Into the Abyss

by Carol Shaben

  As Paul was flying north to face the judge, the Alberta Government was convening in the Legislature. The session lasted only thirty-six minutes and the premier put forward only one motion: that this house stand adjourned until next Friday at 10 a.m. in honour of their deceased colleague. Members from across party lines, some choking back tears as they spoke, paid tribute to Grant Notley and to the three other deceased who were public servants and members of government staff: Mrs. Swanson, Mr. Vince and Mr. Peeves, and to the families of Mrs. Noskeye and Mrs. Blaskovitz. Then the House stood for a moment of silence.

  After Paul’s plane landed in Grande Prairie, a small cavalcade of media tailed the police car that drove him from the airport to the courthouse. Several reporters had been on the plane with Paul, intent on covering the hero’s trial. Paul felt a jumble of fear and nostalgia as he looked out at the city he’d fled. Snow crusted the roads and fields, and the big prairie sky shone bright blue and diamond hard. He stared at the familiar streets, the distant downtown buildings nearby the bars he’d gotten drunk at more times than he could remember, and the river valley where he’d bedded down on warm summer nights. Soon the car approached the centre of the city where the local RCMP detachment, courthouse and other government buildings were clustered. When the car reached the courthouse, it descended a ramp that led underneath the drab, cement building to a service entrance. Ice crackled under the tires as Paul was transported from the brittle brightness of day into dark shadow.

  He was led into the courtroom before the judge arrived, and took a seat beside his escort. The room was small but stately, decorated in shades of beige and rust. A wide centre aisle cut through it, leading to the judge’s imposing bench. Behind it hung a massive provincial coat of arms on a checkered wall of raised and inset brick. At the front of the room were two counsel tables and a modest seating area where Paul waited nervously. The judge entered and Paul was called forward to the prisoner’s box.

  Justice Kenneth Staples was in his early forties, with dark brown hair and a gentle, reserved manner. The case before him was highly unusual. The accused had saved the life of his RCMP escort after a plane crash, and had gathered wood and maintained a fire during the night to keep the survivors alive.

  Judge Staples listened intently, first to the crown prosecutor who presented details of the case and then to the accused who answered his questions in a soft-spoken voice.

  “I was taken with his conduct,” Staples would say later. “He wasn’t a show-off. He was quiet and respectful.”

  The judge sat thoughtfully for a moment after the Crown and the accused had had their say, and then asked Paul to step out of the prisoner’s box and stand on the floor in front of the bench.

  “You are to be highly commended for your conduct,” Staples said, then dismissed the mischief charge. He ruled that the time Paul had already spent in custody since his October 15 arrest would serve as his sentence on the charge of failing to appear. The judge then excused him from the courtroom.

  Paul Archambault was a free man.

  He couldn’t believe it. A huge grin split his face as a court worker led him downstairs to collect his personal effects. A woman behind the long front counter handed him a green garbage bag. Inside, he was relieved to find his blue jeans, shirt and jean jacket, which he promptly changed into in a nearby washroom. They smelled something fierce of fire.

  His pleasure was short lived. Riffling through his pockets, Paul discovered that his wallet was gone. The Edmonton Remand Centre hadn’t returned it when he’d left that morning. He wished to hell he’d hidden it somewhere they wouldn’t have found it. Still, as Paul left the provincial courthouse and walked into the bright afternoon sunshine, there was a spring in his step. Outside, a clutch of reporters surrounded him. With cameras rolling and microphones thrust in front of him, Paul found himself once again the centre of rapt attention.

  “What are you going to do now?” a reporter asked.

  It was a question Paul hadn’t had much time to think about. He’d expected to be locked up for awhile. He didn’t want to reveal too many details about his life, but he did tell reporters he didn’t even have the coins to wash his smoke-smelling clothes. He would have liked to say that he was heading back east to see his mom in Aylmer, but being flat broke, that was out of the question. Plus, there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Quebec stemming from the B and E and theft at the golf course he’d worked at the year before.

  Though he had no permanent address, Paul kept a post office box in a town just across the Alberta–British Columbia border. Thinking fast, he told reporters that if anyone wanted to find him, he could be reached care of general delivery in Dawson Creek.

  “How will you get there?” a reporter asked.

  “I’ll be travelling the way I like best: thumbing,” Paul told them. “That way my feet are on the ground and I like the view.”

  Paul hung around Grande Prairie for a few days, but his new status as a hero made him uncomfortable.

  “It was pretty scary being called that,” Paul recalled. “It was hard to walk down the street because everybody would stare at me and it kind of blew me away. Like, one minute they couldn’t give a shit who I was and then the next minute I’m something great.”

  In an interview the day after his exoneration, Paul was blunt with reporters. “I’m going to tell it to you straight. I’m tired of everyone calling me a hero. I didn’t do anything different than a whole lot of other people would have done in that situation.”

  But most people didn’t see it that way. Teddy Bougiridis, the owner of Corona Pizza who’d fired him two months earlier, was one of them.

  “So you’re a hero now, eh?” he said with a happy grin when Paul showed up at his old haunt. Coming from his former boss, Paul didn’t mind. It had cut him deeply when Teddy had let him go, and it felt good to redeem himself in Teddy’s eyes.

  Paul also appreciated the way complete strangers stepped in to help. Shortly after his exoneration, Grande Prairie’s Daily Herald Tribune established a fund to help him get back on his feet. Within a few days, it had collected $300 from local citizens. But their generous donations weren’t enough to keep him in Grande Prairie.

  “I wanted some time to get my thoughts together,” Paul recalled. Several days later he quietly left the city.

  “I’m keeping my plans to myself,” was all he would say. “I want to lead my own life. I don’t want to get hounded.”

  One thing Paul did after he left town was visit his uncle, Denis Archambault, a criminal defence lawyer in Prince George, British Columbia. Denis was not only sympathetic to individuals who ended up on the wrong side of the law, but also understood and appreciated his nephew in a way few others did. In his legal work Denis had crossed paths with an innovative psychiatrist by the name of Bennet Wong, a consultant with the government’s justice department who helped rehabilitate troubled youth. Wong and his partner, Jock McKeen, had recently opened The Haven Institute, a residential personal development retreat on an island on Canada’s west coast. They were reputed to be doing groundbreaking group therapy with people struggling to find their way in the world. Denis suggested Paul enroll in a one-month seminar at The Haven, and offered to foot the bill. Paul agreed.

  In the meantime, the story of Paul’s heroism continued to prompt financial donations from people across the province, all wanting to help him get back on his feet. This, too, made Paul uncomfortable. He told one reporter that he hoped Albertans who wanted to contribute to a fund for him “won’t go crazy.” All he needed, he said, was money to keep him going for a month on the island.

  “I’ve got to find out a little more about myself and fix myself up mentally,” he said.

  Days later, as the cold whip of winter lashed the rest of the country, Paul was aboard a British Columbia ferry heading across the Strait of Georgia en route to Gabriola Island.

  INQUEST

  Erik Vogel lay in a no man’s land between life and death in Edmonton’s Roya
l Alexandra Hospital. Reports of the crash filtered through his semi-conscious brain like dark, slow-moving shadows.

  When his parents arrived at his bedside, the first words he remembers his father saying were, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  A jetliner pilot who had never experienced the pressure cooker atmosphere common to small commercial carriers, Erik’s father couldn’t comprehend how his son could have made such a colossal error in judgment. Erik shrivelled at the shame he had brought upon his dad, who had a high profile in aviation circles as well as BC’s Lower Mainland municipal politics.

  The weight of the grief and pain he had caused his passengers and their families, and the notoriety he’d inflicted on his own, drained Erik. His condition worsened. His fiancée flew in to be at his bedside, and an old school friend, expecting the worst, called to say goodbye.

  It seemed to Erik that his future had been shattered beyond redemption. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he tried to recall the desire for flying that had propelled him toward his terrible fate. Not so very long ago, he had been absolutely certain that it was his destiny to fly. Now, he was equally certain his flying career was over.

  As Erik was losing his will to live, events were conspiring to bring him back from the brink. The first arose from a fortunate turn of fate that briefly put Erik and Scott in the same hospital room. Hours after he’d returned from the emergency department, several RCMP officers paid a visit to Erik’s bedside to obtain a statement. Weak and guilt-ridden, he’d been prepared to take all the blame and tell them everything that had happened. Scott, lying in the bed next to him, told Erik to keep his mouth shut.

  “You don’t have to talk to anyone until you get yourself a lawyer,” Erik remembers Scott telling him. “They’re going to use any statement you make to press criminal charges.”

  Scott’s intervention gave Erik pause. The charges he felt certain the authorities would lay on him might not be a foregone conclusion.

  Then he received a phone call from Sandra Notley, who’d heard that the young pilot was in critical condition. Her forgiveness had filled him with gratitude.

  The final event was an interaction with investigators from the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, or CASB, who visited Erik sometime during his early days in the hospital. Created by an act of Parliament, the CASB had been operational less than a month. The fledgling safety board owed its existence to Justice Charles Dubin, a prominent Ontario Court of Appeal judge appointed in 1979 as a one-man commission of inquiry on aviation safety in Canada after a series of plane crashes. During his inquiry, Dubin discovered that the Aviation Safety Bureau had destroyed evidence, and he concluded that the agency, deeply rooted within Transport Canada’s massive bureaucracy, could not objectively investigate aviation safety when it was also responsible for setting regulations, and for licensing pilots and air carriers. Dubin recommended that the Aviation Safety Bureau be abolished and that an independent tribunal be created to investigate aviation accidents and conduct public inquiries.

  The high-profile crash of Wapiti 402 was just what investigators from the newly minted CASB needed to cement their role as an effective and powerful watchdog. And their ace in the hole was Erik Vogel. More often than not in plane crashes involving multiple fatalities, the pilots don’t survive. As a result, authorities often conveniently cite pilot error as the cause—a practice referred to in the aviation industry as blaming the dead guy. This time, however, the CASB had a pilot who could tell his side of the story.

  By Monday, October 22, they had launched an investigation into the crash and a national team of investigators had converged on Erik’s hospital bed. What they told Erik during that first meeting made an impact: Transport Canada had known for a year and a half before the crash that Wapiti Aviation had repeatedly violated safety standards. In fact, in August 1984, Dai Griffiths, a Transport Canada inspector, had written a lengthy memo to government authorities about the airline’s safety transgressions, based on interviews with three pilots, two of whom had recently been dismissed by Wapiti. The pilots told officials that Wapiti indirectly pressured them to fly in poor weather conditions and that they felt they’d be fired if they didn’t complete certain flights. The memo stated: “There is total disregard for regulations, rights of others and safety of passengers. If they persist in this matter of operation for a much longer period we are virtually certain to be faced with a fatality.”

  With Erik’s help, CASB investigators were confident they could not only shut down Wapiti, but also fix Canada’s broken aviation safety system.

  Erik Vogel had a reason to live.

  Even with a cause to champion, the weeks and months following the crash were crushingly difficult for Erik. As he found out more details about the passengers he had killed, and news of the crash continued to dominate headlines, his stomach tightened into a fist of guilt and remorse that would not unclench.

  After ten days in the hospital, Erik returned to White Rock. By mid-November, the CASB had finished its field investigation of the crash site and written a letter to the highest levels of government requesting special surveillance of Wapiti Aviation. The CASB also announced it would hold a public inquiry, and in January 1986 it subpoenaed its key witness, Erik Vogel. Over the following weeks, CASB investigators inundated him with files and exhausted him with interviews as they began building their case.

  A day did not pass when he didn’t think about the crash, but the CASB’s insistence that the fault lay with Wapiti and with Canada’s inadequate aviation safety system gave Erik hope of resurrecting his flying career. That hope was short lived.

  “No one wanted anything to do with me,” Erik recalled of the bleak months that followed his high-profile accident. He applied for dozens of flying positions both locally and on the other side of the country, the continent, the globe. He sent résumés to carriers as varied as Georgian Bay Airways in eastern Canada, United Airlines in the United States, and obscure operations in the Maldives. Rejection letters arrived one after the other. His only lifeline was the belief that he wasn’t solely to blame for what had happened that October night.

  In Grande Prairie, Dale Wells was facing his own kind of hell. The night of the crash, it was he who made the difficult phone call to Erik’s parents to tell them their son’s plane had gone down. Since then he’d barely had a moment to breathe. On Monday, October 22, 1984, Transport Canada inspectors had descended on Wapiti Aviation, sequestering its records and subjecting Dale and his dad to four straight days of interrogation, despite the fact they were still reeling from the devastating impact of the crash. Aviation officials had also released a damning media statement: “The most recent base inspection of Wapiti Aviation was a maintenance inspection conducted October 1, 1984. At that time it was discovered that the Company failed to meet a regular maintenance check on part of its fleet.”

  If Dale hadn’t been so angry, he might have laughed out loud. As far as he was concerned, his planes were all serviceable and the only deficiency inspectors had found during their recent airworthiness maintenance audit was that Wapiti had not conducted the “special” 500- and 1000-hour inspections for some of its fleet. What aviation officials failed to mention was that Wapiti had kept up with all of its required 100-hour inspections, that the company had immediately completed the additional inspections, and that the planes in question had been back in the air within twenty-four hours.

  Shortly after the crash Dale had told one of his pilots that he was “surprised Vogel had flown into the ground as he was considered conscientious and a careful pilot.” But he hadn’t spoken to Erik since the crash and hadn’t seen him the day Erik returned to Grande Prairie to get his truck from the yard outside the Wapiti hangar.

  As the weeks progressed, Dale felt as if his detractors would settle for nothing less than Wapiti’s total destruction. Aviation inspectors surveyed its operations like sharp-eyed raptors, monitoring maintenance activities, scrutinizing Edmonton departures and constantly hassling pilots to
produce valid licences, medicals and PPC cards. By early November, one of the victim’s families had launched a lawsuit against Wapiti alleging “wanton or reckless operations.”

  On December 10, three inspectors arrived at Wapiti to conduct a full audit. The results of that days-long ordeal were outlined in a double-registered, special delivery letter, which arrived on Christmas Eve, 1984. In it, Transport Canada notified Dale that they were suspending elements of Wapiti’s operating certificate for safety reasons, including the company’s right to fly single-pilot IFR, and flights into several northern airports. Dale would also lose his status as chief engineer. But an even more personally devastating result of that year-end audit concerned Dale’s father, the man who had literally sold the farm to support his son’s dream of building a thriving northern airline. In Transport Canada’s estimation, Delbert Wells, Wapiti’s president for the preceding fourteen years, “lacked sufficient knowledge of the intricacies of the present operations to permit him to competently discharge his duties as operations manager.”

  On February 26, 1985, the CASB convened a public inquiry into the crash at Grande Prairie’s Golden Inn, a cheerless ten-storey building just a few minutes’ drive east along the highway from the airport. Erik was filled with dread as he conferred with James Duke, the lawyer his father had hired to represent him at the proceedings, which took place inside the hotel’s large, dome-ceilinged conference room.

  Outside that conference room, the three surviving passengers were experiencing entirely different emotions. Larry, Paul and Scott hadn’t seen one another since shortly after their rescue, and the joy of their reunion was unbridled. They shook hands and clapped one another on the back. Larry embraced Paul warmly. Paul felt a flush of affection for the two well-dressed men who stood beside him—one his former captor, the other a politician who had vouched for his character. In Paul’s hand was a binder containing the initial pages of a handwritten manuscript he’d begun to write during his month at The Haven. The exercise had been a revelation, and had given him the courage to begin changing his life.