Google image sparks search
 | Fifty four years ago Frank Avery Jr., 22, and friend Bob Markle, 20, took off in their airplane for an afternoon flight around Yellowknife and were never seen again. The following is the first of a three-part series. |
Mike W. Bryant
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, December 3, 2014
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Old mysteries are like sediment at the bottom of a stream: time buries them.
Frank Avery Jr., centre, Bob Markle, right, and friend Jack Schultz with the Luscombe Silvaire that went missing on Oct. 30, 1960. - photo courtesy of Gerry Avery
Longtime Yellowknifer Mike Byrne spent days last spring trying to determine whether a Google Earth image in the shape of an airplane appearing on Fox Lake outside Fred Henne Territorial Park was an aircraft that had gone missing 54 years ago. - Mike W. Bryant/NNSL photo |
Such is the case of the missing flight of Frank Avery Jr. and Bob Markle, two young men who on Oct. 30, 1960, hopped into their shared Luscombe Silvaire two-seater airplane and were never seen again.
The most baffling part of the mystery is that by many accounts, including from those who saw the pair flying that day, the plane probably remained within view of Yellowknife for the entire flight.
Somehow a 20-foot-long, 35-foot-wide plane with bright silver wings has been swallowed up at the outskirts of the city. In all this time, not a single hiker, boater, prospector, pilot or passenger flying overhead has come forward with conclusive evidence pointing to their whereabouts.
The tantalizing proximity of their disappearance isn't lost on Yellowknifers who recall when the plane went missing or grew up hearing stories about it. It's enough to keep hope flickering that someone, some day, will stumble upon the missing men and aircraft, bringing closure to one of northern aviation's most enduring mysteries.
Hope sprang to life earlier this spring when bush plane pilot Ron Lee made a startling discovery while poring over a Google Earth map in search of a safe place to land his floatplane in case of engine trouble.
On the satellite image map, in a small bay on the southwest corner of Fox Lake - just a stone's throw from Fred Henne Territorial Park - was an airplane. Or at least what looked like an airplane.
"I was looking for rocks and lo and behold, there was that little cross that looked like an airplane on the bottom of the lake," said Lee. "The story was fresh in my head because we were already talking about it."
In early April, conversation at the Diner on 50 Street, much like everywhere else in the world at that time, had turned to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a 777-200ER aircraft with 12 crew and 227 passengers that disappeared flying to Beijing from Kuala Lampur.
Naturally, the missing airliner spurred discussion of Yellowknife's own lost airplane. It didn't take long for news of Lee's discovery to make the rounds and for plans to be hatched to verify it.
Lee was in the parking lot at Fred Henne a few days later when he encountered Mike Byrne and Brian Piro preparing for an expedition of their own to Fox Lake based on what they heard at the Diner. Lee had made a preliminary investigation the night before, poking a few holes through the ice and breaking some trail but had come up empty.
Byrne planned to leave no stone unturned. The lifelong Yellowknifer had the week off work and had assembled a small crew, including his son Ryan, to help uncover the truth behind the peculiar Google Earth image.
More intrigue came when Byrne found some old aerial survey photos of the area taken the year before Avery and Markle disappeared. The ghost plane wasn't there.
Fox Lake is very close to the approach path pilots take when heading to Yellowknife Airport from the south. It is also close to Back Bay where Avery and Markle had taken off from on skis. It's a compelling body of water when contemplating where a lost plane might likely be found if searching around Yellowknife.
"Fox Lake is one of these brown-water lakes so it could've been covered in muck, could've been algae in there, could've been all the right circumstances to have kept it hidden in all of these years," said Byrne.
"Maybe this satellite had happened to pick it up at just the right time of year, right time of day, in the right the season, and all that kind of stuff."
Over several days, Byrne painstakingly measured and triangulated distances using pickets and sight lines to pinpoint the exact location of the Google Earth image on Fox Lake. Dozens of holes were drilled through the ice. A metal detector was brought in by snowmobile but it didn't detect anything.
Then, a moment of delirious excitement. Suddenly the ice auger pushed past resistance at the bottom and into a promising void.
"There was a couple times when the auger bit and grabbed something that pulled the auger right down to the ice," Byrne recalls.
"We thought, 'Oh my goodness, there's gotta be something!' But it turned to just be the muck underneath. The first couple of times, it was enough to really give you goosebumps thinking, 'Uh oh, it's gone through the fuselage.'"
Months later, on a damp fall day in September, Yellowknifer accompanied Byrne on a hike to Fox Lake to see the fruits of his labour firsthand, without two feet of snow on top of the ice.
No one really expected to find a plane but it was Byrne's first time back to the area since April.
It was evident beyond the last few tent pads at Fred Henne Park that this little corner of wilderness, still very much within city limits, is not frequented by many people.
An old drill site lies rusted and exposed. A long-overgrown Cat trail veers off into impenetrable conifer jungle. But the usual flotsam and trash one would expect to see this close to the city is conspicuously absent. Only Byrne's sentinel wooden posts and the odd plane overhead interrupted the illusion of remoteness.
In the middle of the bay stood a solitary picket adorned with orange flagging tape - the same place where Byrne had planted it through a hole in the ice months before. There was no plane, only mud and hope unfulfilled.
Byrne, whose older brother Norm Jr. was killed in a bush plane crash on a lake north of Yellowknife in 1974, now believes the ghostly image on Google Earth may very well be a plane - just not one submerged in water.
"I'm starting to think that a plane was flying overhead right at the same time the satellite took the picture," said Byrne.
"Just another little plane doing touch-and-goes."
The pilot Ron Lee won't entirely discount the possibility a plane might still be there. Lee flew out to the lake in his Super Cub last summer, and while the bay is very shallow and nothing promising was visible, he says the soupy bottom muck could obscure a small plane quite easily.
"Just from paddling a little bit from out on the float, just a little swish from the paddle stirs up the bottom immensely and then you lose all visibility completely," said Lee.
"So, I don't know. The strange thing of it is, when you're looking at the computer it looks like there is something there."
See Friday's Yellowknifer for part two of this series - Flight into oblivion.
