Ghosts in the water
Numerous plane sightings over the years yet lost pilots still missing
 | The following is the last of a three-part series recounting the search for Frank Avery Jr. and Bob Markle, missing since Oct. 30, 1960 after they went for a ride in the Luscome Silvaire two-seater aircraft they purchased together the previous year. This story follows Flight into oblivion published Friday. |
Mike W. Bryant
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, December 10, 2014
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
On Aug. 8, 1982, Don Borden, an air accident investigator with the Department of Transport, was flying back to Yellowknife from a crash site in Whati when something caught his eye on the pockmarked landscape below.
A young Frank Avery Jr., missing since Oct. 30, 1960. - photo courtesy of Gerry Avery
Debra Saftner, left, and her mother Patricia Groves hold a portrait showing Groves and her brother Bob Markle, her only sibling, who disappeared while flying his airplane outside Yellowknife 54 years ago. She was 12 at the time the photo was taken; Markle was nine. - Mike W. Bryant/NNSL photo
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It was an airplane. He could see from his seat at the rear of the Twin Otter that the tiny plane, although submerged, was sitting upright and intact in a small lake less than a kilometre to his left. The nose was facing northwest.
According to people aware of Borden's extraordinary sighting, the investigator didn't think much of it at the time. He didn't live in Yellowknife and wasn't aware a plane around the same size with two occupants on board had been missing for more than 20 years.
One of his colleagues, however, knew everything there was to know about the lost flight of Frank Avery Jr. and Bob Markle, two young men who disappeared while testing out their skis on an afternoon flight on Oct. 30, 1960. The two friends were not expected to have flown far from Yellowknife.
Les Mullins, who founded Yellowknife's Ptarmigan Airways before launching a career as an air accident investigator, lived down the street from the Avery family for most of the 1960s. Based on his conversation with Borden, Mullins compiled a report with a map showing his approximate route back to Yellowknife and the likely location of the sunken plane, between 35 and 65 km northwest of Yellowknife.
Sighting stirs up hope
According to the report, Borden was about 10 minutes out of Yellowknife at an altitude of about 3,000 feet when he spotted the plane. He described the lake as oval shaped with a dull, silty bottom. He caught just a glimpse but the plane appeared to be a Cessna 150 or some other similar aircraft. No one else aboard the Twin Otter, including the pilots, saw the plane.
Like the Luscombe Silvaire, the Cessna 150 is a single-engine, high-winged, two-seater airplane. The Luscombe is 20 feet long with a wingspan of 35 feet; the Cessna 150 is 24 feet long with a wingspan of 33 feet. One of the most obvious differences between the two aircraft is with the landing gear. The Cessna 150 has a tricycle configuration with a single wheel under the nose and two wheels under the wings, while the Luscombe's third wheel is located under the tail. It's unlikely this would've been discernible from 3,000 feet in the air.
Gerry Avery, one of Frank's two younger brothers, distributed the report to anyone he thought could help.
One of those people was Roger Zarudzki, a member of the Yellowknife Flying Club, who, along with Mike Piro, a prominent businessman in the city, painstakingly tracked a grid in Zarudzki's Super Cub. Four separate excursions were completed, along with 12 side trips at different elevations and times of the day to recreate conditions under which Borden sighted the plane.
"We never did see anything," said Zarudzki. "Nothing resembling a plane."
Borden, reportedly alive but retired, could not be reached for comment.
Asked whether he thought Borden could have mistaken the plane for something else, Zarudzki, citing the official's experience and familiarity around aircraft, says it's unlikely.
"Something must still be out there," he said.
Close to the airport
Gerry Avery made several exploratory trips of his own, joining his friend Gerry Reimann in his Stinson aircraft.
As those involved in the search explained, there are many reasons why searching for an object submerged in water is tricky, even in relatively shallow water.
"Part of the problem is that light changes, and your depth perception – everything," Avery explained. "One day you can be flying over something and see it and then you fly over the next day, depending on the time of day, the sun, you don't see a damn thing."
Yet sightings continued.
In 2003, Buffalo Airways chief pilot Jim Smith was on final approach in a DC-3 – and like Borden, flying to Yellowknife from Whati – when he too saw a plane in a small lake beneath him.
His employer, "Buffalo" Joe McBryan, said Smith planned to go search for the plane but never got the chance.
"He said he was going to keep on looking but of course he didn't because he died the next winter," said McBryan.
Areas close to airports tend to be blind spots for aerial searches because pilots are too focused on landing the airplane to be looking at the ground below them, the airline owner said.
McBryan, who said he always keeps an eye for them when he flies, believes if Avery and Markle's plane is ever found it will be nearby.
"Airplanes have been known to be lost near the airport because you're not looking down," said McBryan.
"You got to look close to the airport because they're not very far away."
In 2005, a minor stir was caused when navy divers pulled an airplane wing out of Long Lake – only a few metres from the runway at the Yellowknife Airport – but it was much too big for a Luscombe. It was believed the wing came from either the tail of a British Avro York tanker that crashed at the airport in 1955 or from a DC-3 that also crashed and later became a clubhouse for the golf course.
Another flury of excitement came four years later when the RCMP were called after it was reported a plane had been sighted underwater in Back Bay near Ndilo. Gerry Avery said he and his brother Ron went to investigate but it was quickly determined the plane was not their brother's but some other vintage aircraft that had been sunk there deliberately.
"It's about four feet below the surface. In fact, if you try driving over it with a motor boat you'll probably run over it," said Avery. "It burned up I believed."
Across Canada, there are 29 helicopters and fix-winged airplanes on the Transportation Safety Board of Canada's list of missing aircraft dating back to 1958.
The last was a Cessna Caravan 208 flown by Morningstar Air Express with a single pilot on board that crashed into Hudson Bay on Sept. 25, 2013. Investigators have a general idea of the aircraft's whereabouts but it is inaccessible.
The list is by no means complete, admits Jon Lee, the safety board's western regional manager. The complete list only goes back as far as 1976, he said.
Some records were omitted over the years while changing hands from Transport Canada to the Canadian Aviation Safety Board to its current incarnation as the transportation
safety board.
"Obviously stuff getting transferred from one database to another over the years, stuff is going to get left out," said Lee. "We got some historical stuff captured but not everything."
In fact, neither Avery and Markle's plane nor any other aircraft from the NWT are on the list. A Cessna 150 flown by Gavin Edkins of Fort Smith, who went missing while flying to Red Deer in 1996, is on it but his disappearance is considered an Alberta incident as he is believed to have crashed somewhere near Fort McMurray.
Lee said Search and Rescue Canada's records of missing aircraft are more complete but when contacted, Yellowknifer was referred back to the transportation safety board.
Family drawn back to Yellowknife
Government officialdom may have forgotten about the two missing men in Yellowknife but not their families.
Markle's only sister, Patricia Groves, who was 23 when he went missing, says despite her misgivings about the city after her brother disappeared, she found herself inexorably drawn back. Her youngest son Tim was the first to arrive in the mid-1990s, then her daughter Debra in 1999, followed by Groves about six years later. Her son Robin – born less than a month before his uncle's flight into oblivion – would eventually move back to Yellowknife as well.
"I really had to move back," said Groves. "My husband didn't want to move here but I had to come back."
The 78 year old says when she passes on, she wants her ashes spread over Back Bay. "Because that's the last place anybody told me that might be where they are."
Ron Avery wonders what it will take to finally lift the veil off his long lost brother and plane.
Finding aircraft buried underwater, even from a deep body of water, is not impossible. But it does require a starting point, the will and some money.
In 2012, the bodies of two airmen, Leading Aircraftsman Theodore Bates and Flight Lieut. Peter Campbell, were recovered from Ontario's Lake Muskoka 72 years after their military aircraft plunged into the water following a mid-air collision with another plane.
The search for the men involved several parties, including the Lost Airmen of Muskoka, a civilian group that found the plane using sonar, and the Ontario Provincial Police and Royal Canadian Navy, which recovered the bodies and the plane.
Avery, who warmly remembers his brother – eight years his senior – picking him up in his pick-up truck and taking him for airplane rides in the Luscombe, believes, despite the ghost plane sightings near the airport, the missing men are in Great Slave Lake.
Its size, depth, proximity to their launch point, and the fact that its waters would've been mostly unfrozen the day they disappeared while most of the small lakes would've been covered in ice, makes it a prime candidate for a search.
"If money wasn't a problem I'd have something done," said Avery. "If they can find the Titanic I'm sure they can find my brother."
