was the last one in the world.

  “It’s too quiet,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

  Maybe the rescuers had abandoned them. The thought propelled Erik to his feet. This situation was his fault and injured or not he bore responsibility to somehow help his surviving passengers.

  “I’m going to flip the ELT switch,” he said. It was all he had to offer.

  “Think it’s working?” Paul asked.

  “If they haven’t found us by daylight, we’ll take it out and bring it to the fire,” Erik said. “If it’s not working, we’ll try to fix it.” He swayed unsteadily and paroxysms of gurgling coughs erupted.

  “Why don’t you rest,” Larry suggested.

  “Yeah, pilot,” Paul said. “I’ll go.”

  Erik shook his head, raising a hand. Even though he was suffering, he was alive. It was more than he could say for six others inside the plane. He staggered down the path toward the wreckage, bending to scoop a mouthful of snow along the way.

  Paul thought about all the pisses he’d taken along the trail on his forays for wood.

  “Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow,” he sang out after Erik, but no one laughed.

  When he reached the fuselage, Erik leaned heavily against it and gave in to another coughing fit. He tasted blood in his mouth and braced his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.

  Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

  He couldn’t come to grips with what he’d done. He dimly understood that he’d let the pressure of the situation—the company’s expectations; his passengers’ need to get home; his intense desire to hold on to his job—override his instincts not to take the flight. But he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what had gone wrong during the flight. He’d been so fixated on getting into High Prairie that he’d committed the unforgivable sin of descending before passing the airport beacon, dropping to almost 2,800 feet without knowing exactly where he was. Yet he’d been so sure he was close.

  Everything was a blur. His traumatized mind couldn’t connect his grossly overloaded aircraft, prop ice so thick it was breaking off in pieces that hit the fuselage like hammer blows, and his inability to raise High Prairie on the radio. He couldn’t understand how he’d made such a rookie mistake.

  Erik shuffled forward, sweeping a hand down the plane’s rear flank until he found the open ELT panel. It took a minute for him to locate the toggle switch, and another to manipulate his fingers to flip it. As he stumbled back along the trail to the firepit, the one question he couldn’t answer was Why?

  Erik had lost situational awareness—an understanding of what was going on around him. A shockingly frequent occurrence in aviation mishaps, according to the United States Federal Aviation Authority, loss of situational awareness is responsible for up to 15 percent of fatal crashes. Most of them occur when pilots fly in darkness or bad weather.

  On a hot, hazy mid-July night in 1999, John F. Kennedy, Jr. was flying with his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren when his Piper Saratoga plowed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause as pilot error due to spatial disorientation. A relatively inexperienced pilot, Kennedy was flying without the benefit of peripheral or ambient vision, senses that help pilots judge and maintain proper aircraft attitude. Flying at night in haze, Kennedy literally couldn’t tell up from down or left from right.

  Richard Leland, director of the Aeromedical Training Institute in Southampton, Pennsylvania, explains that in such circumstances,

  The conscious brain can quickly become overwhelmed and important situational awareness cues (i.e., altitude, descent rate, etc.) can be missed. Cockpit tasks are more difficult. Switches are harder to find and pla
cards are harder to read under low cockpit lighting conditions. This puts an increased load on the conscious brain and, in turn, raises the potential for unrecognized spatial disorientation and loss of situational awareness.

  Loss of situational awareness isn’t limited to the aviation industry. It has been known to occur in a range of high-risk activities from mountain climbing to parachuting to scuba diving. However, the phenomenon has been studied in aviation more than in any other field. When it comes to certain commuter airlines, many pilots encounter a contributing force sometimes called go fever—a pressure to fly when they shouldn’t. Often young and inexperienced, pilots flying for small bush or commercial carriers find themselves in highly competitive environments that encourage them to push the limits to reach their destinations. Emotion rather than logic becomes a prime decision-making impetus. This pressure to succeed at all costs also contributed to two ill-fated 1996 Everest expeditions memorialized in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. Expedition leaders and climbers encountered the mountaineering equivalent of go fever, propelling them to ignore their designated turn-around time in their push for the summit, catching them high on the mountain as night fell and a storm rolled in.

  Whether in aviation, mountain climbing or other high-risk scenarios, several factors can predispose individuals to lose situational awareness. Broadly, these factors are environmental, psychological and physiological. Erik experienced all three. Foul weather reduced his visual information to nil and severe icing had slowed his speed over ground to a degree that put him several miles further back from his destination than he’d estimated. Psychological factors—those imposing an additional processing load on the conscious brain—taxed Erik’s ability to determine his exact location using dead reckoning, and impaired his decision-making. He experienced a condition known as task saturation. Flying solo, with an unreliable autopilot, Erik needed to handle more information than his highly stressed brain could process, and missed important cues that would have alerted him to danger. Task saturation explained how Erik allowed himself to descend to such an unsafe altitude, and remain there until he had no time to successfully recover. Physiological factors, most notably fatigue, also impaired his ability to perform. Fatigue is by far the most common physiological factor contributing to aviation mishaps and Erik’s cumulative lack of sleep in the days and weeks preceding the crash had impaired his concentration to the point where he was, literally, an accident waiting to happen.