On April 28, 1947, Trans-Canada Airlines Flight 3 took off from Lethbridge, Alta. on a routine flight to Vancouver. It never arrived.
I was walking around Rice Lake recently and stopped to pay my respects at the two boulders near the entrance. These boulders are a memorial for the 15 passengers and crew of Trans-Canada Airlines Flight 3.
All seemed normal for the twin engine Lockheed Lodestar as it approached Vancouver. Just after 11 p.m., Capt. Bill Pike, a former fighter pilot, radioed Vancouver Airport that he was over Maple Ridge, giving traffic control his position before landing.
And then in what sounds like an episode from the television show Manifest, the plane, the passengers and the crew disappeared for the next 47 years.
I was working on the city desk at the Vancouver Sun in September of 1994 when the mystery was finally solved. News came in that the plane had been discovered in a deep gully between Mount Seymour and Mount Elsay, 30 kilometres northeast of the airport, under heavy first-growth cover. Also found was a gold ring, bracelet, a woman’s watch, a cigarette case and a lighter.
Mike Neale, the 20-year-old who led searchers to the site in 1994, had actually found the plane two years earlier with his friend Doug Keir. The two North Vancouver men assumed that it was old wreckage found long ago. It wasn’t until they showed photos to historians at the Canadian Museum of Flight that they learned that they’d stumbled across the missing plane.
The memorial was erected 30 years ago on April 28, 1995, and placed in view of the crash site. One of the boulders gives the location and story behind the doomed flight, while the other lists the names of the passengers and crew.
Jane Warren and Margaret Hamblin, both 21, were student nurses at Vancouver General Hospital. Margaret Trerise, 22, and 25-year-old Anatasia (Nell) Lesiuk were flight attendants travelling on stand-by. David Vance was a lumber buyer from Winnipeg. Marjorie and Cecil Nugent, also from Winnipeg, were starting their honeymoon. Victor Armand was an executive with Famous Players, and Lance Millor was the divisional manager of Aro Equipment. Both were from Vancouver. James Woolf was on a business trip from the U.K. The other two men were Clarence Reaper of Quebec, and a W. Robson from Winnipeg.
Twenty-three-year-old Audrey (Tavender) Brandon was supposed to be one of three crew members on the flight that night. Her daughter Dale Brandon says: “She told me she was walking out the door, her suitcase packed, uniform on, and then the phone rang. They had bumped her off the flight.”
Audrey was told that she’d been replaced by Helen Saisbury. The two women were good friends and had graduated from St. Paul’s nursing department together the previous year.
Audrey had made several flights with Pike and his co-pilot Bunty Stewart. It was the days when you had to be a qualified nurse to be a flight attendant, and leave your job if you got married. TCA (which morphed into Air Canada in 1965) didn’t like its flight crews getting up to “hanky panky,” Audrey told Dale, so they would frequently switch the crews around.
It saved her life.
Audrey stayed with the airline until she married in 1950 and automatically lost her job. It wasn’t an easy decision for her, says Dale, one of Audrey’s three children, because she loved flying.
“It was like being a movie star. Everyone knew each other, and the crews were very close knit,” she says.
Audrey told Dale that once she was on a DC-4 from Vancouver when fog closed in. The plane lost a motor over the Rockies and had to make an emergency landing at a military airstrip in Kimberley.
Another time the plane had to return to Vancouver when a drunk passenger passed out over Hope and Audrey couldn’t find a pulse.
“He fooled everyone as he didn’t appear to be impaired when he boarded the aircraft,” she told Dale. “He woke up on the way to Vancouver and he was not pleased.”
Audrey died in August of 2004 at age 80.
Eve Lazarus is a North Vancouver resident and author. Her latest book is Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck. [email protected]
