Into the Abyss (24 page)

With Erik’s help, CASB investigators were confident they could not only shut down Wapiti, but also fix Canada’s broken aviation safety system.

Erik Vogel had a reason to live.

Even with a cause to champion, the weeks and months following the crash were crushingly difficult for Erik. As he found out more details about the passengers he had killed, and news of the crash continued to dominate headlines, his stomach tightened into a fist of guilt and remorse that would not unclench.

After ten days in the hospital, Erik returned to White Rock. By mid-November, the CASB had finished its field investigation of the crash site and written a letter to the highest levels of government requesting special surveillance of Wapiti Aviation. The CASB also announced it would hold a public inquiry, and in January 1986 it subpoenaed its key witness, Erik Vogel. Over the following weeks, CASB investigators inundated him with files and exhausted him with interviews as they began building their case.

A day did not pass when he didn’t think about the crash, but the CASB’s insistence that the fault lay with Wapiti and with Canada’s inadequate aviation safety system gave Erik hope of resurrecting his flying career. That hope was short lived.

“No one wanted anything to do with me,” Erik recalled of the bleak months that followed his high-profile accident. He applied for dozens of flying positions both locally and on the other side of the country, the continent, the globe. He sent résumés to carriers as varied as Georgian Bay Airways in eastern Canada, United Airlines in the United States, and obscure operations in the Maldives. Rejection letters arrived one after the other. His only lifeline was the belief that he wasn’t solely to blame for what had happened that October night.

In Grande Prairie, Dale Wells was facing his own kind of hell. The night of the crash, it was he who made the difficult phone call to Erik’s parents to tell them their son’s plane had gone down. Since then he’d barely had a moment to breathe. On Monday, October 22,
1984, Transport Canada inspectors had descended on Wapiti Aviation, sequestering its records and subjecting Dale and his dad to four straight days of interrogation, despite the fact they were still reeling from the devastating impact of the crash. Aviation officials had also released a damning media statement: “The most recent base inspection of Wapiti Aviation was a maintenance inspection conducted October 1, 1984. At that time it was discovered that
the Company failed to meet a regular maintenance check on part of its fleet.”

If Dale hadn’t been so angry, he might have laughed out loud. As far as he was concerned, his planes were all serviceable and the only deficiency inspectors had found during their recent airworthiness maintenance audit was that Wapiti had not conducted the “special” 500- and 1000-hour inspections for some of its fleet. What aviation officials failed to mention was that Wapiti had kept up with all of its required 100-hour inspections, that the company had immediately completed the additional inspections, and that the planes in question had been back in the air within twenty-four hours.

Shortly after the crash Dale had told one of his pilots that he was “surprised Vogel had flown into the ground as
he was considered conscientious and a careful pilot.” But he hadn’t spoken to Erik since the crash and hadn’t seen him the day Erik returned to Grande Prairie to get his truck from the yard outside the Wapiti hangar.

As the weeks progressed, Dale felt as if his detractors would settle for nothing less than Wapiti’s total destruction. Aviation inspectors surveyed its operations like sharp-eyed raptors, monitoring maintenance activities, scrutinizing Edmonton departures and constantly hassling pilots to produce valid licences, medicals and PPC cards. By early November, one of the victim’s families had launched a
lawsuit against Wapiti alleging “wanton or reckless operations.”

On December 10, three inspectors arrived at Wapiti to conduct a full audit. The results of that days-long ordeal were outlined in a
double-registered, special delivery letter, which arrived on Christmas Eve, 1984. In it, Transport Canada notified Dale that they were suspending elements of Wapiti’s operating certificate for safety reasons, including the company’s right to fly single-pilot IFR, and flights into several northern airports.
Dale would also lose his status as chief engineer. But an even more personally devastating result of that year-end audit concerned Dale’s father, the man who had literally sold the farm to support his son’s dream of building a thriving northern airline. In Transport Canada’s estimation, Delbert Wells, Wapiti’s president for the preceding fourteen years, “
lacked sufficient knowledge of the intricacies of the present operations to permit him to competently discharge his duties as operations manager.”

On February 26, 1985, the CASB convened a public inquiry into the crash at Grande Prairie’s Golden Inn, a cheerless ten-storey building just a few minutes’ drive east along the highway from the airport. Erik was filled with dread as he conferred with James Duke, the lawyer his father had hired to represent him at the proceedings, which took place inside the hotel’s large, dome-ceilinged conference room.

Outside that conference room, the three surviving passengers were experiencing entirely different emotions. Larry, Paul and Scott hadn’t seen one another since shortly after their rescue, and the joy of their reunion was unbridled. They shook hands and clapped one another on the back. Larry embraced Paul warmly. Paul felt a flush of affection for the two well-dressed men who stood beside him—one his former captor, the other a politician who had vouched for his character. In Paul’s hand was a binder containing the initial pages of a handwritten manuscript he’d begun to write during his month at The Haven. The exercise had been a revelation, and had given him the courage to begin changing his life.

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?”