Andrew Raven
Northern News Services

Hood River, Nunavut (Aug 08/03) - Unopened sardine cans litter the beachhead of an unnamed lake in Nunavut, scattered randomly around the crumpled airframe of a wrecked bush plane.

A knife rests on the pilot's seat, inches away from the weathered pelvic bone of its owner.

And a tattered green cloth with the letters AVOY flutters in the wind along the rocky shoreline.

For nearly 40 years, this remote debris field has served as a coffin for famed aviator Chuck McAvoy and his two passengers Doug Thorpe and A. Kune.

The three men disappeared on June 9, 1964 during a flight from Bristol Lake near the Arctic Ocean to Itchen Lake.

It wasn't until Monday afternoon -- 14,299 days after the trio disappeared -- that a helicopter pilot and a team of geologists finally discovered what's left of McAvoy's Fairchild 82.

"The pilot was making a correction to his course and all of a sudden I caught the reflection of the sun off a tail fin," said Lester Vanhill, a geologist at Ashton Mining who was part of the crew.

The geologists and pilot Curtis Constable decided to land the helicopter and check out what looked like any other accident site.

But what they found amazed them.

"I've seen lots of crash sites before," said Vanhill. "Usually they're marked by a cross, but this one didn't have one. It was undiscovered."

The plane was in remarkably good condition given the fact that it had spent the last 39 years on the unforgiving Northern steppe.

The canvas skin of the plane had long since disintegrated, but it's metal airframe was more or less intact.

It's engine was lying several meters away, partially buried in the ground with propeller blades still attached.

Vanhill guessed that it had been ripped away from the fuselage when the plane ploughed headfirst into the rocky shoreline during an emergency landing.

"It looked like he was trying to land on the lake and he ran out of room," said Vanhill, who saw one ski still attached to the plane.

"I guess (the pilot) was having trouble with his engine and this was the only place to put down. But you would never be able to land a plane on this lake."

A trail a debris extended far behind the crash site, leading Constable to theorize that the plane skipped several times on landing.

"I guess the pilot thought it would be a soft place to put down, but the gear must have caught some rocks."

When Constable and Vanhill approached the cabin they made a sobering discovery. They found a skull resting near the pilot's seat and a shiny hunting knife still sitting on a pelvic bone. It must have been Chuck McAvoy.

"It's was eerie," said Vanhill.

"The first thing you do when you crash is take out your knife, but it was still sitting there. The pilot didn't survive the landing," he surmised.

Almost everything inside the plane was charred by a fire that probably erupted on impact, said Constable. The Fairchild 82 was carrying several canisters of fuel when it disappeared.

"It burnt up, and probably quickly," he said.

Remarkably, McAvoy's flying wallet somehow managed to survive the blaze, offering a glimpse back in time to 1964.

It contained McAvoy's 1963 bird gaming license, his Alberta Motor Association membership card, his pilot's license and even a VIP card from Las Vegas' Pink Flamingo Casino.

While the wallet offers solid evidence that McAvoy died in the crash, the fate of Kune and Thorpe hasn't been confirmed.

Constable found a number of bones outside of the plane, but he couldn't say for sure if they belonged to someone other than McAvoy.

But Constable and Vanhill believe the two young American geologists died on impact.

"We saw a bunch of unopened sardine cans near the plane," said Vanhill.

"You would think that if they survived they would have gathered up all the supplies they could get their hands on."

Vanhill also came across a tattered green cloth with the letters AVOY.

"It was probably part of a jacket or a duffel bag that belonged to (Chuck). I guess the MC must have burnt off."

Constable said he stumbled across several other artifacts including a measuring tape, a blue jacket, a table, some folding chairs and a wrench.

"A lot of stuff looked new," he said. "He must have had some good tools."

After close to an hour on the ground Constable and Vanhill pried the serial number off the engine -- in order to help investigators identify the wreckage -- and jumped back into their helicopter.

"This was one of the creepier (crash sites) I have seen," said Vanhill.

The task of identifying the remains now falls on the RCMP, who sent a team of forensic experts to the remote crash site yesterday afternoon, said Nunavut Chief Coroner Tim Neilly.

He expects the RCMP to collect the remains and transport them to the coroner's office in Rankin Inlet.

"It could be a while before we positively identify the remains, or it could go very quickly," said Neilly.

"It all depends on how much forensic material is left."

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada was notified of the crash, but doesn't plan to investigate.

"Personally, I would love to be there," said Wray Tsuji of the TSB.

"But we can't justify the cost of sending people to a remote location like that. We just won't learn anything new about safety."

Tsuji said there are no plans to recover the wreckage.

"It will stay there unless someone salvages it for historical purposes."