Flight into oblivion
Two young men go flying near Yellowknife and are never heard from again
 | The following is the second 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 'Google image sparks search,' published Wednesday. |
Mike W. Bryant
Northern News Services
Published Friday, December 5, 2014
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Winter came early in 1960. By the third week of October the thermostat was dropping down to -15 C at night and Back Bay was frozen solid from Peace River Flats almost to Giant Mine.
Frank Avery Jr. stands outside the old Gerry Murphy Arena some time during the late 1950s or early '60s. He mysteriously disappeared after going for a ride in his plane around Yellowknife 54 years ago. - photo courtesy of Gerry Avery
The search for Frank Avery Jr. and Bob Markle was initially off to slow start when they disappeared on Oct. 30, 1960. It eventually involved the Royal Canadian Air Force and covered 90,000-square kilometres from Behchoko to the East Arm of Great Slave Lake.
- newspaper clippings courtesy of Gerry Avery |
Friends Frank Avery Jr., 22, and Bob Markle, 20, had made many trips in the Luscombe Silvaire they had purchased together the previous year. The two men both worked at Con Mine and dreamed of establishing their own charter airline business. The tandem-seated plane, with the call letters CF-HUF inscribed on its tail, had two stick controls, allowing the plane to be flown from either seat.
They were anxious to accumulate enough flight hours to obtain a commercial licence. So on Oct. 30, after Avery's night shift at the mine, the two men flew their plane down to Back Bay from the airport and installed the skis. The winter months opened up more places to land and visit than during summer when they were on wheels.
After several days of double-digit lows, the temperature had warmed, hovering around 0 C, according to Environment Canada's historical weather database.
Patricia Groves, Markle's older sister and only sibling, remembers a day of deteriorating weather with high winds and blowing snow. Her neighbour Betty McAvoy was at the Old Town float base and watched as the two men installed the skis.
"The weather was iffy, and Betty had said, 'You're not going anywhere today are you?' And they said, 'we're just going up around town,'" remembers Groves.
Betty's husband was the famed bush pilot Jim McAvoy. In 1964, his brother Chuck McAvoy went missing while flying in the Barrens. His crumpled plane was found 39 years later by a helicopter pilot and a team of geologists in a remote gully 585 km northeast of Yellowknife.
Groves remembers her brother - a large man more than six feet tall - as a calm and confident pilot even though he had only received his licence the previous spring.
A couple of months before he disappeared, Markle flew his sister in the Luscombe to visit friends at Discovery Mine, about 80 km northeast of the city. Groves wasn't as comfortable in the air as her brother was and she wanted to open the window because she was feeling sick.
"He was wearing canoe shoes," said Groves. "He took one off and said, 'Use this.'"
Frank Avery Jr., although only 22, had already been flying for several years, recalls Gerry Avery, one of two younger brothers. He had learned how to fly on a Link Trainer, an early form of flight simulator, set up in the living room of Hank Hicks, who ran the Yellowknife Flying School back in the 1950s.
"He did all his training here in Yellowknife," said Avery.
The other Avery brother, Ron, recalls the day Frank went missing as starting out nice but worsening in the afternoon. He was on Frame Lake hunting ptarmigan when the Luscombe Silvaire came in for a touch-and-go shortly after noon.
"I could almost see them in the plane," said Ron. "They took off and it was shortly after that, not an hour even, that it really started to blow in. I was heading back to home and it was starting blow pretty good. It did get to be what you'd call whiteout conditions by about 3 p.m."
Other sightings were reported throughout the afternoon. One witness, his vehicle stuck in a snowbank, said he saw the plane flying overhead near the airport at around 3:30 or 4 p.m. The men tipped their wings at him.
Father Maurice Beauregard, a Catholic priest living on Latham Island, reported seeing the plane over the island, adding it sounded like it was having engine trouble. There was a similar report of a plane in distress but closer to Con Mine over Mosher Island, said Ron.
Being close to Halloween, Groves was at a masquerade party at the Elks Hall that night and didn't know her brother was missing until the following morning.
"The next morning I hadn't heard anything about it," said Groves. "Then all of a sudden my husband was over at my parents' place and they were telling them they hadn't come home."
Ron remembers local pilots beginning the search immediately. His father went flying with a friend that morning. It was three days, however, before the Royal Canadian Air Force began an official search. Avery's father - a former air force officer - had to pull rank to get the ball rolling.
| If the trail had been cold before, it was frozen solid now |
"The small planes were out flying right away," said Ron.
"At that point, if they had gone into a smaller lake and went through, it would've been visible. But you could get fooled. You're not looking for that. You're looking for an airplane sitting on a lake."
Search crews, along with many local pilots and airlines, covered some 90,000 square kilometres between Behchoko and the East Arm of Great Slave Lake, but no trace of the men was found. If clues had been visible from the air, they were wiped away by the relentless onslaught of wind and snow that heralded Yellowknife's descent into winter.
"Snow hampers search," trumpeted the headline in the Nov. 4, 1960 issue of the Edmonton Journal. On Nov. 10, News of the North reported RCAF Dakota aircraft were being used for long range searches. By Nov. 26, almost a month after the men had disappeared, only a single Dakota from Winnipeg remained on the search.
If the trail had been cold before, it was frozen solid now.
For Groves, who moved to Yellowknife with her parents and brother in 1950, the pain of not knowing what happened to him eventually took its toll. Groves and her family left Yellowknife in 1965. It would be more than 30 years before she returned.
"After Bob went I got kind of depressed," said Groves. "I hated it here.
"We had a bond. We never fought, which my parents thought was really weird. I had to look after him from the time he could walk practically. He was the best brother anybody could have."
- See Wednesday's Yellowknifer for part three of this series - Ghosts in the water.
