Into the Abyss

by Carol Shaben

  One of the vows Paul made while at the retreat was to keep in closer touch with his family. He’d contacted his parents after the crash, and when he got off the island, they’d paid for his visit east. Paul had first flown to Montreal, where his father was living. From there he’d hopped a bus to Ottawa, just 15 kilometres across the provincial border from his hometown of Aylmer, Quebec.

  A slim, attractive woman in her mid-fifties, Gayle Archambault sat on the bench of an Ottawa bus station anxiously awaiting her son’s arrival. Her short auburn hair was freshly set and she’d carefully applied a half moon of shadow above her blue eyes. She wore a voluminous fur coat and clutched a large black purse primly in her lap. Gayle appeared self-conscious beneath the glare of TV cameras, her bright red lips pursed in a thin line. The media had tracked down Gayle in Aylmer shortly after the plane crash and she’d enthusiastically told reporters when her son would be arriving home. There is no way of knowing whether she felt honoured or annoyed by the media’s attention that day, but what is clear is that the minute she saw Paul’s bus pull into the bay, she forgot about the cameras. She slid to the edge of her seat in anticipation and when she saw her son descending the stairs of the bus, her eyes lit up and an enormous smile creased her face.

  Unaware that reporters and TV cameramen had gathered to witness his homecoming, Paul stepped down unselfconsciously onto the pavement. He was clean-shaven, sporting his typical uniform of blue jeans and a jean jacket, and had a new black duffle bag slung over his shoulder. A camera flash flared. Paul’s face briefly registered surprise, and his eyes darted uneasily toward the cameras trained on him and then into the small waiting crowd. When he saw his mother, he ran forward and embraced her. Paul held on for a long time.

  The story of his return hit the local news that night. The next day the Aylmer police came knocking on his mother’s door. They arrested Paul on an outstanding warrant dating from September 12, 1983, for allegedly breaking into the pro shop at the Gatineau Golf Club and cleaning $10,000 out of the cash box. The charge was far more serious than the one Paul had recently faced in Grande Prairie, but the judge was equally sympathetic. Though Paul pleaded guilty, the judge sentenced him to just a year’s probation without surveillance.

  For the first time in many years, Paul felt truly free. He told reporters in an interview after his court appearance. “I feel it could turn my life around. I want to put the past behind me, starting today.”

  Though his mother desperately wanted her eldest child to settle in Aylmer, he knew his stay would be temporary. It was not just the subpoena to be in Grande Prairie for the crash inquiry that drew him back west, but his feelings for a woman he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind.

  Inside Conference Room A, seventy people sat shoulder to shoulder in rows of straight-backed, metal-framed chairs. The clamour of voices filled the air and television cameras and media crews dotted the room’s perimeter. On the far wall was a bank of large windows across which brown curtains were drawn. Pinned to the centre of them was a large Canadian flag. On a raised platform in front of the flag, three men in dark suits sat like judges behind a long draped table; senior members of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board who had flown in from Ottawa. On the floor facing them, at another long table, sat representatives of the federal departments of Transport and Justice, accident investigators and their legal counsel, Dale Wells with his legal team, and finally, Erik Vogel and his lawyer. It was the first time Erik had seen his former boss since the accident and Erik’s stomach was turning cartwheels.

  Bernard Deschenes, the inquiry chairman, opened the proceedings, telling the audience that the inquiry was to be a fact-finding mission solely aimed at identifying the safety deficiencies that had led to the accident and making recommendations that might help prevent future reoccurrences. “We will not point an accusing finger at anybody,” he said.

  After tabling the exhibits and providing a clinical synopsis of the crash, Norm Hull, chairman of the CASB’s technical panel, called Erik to the stand. Though he’d gone over details of his testimony half a dozen times with Hull and other members of the panel, Erik’s mind felt thick and doughy with stress. He made it through the testimony about his flying experience and the events preceding the flight without difficulty, but Erik faltered when it came to the area of questioning Hull called Accident Flight Segment 3: The Actions and Events from Initiation of Descent to Impact. Sweat trickled from his armpits as he recounted the details of his descent, and his eyes darted to Dale Wells who sat stone-faced at the front of the hearing room, flanked by three lawyers. The men conferred often, and Erik watched them scribbling notes as he spoke. Even to his own ears, his explanation sounded feeble. In truth, Erik’s approach into High Prairie that night was illegal. If Hull had asked him to justify why he had done it, he would have been hard pressed to give him an answer.

  At one point during his agonizing testimony, Erik glanced up into the audience and saw Larry, his brown eyes warm and sympathetic behind large, thick glasses. Larry had never judged Erik and it was clear he was not judging him now. Erik pressed on and at 11:15 a.m., Deschenes called for a five-minute break in the proceedings.

  As Erik slouched limply at the witness table, Paul appeared at his side. After a brief hello, Paul leaned in toward Erik as if he meant to speak, his hands on the back of a nearby chair. Erik lifted his eyes questioningly and as he did so, saw a photographer training an enormous camera lens on them. Erik shot Paul a withering look, then stared grimly ahead as a camera flash flared white. To his annoyance, the photograph, staged by the media who’d asked Paul to stand next to him, would be picked up by the wire services and appear in papers across the country the next day.

  After a fifteen-minute recess, Erik returned to the stand where Dr. Bryce Hansen, the CASB’s expert on the impact of human factors in aviation, took over. Dr. Hansen’s line of questioning shone a spotlight on the tense operational atmosphere at Wapiti, drawing out information on the uneasy relations between Erik and company management, Erik’s significant weight loss after joining the airline, and finally his chronic state of fatigue. When investigators had interviewed Erik after the crash, they’d quickly determined that stress and fatigue had likely played a critical role in the accident. Though Erik didn’t have the benefit of his pilot’s logbook to refer to, he’d recounted his punishing schedule in the days preceding the crash, including the unscheduled medivac flight and blown starter, which had forced him to spend a grim night in the refuelling trailer at the Edmonton Municipal airport on October 17. The investigators had questioned him repeatedly on his pre-crash schedule, taking careful notes, which they later transcribed into a preliminary report. Erik had an outline of that report in front of him and frequently referred to it during his testimony.

  “Did you have an opportunity to sleep?” Dr. Hansen asked.

  “No.”

  “What time did you finally manage to get away from Edmonton the next day?”

  “I believe it was about 10 p.m.”

  “And what time did you arrive at your residence?”

  “It would be after midnight,” Erik answered.

  “And what time did you retire for the night?”

  “I had made a phone call home. I have a fiancée in Vancouver, and I retired after that. Twelve-thirty, one.”

  “Then your time on duty would have totalled fifteen- or fifteen-and-a-half hours, is that correct?”

  “That sounds correct,” Erik confirmed.

  “And that was following two-and-a-half-hours’ sleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “How were you feeling by the time you went to bed that night?” Dr. Hansen asked.

  “I was tired,” Erik said, adding that he’d let his co-pilot fly the leg back from Edmonton so he could rest.

  Dr. Hansen nodded. “But to reiterate, you did not have an opportunity during the day or during the flight to sleep?”

  Erik said that he had not. He also detailed his three uncomfortable exchanges with company
management.

  “Would you describe how these incidents affected your state of mind at the time,” Dr. Hansen asked.

  “Besides being uptight, it weighed heavily. You keep wondering if you are going to keep working tomorrow.”

  By that point, the sympathy of the audience was with the young pilot. Quiet murmurs of dismay began to ripple around the room and reporters scribbled furiously. Dr. Hanson picked up steam as he neared the finish line.

  “And calculating duty time for the three days previous, the sleep over that same period of time was nine hours … are those totals correct?”

  “That sounds correct,” Erik answered.

  “As a final question,” Dr. Hansen concluded, “in any of your training as a professional pilot have you been required to receive any instruction in aeromedical subjects, things like disorientation, hypoglycemia, fatigue, illness …?”

  “No, sir.”

  “All right. Thank you,” Dr. Hansen said with a note of satisfied finality. “I have no further questions.”

  With that, the inquiry chairman adjourned the first day’s proceedings. It was 5:30, and Erik had been on the stand for six hours. He felt completely wrung out, but as his lawyer, CASB investigators, his father, and many former Wapiti pilots who attended the inquiry to support Erik gathered around, he felt a glimmer of redemption. When the crowd cleared, Erik saw two women patiently waiting to speak to him: Sally Swanson and Virginia Peever, the widows of two of the men who had died on Flight 402.

  They thanked him for telling the truth.

  The next morning, Erik walked a little straighter as he entered Conference Room A. His nerves felt less jagged and he found a moment to talk to his fellow survivors. Reporters asked the four men to stand together for a picture and in that one Erik smiled broadly.

  At 9:05, he took the stand for the second day. This time, he fielded questions from John Bassie, the chief counsel representing Wapiti Aviation. Not more than a minute had passed before Bassie asked Erik where his pilot’s logbook was.

  “I burned it in the fire,” Erik told him.

  “I see,” Bassie replied, and then asked Erik about what the notes were that he had with him on the witness stand the day before.

  Erik frowned. “An outline from one of the reports.”

  Bassie regarded him steadily. “And I take it from that, you have problems recalling?”

  Uneasiness rippled through Erik. After circling around seemingly peripheral issues about Wapiti’s flight checklist and flight dispatch system, Bassie began his assault.

  “Mr. Vogel, yesterday you mentioned a medivac flight which you said was October 17, 1984. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir …”

  “And are you sure about your date being October 17, 1984?”

  “Yes, I believe I am.”

  Bassie turned and plucked a paper from the tabletop behind him. “Have you seen this before?”

  In his hand was a Wapiti charter invoice. Bassie placed it on the stand under Erik’s nose and Erik nodded.

  “And you recognize your signature where it says pilot’s signature?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that document is dated October 16, 1984?”

  “That is correct.”

  “So your medivac flight was October 16, 1984. Is that correct?”

  “That one, yes.”

  “That’s the flight you were talking about yesterday, is that correct?”

  “I believe it was,” Erik said.

  “Mr. Vogel, now that we know that the medivac flight was on the 16th and not the 17th, could you tell us what you did on the 17th?”

  Erik flushed, his memory completely blank. “I’m afraid I can’t. I was under the impression … in the hospital when we were going over this, that that was the date …”

  “If I told you you went to Fort McMurray at 14:05 with Mr. Powell. Do you recall that?”

  Erik began to sweat. “I recall that, yes.”

  “It was not an authorized flight by the company, was it?”

  Erik swallowed. His lawyer, Jim Duke, quickly asked the Chairman, “Sir, is this relevant to safety? Where are we going with this line of questioning?”

  “I didn’t hear the question,” the Chairman answered. “Mr. Bassie …?”

  “Was it authorized?” Bassie asked again.

  “The flight itself was a scheduled, authorized flight, sir,” Erik replied.

  “But you were not authorized to go?”

  Erik felt the air leave his lungs. “No.”

  “That starter problem, then, was on the 16th, was it not?”

  “It was the day of the medivac, yes.”

  “Would it be fair to say that on the 17th of October, 1984, you did not work at all?”

  Erik was flustered now. “Was I not … there are not records of my flying?” he stammered.

  “I’ll show you the company records,” Bassie offered, almost congenially. “I’ve marked the area in question with the photostat copies of them, Mr. Vogel, to assist you.”

  Erik studied the journey log in front of him. There it was: the medivac to Edmonton had not been on Wednesday the 17th, but Tuesday the 16th. He’d slept in the refuelling trailer on Tuesday night and on Wednesday, as a favour to Jim Powell, Erik had flown to Fort McMurray as his co-pilot while awaiting the starter repair. That left Wednesday and Thursday nights during which Erik had presumably gotten plenty of sleep.

  Later, after agonizing long and hard about the events of that week, Erik would put the pieces together—how he’d arrived home after the starter fiasco, late on Wednesday, October 17, his one day off that week, and resumed flying the next day, Thursday, October 18. Thursday had been the day he’d picked up the props in Edmonton, banged ice from the wings with a broom handle, and first battled the fierce weather system that would bring down his plane on October 19. But in that moment at the inquiry, Erik was mute, his brain numb.

  At the table behind him, members of the CASB investigative team were in shock. They hadn’t thought to question Erik’s recollection of events, to cross-check them against the company records. Phyllis Smith, the CASB’s lawyer, was the first to speak.

  “Mr. Chairman … I did want to express a concern … Mr. Bassie and Wapiti have had the group reports for some five weeks and none of this information has been brought to the attention of the technical panel … And one of the things that was discussed in some detail at the pre-hearing conference is that an ambush of the type we were expected to avoid, has appeared at this hearing.”

  Bassie, well seasoned in the thrust and parry of the courtroom, didn’t miss a beat.

  “That’s a problem that will always be faced by an inquiry of this type, Mr. Chairman,” he interjected. “Whoever conducted the investigation had access to all these books. There was nothing held back … There is no ambush here. It is just a situation where something was not done.”

  “Or missed,” suggested the chairman.

  “Or missed,” Bassie concurred.

  “Yes,” the chairman agreed, looking at Bassie. “I think we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  Bassie pressed his advantage. “And the other problem we faced here is that we did not know what Mr. Vogel would say. We knew he lost a whole day, we knew that this idea that he worked so hard those two or three days … was not correct. We thought that Mr. Vogel would look at it and realize that he was wrong and say so. But he didn’t.”

  “Mr. Chairman …” the CASB’s legal council tried again.

  “End of argument,” the chairman cut her off. “File the documents.”

  The rest of Erik’s testimony unfolded like slow torture. The spirit of “respect and cooperation” the chairman had insisted on during the inquiry did not seem to Erik to be part of Mr. Bassie’s repertoire. He found himself constantly on the defensive, his credibility questioned and undermined at every turn. After another hour of cross-examination, it was the inquiry chairman who finally asked the question Erik had been dreading: “Have
you come to an explanation as to why you were still in the Swan Hills when you descended to the altitude of 2,800 feet?”

  “I made an error in navigation,” Erik admitted. “I believed I was farther ahead than I was.”

  When he stepped down from the stand, he felt as if he’d been gutted in front of the entire audience.

  His testimony spawned a host of sensational news stories detailing how Erik had recanted his original version of events. Erik’s contradictory account on the second day of the inquiry not only called into question his credibility and skills as a pilot, but completely undermined the CASB’s attempt to show that human factors—particularly fatigue—were a major cause of the crash. As for the CASB’s hopes of making the crash of Wapiti Flight 402 a precedent-setting case that would improve aviation safety—they had been dashed.

  By the time Dale Wells took the stand later that day, the CASB’s team of investigators had elected to avoid the now-uncertain territory of pilot fatigue and focus instead on Wapiti’s safety standards. Harry Boyko, the CASB’s head of operations, questioned Dale on everything from his airline’s recent maintenance audits to allegations that management refused to assign co-pilots when the weather was below single pilot minimums.

  “Can you tell me … has the operations manager ever rejected a request by a pilot for a co-pilot?” Boyko asked, picking up on Erik’s testimony of the previous day during which he’d recounted his uncomfortable exchange with Delbert Wells over wanting a second pilot for the October 16 medivac.

  “Not to my knowledge under normal circumstances,” Dale replied.

  “Have you ever refused that request?”

  “Not when it was required by the weather.”

  Boyko persevered, trying another tack. “How many times in situations where a pilot has requested a second pilot have they been refused that second pilot?”