The RCMP and Air Canada Flight 621
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CHAPTER 7 The RCMP and Air Canada Flight 621 s Sterling Moore and I headed out from our apartment on Green AValley Road in Toronto’s affluent Hogg’s Hollow for a day of fishing in the Muskokas, Gordon Lightfoot’s song 'In the Early Morning Rain’ was playing on the car radio. The sun hung as a red orb in an early-morning summer sky. It was foretelling a clear but hot day ahead. My work partner and I made a stop at the Airport Shell Station in Malton to gas up. We both worked shifts at the Old Malton Airport as part of a contingent of RCMP officers stationed there. Our duties were varied, but security of a federal property, dealing with immigration and customs issues, and traffic control topped the list. That morning dawned as a beautiful clear and sunny July day, the first of three days of well-deserved leave. After getting gas and talking to the people at the service centre, we exited the complex. We planned to head north by backtracking along the 401 East to the 400 exit, then north towards Barrie. It was approximately 8:00 a.m., July 5th, 1970. We had not travelled any more than a few hundred feet when we were stopped by our duty corporal, Corporal Marshall, who had seen us leaving the gas station. He had the lights of the police car flashing, the siren blaring. What was going on? That question was answered instantaneously when he came to the driver’s side window of our car and asked us to pull it off the road and come with him. There was some urgency in his voice for sure. We wondered what would take him out of the airport that early in the morning. We parked our car in haste and joined him in the police car. He then told us that a plane had crashed north of Malton and we were needed. He told us the tower said it was an Air Canada stretch 8 (DC 8) inbound from Montreal. "That's all I know," he told us. "Keep your eyes peeled for any sign of the crash site.” The conversation among the three of us was confused and anxious. What were we going to see? A few more miles up a short secondary road we all noticed smoke. In a minute or two we were at the end of a - 87 - long dirt driveway, which led to a farmhouse. Not far from the house black smoke was bellowing up from the ground. The corporal was hesitant at first to drive up to the site where the smoke was coming from, some three hundred yards away, so we told him to park the car on an angle to block the road and we would walk the rest of the way. This he did and soon joined us. The three of us unintentionally were to become the first witnesses to a most horrific accident—the first major airline crash any of us had ever seen, and speaking for myself, hopefully the last. The closer we got to the site, the more pungent the air became, with a very strong smell of what appeared to be kerosene. We later learned it was jet fuel. It seemed to cover everything including the dirt driveway itself. We looked everywhere for a plane or some semblance of a plane—a wing, a tail, an engine—anything we could readily recognize, but there was nothing. We concluded at first that the plane must have crashed in another location and the area we were now looking at was just a small section of the overall event. The hole and proximity to the farmhouse. Courtesy: The Brampton Guardian As we slowed our pace, we discussed the close proximity of the farmhouse, noting it was lucky for anyone inside that the plane went down in another location. If it had crashed here, all inside would surely have been killed. But we were soon to discover that it had, in fact, crashed right next to that house in what we could make out to be sort of a small garden bordered by a field. The whole scene was - 88 - beyond eerie; there was no sound, and just a wisp of black smoke coming up out of the ground. If people lived in that house, they were lucky indeed. We then saw a few dazed people on the front step. We tried to make contact but they did not acknowledge our presence. We quickly realized, however, that they were residents of the farmhouse and not part of the charnel house scene that now lay before us. Getting even closer, we could see that the smoke was coming up out of a large, black hole. Where was the plane? “Maybe it's in that hole," the corporal said, as we searched each other’s faces for answers. "No way could a 'stretch 8' fit into such a small area,” I said. So to satisfy our curiosity even further the corporal said he would go back to the police car and use the special Dept. of Transport radio we had onboard to call the tower back at the airport. "There must be another explanation," he said, "and if so we need to find out what it is if we hope to help anyone this morning.” With that, he rushed back to the police car; we stayed behind and began to survey the scene. Author in uniform with his sister Barbara taken a day before the crash. Courtesy: Robert MacKinnon I walked up to the edge of the hole and thought I could make out a section of undercarriage but was not sure. My partner hollered, breaking the eerie silence, that he found what looked like an aircraft tire. That did it. We began to look at the site from a different perspective. Could this small area actually be the entire crash site and, if so, where were the passengers and crew and where was the plane? In actual fact, the plane was all around us. We just could not see it. - 89 - Corporal Marshall quickly returned from the police car stating the all-too-obvious reality: “The tower says this is the crash site, one engine is back on the tarmac so our job here is to help anyone we can without destroying evidence in the process." So we all looked around for someone, anyone, to help but there was no one. Had they sought shelter in the farmhouse? Were there any people from the plane in the farmhouse? Then a macabre feeling swept over the three of us as the reality began to sink in: was everyone onboard killed and are we standing among them unseen? We were. The colour red caught my eye from high in a tree near the farmhouse. It looked like a distress flag, but in reality it was a dress, flying in the gentle breeze that now blew over the site. The closer I got to it from ground level, I more I could make out that it was a stewardess’s uniform dress, still, it seemed, in perfect condition. Then other less obvious items began to make themselves visible. I walked on something soft but at first glance could not make it out. One of the others shouted out from across the other side of the hole: “We have body parts here. At least I think that is what they are.” In only a few minutes, we went from wondering if this was the main crash site to realizing with horror that it was. The whole thing sent a cold shiver down my spine as I expect it did my two fellow officers on the scene with me that day. One asked again, “Where are all the passengers? They must be around here somewhere.” As we quickly discovered, they were—in small pieces spread around the crash site, in the trees and buried with what was left of the plane in that hole. One hundred and nine people in all. We immediately came together to discuss the realization that what lay in front of us and under our feet was in fact the entire remains of Air Canada flight 621, its passengers and crew. It was the complete package of destruction and death, except for one engine that lay back on the tarmac and what the tower’s last report indicated was one of the wings that broke off when the plane banked hard trying to return to the airport. This final point I have never had proven as fact. In reality the three of us were in - 90 - some sort of private shock, some sort of private hell with the smell of jet fuel and death all around. We stood there in silence, near that smoking, gaping hole, in a strange state of altered consciousness. We all seemed to realize that life so precious not an hour earlier had been snuffed out in unthinkable horror. The sound of sirens off in the distance brought us back to reality in both time and place. If what we were looking at was actually reality, it was a cruel one beyond human belief. We knew many officials would be on their way to investigate the crash, look for survivors if any, but most importantly, secure the site. We turned and headed back toward our police car and some semblance of life as we knew it before we began our walk up this road not less than twenty minutes previous. Even before we reached the patrol car with its single-dome roof light still flashing red, emergency vehicles from the airport and the surrounding communities were racing up the road toward us.