A Forgotten Terrifying Dive: The Story of Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 831
November 29th, 1963. Sainte-Thérèse-de-Blainville, Quebec. A municipality just outside of Montreal, the sound of planes flying over is common. They’re near a flight path from Montreal-Dorval Airport (now Montreal-Trudeau Airport), one of the busiest airports in Canada. It’s a Friday evening, and the weather has been terrible. The fog and the pouring rain has caused some of the worst traffic jams in Montreal, and has probably made many men working there late for dinner.
6:33 pm. The residents hear the sound of one of those new jet planes owned by their national airline, Air Canada (better known by their English name at the time, Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA), though both names were used on English advertisements). Suddenly, they hear a thunderous crash. Flames light up the dark sky, coming from a muddy field just west of Highway 11. Many race outside to see the devastation for themselves: a plane full of people has just impacted the ground in a violent fashion. No one on board has survived.
People across Canada watching TV or listening on the radio would later hear shocking news from Blainville (also referred to as Ste. Therese, a town that was, at the time, merged with Blainville and other surrounding communities to make Sainte-Thérèse-de-Blainville): Trans-Canada Air Lines flight 831, a DC-8 registered CF-TJN heading to Toronto, has crashed after take-off from Montreal. The death toll was disturbing: 118 people (7 crew, 111 passengers) dead. To Canadians, it would be a tragedy on top of a tragedy: the JFK assassination had only happened 7 days prior, and many Canadians were grieving with their American neighbours. Now, a tragedy had hit their own country.
To some, they would be shocked with confusion. There were many flights going from Montreal to Toronto, and some people changed tickets at the last minute. Others missed the flight because of those traffic jams. Some, who thought their loved ones were on the plane and were grieving when they heard the news, would suddenly see them at the front door, having caught a later plane. Others, who believed their loved ones took the train or an earlier flight, were devastated to learn that they were actually gone.
At the time, it was the second-deadliest single-plane disaster in the history of commercial aviation, slotting itself ahead of Air France flight 117 but behind Air France flight 007, both occurring the previous year. For Canada, it would be the deadliest air accident in Canadian history. Even today, it is the third-deadliest air accident in Canada, and is still the deadliest air accident in Canada involving a Canadian airline. Investigators had to find out why such a tragedy occurred.
Some in the public feared the worst. In 1963, a new entity in the Quebec separatist movement appeared on the scene, and did so violently: the FLQ. More well known as the group behind the October crisis in 1970, where Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act after the FLQ kidnapped James Cross and Pierre Laporte, the FLQ made themselves known by conducting a series of attacks in 1963, one of which included bombing a section of rail between Montreal and Quebec City. Questions on whether TCA831 was bombed out of the sky by the FLQ were valid, as most of the people on board were from the Toronto area, but were ultimately dismissed. All of the plane’s wreckage was at the muddy field, and no evidence of a bomb was found during the investigation. Investigators conducted tests by making their own suitcase bombs and seeing what explosive residue and types of fragments would appear, and none of these appeared on the accident wreckage. These tests would actually be helpful in the long-term, as they added to the knowledge base of bombed planes and how fragments from one actually look like. No doubt that this knowledge helped investigators find that Air India flight 182 was actually bombed out of the sky 22 years later, the biggest terrorist attack on Canadians.
Some wreckage was found on the ground, scattered from the crash site. Some of that wreckage was unfortunately looted by some locals, who also looted the possessions of dead passengers, which, at one point, forced a police officer to shoot in the air a few times to warn people against looting. To find out more, however, investigators had to dig deep. Really deep. When the plane impacted the ground, it did with such a force that it dug itself into the muddy field. So, for the next few months, they had to dig the ground open. While starting out with picks and shovels, heavy equipment was later introduced, including “four cranes with clam shells, pay loaders and end loaders which excavated around the edge, cutting gradually towards the centre of the crater.”
Due to the muddy nature of the soil and the weather, pumps were used to pump out water from the crater. This was actually a double-edged sword: there would no longer be water impeding progress, but the ground was now dry and harder to dig through. The cold weather did not help matters; it make the ground frozen. Floodlights were brought in to make this dig a 24-hour operation, with a temporary tent village built nearby.
Two weeks in, they realized that, with the heavy equipment and the soil, they had to stop the excavation to avoid the ever increasing landslides as they dug to a depth of 20 to 30 feet. After a month dedicated to an engineering investigation, it was decided that they had to build a cofferdam to support the heavy equipment and prevent any future landslides and any water from seeping in. After another month of building the cofferdam, excavation finally resumed on February 13th, 1964, and continued until April 27, 1964. In total, the team moved and screened 26,000 cubic yards (about 20,000 cubic metres) of soil from the crater area, and recovered 78% of the wreckage (in terms of comparing the known weight of the aircraft and the weight of the recovered wreckage). The remaining 22% was deemed to have existed “in very small pieces and that the recovery of the missing material would not assist in determining the cause of the crash”.
There was one thing the team knew they wouldn’t get: flight recorders. At the time, Canada did not require airplanes to have any flight recorders, whether flight data or cockpit voice. Though one TCA DC-8 was said to have a flight recorder in 1963, CF-TJN was not that one. Coincidentally, on the same day of the crash, Trans-Canada Air Lines had a meeting in Winnipeg to consider which recorders they should put on their planes. They would later commit to immediately installing flight data recorders onto their planes, and in 1969–70, Canada would pass laws that would make flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders on commercial aircraft above a certain weight mandatory, just in time for the crash of Air Canada flight 621 in what is now Brampton, Ontario on July 5th, 1970, where they proved vital in understanding that crash.
However, without any recorders on TCA831, trying to figure out the cause of the crash would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. They could only rely on the wreckage retrieved in order to come up with some sort of answer, and without information from the cockpit, they would never know what exactly happened in the cockpit; only a good guess.
Conducting the initial investigation was the Department of Transport’s Accident Investigation Division, created in 1960. They decided that the investigation should be split into six groups: Records and Documents, Operations, Power Plants, Human Factors, Structures, and Systems. While Records and Documents and Operations were each led by a person from the Department of Transport, Power Plants, Structures, and Systems were each led by a person from the National Research Council, and Human Factors was led by a person from the RCAF Institute of Aviation Medicine.
From the Records and Documents group, they had information about the crew and the history of the plane. The captain was John Douglas Snider, who was 47 years old, and flew for the RCAF from 1940 to 1944, when he then joined TCA. He had 17,206 flying hours, with 458 hours on the DC-8 and 103 hours on the DC-8F. The first officer was Harry Jacob Dyck, who was 35 years old, joined TCA in 1953, and had 8,303 flying hours, with 336 hours on the DC-8 and 62 hours on the DC-8F. The DC-8 required three people to fly the plane, so the cockpit also had second officer Edward Desmond Baxter, who was 29 years old, became a TCA pilot in 1957 after working numerous jobs with TCA, and had 3,603 flying hours, with 133 hours on the DC-8 and 144 hours on the DC-8F. These hours on the DC-8 seem low, but the DC-8 was a newer plane to TCA, with only the first ones being delivered in 1960.
The lead flight attendant was Imants Edvins (Jim) Zirnis, with the other flight attendants being Kathleen Patricia (Patsy) Creighton, Linda Joy Slaught, and Lorna-Jean Catherine Wallington.
According to the book Voices from a Forgotten Tragedy, written by Robert J. (Bob) Page (son of John Page, one of the victims of the crash), Ernest J. (Ern) Dick (Bob’s high school friend and an oral historian), and Jean Grant-Page (Bob’s wife), this flight was supposed to be flown by another plane and their crew, but they got stuck in Dusseldorf due to the fog. This was an unexpected flight for all of the crew, who were called in, and the plane itself, which was supposed to do a flight to Vienna that night. Other crew members in TCA declined the schedule change before these people accepted the job, sparing them of their untimely deaths.
The aircraft itself, CF-TJN, was a DC-8F-54. This was technically a freighter version of the DC-8, however, it had an adjustable bulkhead that allowed for up to 114 passengers. It was a brand new plane, with its first flight on February 5th of the same year, and having only 2,174 hours in the air. The plane had four Pratt & Whitney JT3D-3 jet engines. Considering how new the plane was, the Records and Documents group found nothing wrong in terms of the maintenance of the plane.
For the Operations group, they had representatives of the Department of Transport and TCA to take 110 witness statements from between Sainte-Rose (a town now amalgamated into Laval) and the crash site in Blainville. The most notable and detailed statement was made by Thomas Watt in Sainte-Rose. He had years of experience as a bush pilot and was outside his house at around 6:30pm, just before the crash. He heard a jet airplane west of his position and said “that this jet was climbing because the engine noise was strong and then there was abrupt cessation of power or this noise, the jet noise, and then a whistling noise that you could attribute to empennage [the tail] or flying wires. It is kind of a whistling noise in an aeroplane that is coming down.” He said to himself at the time that the pilot “was doing an expedited letdown, a real expedited letdown.” He also stated that “it was so unusual because he was, to me, climbing and that is the kind of power he had on and all of a sudden just stopped.” From the other witness statements, they concluded that the plane was not on fire before impact and that electrical power was available to the lighting system.
From their report, the Operations group found that the flight took off normally from runway 6R, carried out the noise abatement procedure, and turned left about 8 nautical miles from the point of take-off power. The pilots at no point reported any trouble to ATC. Then, around Sainte-Rose, the flight reduced power abruptly, based on Watt’s observation. They found that TCA831 was the only jet aircraft around Sainte-Rose at the time Watt made his observation. From there, the flight path deviated 55˚ to the right, and descended very quickly, travelling at a magnetic heading of about 330˚ between Sainte-Rose and the crash site, where it crashed at a steep angle. From the start of the take-off roll to the crash, it was only 5 minutes, plus or minus 15 seconds. They knew the approximate time of take-off, and, since the crash was so violent, it was actually registered by a seismograph at College Brebeuf in Montreal, and so they knew the exact time of impact. They found no wreckage outside of the crash site, and found that the weather, though it was bad and some turbulence, was fine for this flight. In addition, since the first officer was making the radio calls, the captain was flying the plane.
The Operations group also did something which I don’t know had been done before. Since they did not have an FDR to plot out a flight path, they decided to use a new IBM 1620 digital computer from the National Research Council (NRC) to figure out probable horizontal and vertical flight profiles. According to R. Jack Templin, an aeronautical engineer at the NRC, in an e-mail published in Voices from a Forgotten Tragedy, the average flight speed from take-off to impact was “surprisingly high”. In order to match the short time span, the team had to consider “an early tip-over, and steep descent.” This caused the speed to be quite high, converting the potential energy from the “normal height and climb speed to high speed near ground level.” According to numerous reports from the time of the investigation, Orville R. Dunn, a senior aerodynamicist with Douglas, described the DC-8 as a “slippery eel”, a plane “that can build up speed quickly and lose altitude rapidly once it goes into a dive–even a shallow dive.”
The Power Plant group examined the engines, and found that the engines were completely normal, but that they were at or near forward flight idle at the time of impact and must’ve been in that position for at least 10 seconds. This matches up with Watt’s observation that that engines were powered down before impact. Consider the amount of speed the plane had during its dive, it would make sense that the pilots would reduce engine power to try and slow down.
The Human Factors group found that the tissue samples had no evidence of high carbon monoxide concentrations or other toxic components, and that the crew were all physically and mentally fit.
I’m going to group the findings of the Structures and Systems groups, because they both reveal the culprit. What is interesting is that the Structures group, contrary to the 330˚ magnetic heading given by the Operations group, found evidence, from the direction of the wreckage thrown after impact and how the trees were cut, that the flight path’s magnetic heading was estimated at either 296˚ plus or minus 15˚, or 295˚ plus or minus 12˚, respectively, providing evidence of a curving flight path. Based on the trees, the angle of descent was a staggering 55 degrees plus or minus 7 degrees. The attitude of the plane was right wing down at 35 degrees plus or minus 8 degrees. The compression wrinkles in the fuselage shows that the plane did hit nose first, and everything on the plane was working, and that the wings were in a “clean configuration”, with the flaps and spoilers retracted, also confirmed by the Systems group. The Systems group also found that hydraulic, electrical, and pneumatic power was available up to impact, the fuel was fine, the ailerons was calling for “right wing up”, which indicates that the pilots were trying to level the plane from its right wing down attitude. The speed of the plane at impact was between the staggering speeds of 470 and 485 knots.
The biggest finding by both groups was the position of the horizontal stabilizer trim. For a plane like TCA831 that’s climbing to its cruise altitude minutes after take-off, you would expect the plane to be trimmed nose up. However, both groups found that, not only was the plane trimmed nose down, it was purposely trimmed nose down near it limits, between 1.65˚ and 2˚ according to the Systems group, and according to the Structures group, “witness marks” indicated between 1.6˚ and 1.7˚ nose down trim for the left side, and about 1.9˚ nose down trim for the right side. Witness marks are marks made at impact on certain plane components, and can make an estimate of how the plane was configured, though only a rough estimate considering the many forces at impact. Either way, this plane was trimmed at an excessive, near full nose down position (2˚ is the limit for nose down trim), and it was done so intentionally. Now, as the rest of the investigation will show, this does not mean that the pilots wanted to crash the plane. Actually, they were trying not to crash their plane. Something made them believe that trimming full nose down was their best option to stay in control.
This initial investigation was done over the course of a year. However, this was a huge crash that required a lot of questions to be answered, and it required a lot of public trust to ensure that those questions were answered properly, and that those answers would be taken seriously by the American aviation community. A “Board of Inquiry” headed by a Department of Transport official, like what was done for Trans-Canada Air Lines flight 661 or Maritime Central Airways flight 315 was not going to cut it. After some delay, Justice Minister Guy Favreau finally officially announced a Commission of Inquiry into the crash on October 8th, 1964, over 10 months after the crash, on behalf of Transport Minister Jack Pickersgill.
This commission would take all of these reports from the six groups, and fully analyze them together to create a single, cohesive report to find the cause(s) of the crash, and whether there was any breach of the Aeronautics Act or Air Regulations. It did not get into the lawsuits filed against the airline or the manufacturer, and was understood that the actual goal of the public inquiry was to “try to discover the cause, not to assign legal liability,” according to the article Quebec judge hopes to find why 118 died by David Oancia in The Globe and Mail’s October 31st, 1964 issue.
That Quebec judge was George Swan Challies, Associate Chief Justice of the Quebec Superior Court. He would be the Commissioner of this inquiry, with the help of two technical advisers: Captain William Sydney Roxborough of Canadian Pacific Air Lines, and retired Air Commodore Raymond Harris Bray of the RCAF. One interesting addition was Donald W. Madole of the CAB (whose investigative branch was the predecessor to the NTSB) as an observer. You would think that Madole was there because the DC-8 was an American aircraft, and that is partly the case. However, he was also there for another reason: the CAB was investigating a very similar crash.
On February 25th, 1964, about 3 months after the crash of TCA831, Eastern Air Lines flight 304, a DC-8-21 registered N8607, took off from New Orleans airport on its second leg of a flight from Mexico City to New York-JFK Airport, recently renamed in the aftermath of the president’s assassination that Canadians were grieving for before TCA831. Nine minutes after take off, the plane disappeared from radar. The plane crashed in the nearby Lake Pontchartrain. All 58 people on board died in the crash. Similar to TCA831, EAL304 had a normal take off before diving violently, though this time into the water. The weather was fine for flying, though it was raining and turbulent. The horizontal stabilizer was intentionally trimmed nose down, and, though EAL304 had a flight data recorder, the only portions of readable tape found only recorded up to the landing at New Orleans from Mexico. It seems like there was a flaw in the DC-8 that caused crashes in both Canada and the US, and they both wanted to get the answer.
The first batch of hearings for the public inquiry would happen in Montreal on November 9th, 10th, and 11th, and December 2nd, 3rd, 7th, and 8th of 1964. Though this was supposed to be the start of the analysis of the evidence, the CAB was making another push into their investigation of EAL304 in 1965 for additional information, particularly sessions held in April. These were attended by technical adviser Roxborough and representatives from the Canadian Department of Transport, Douglas, and Air Canada (renamed in English from Trans-Canada Air Lines at the start of 1965). This caused a final reconvening of the inquiry on June 9th, 1965 in Ottawa, where the CAB’s evidence from April was submitted.
Eventually, after the completion of the inquiry in June, on August 6th, 1965, the final report was issued by the Commission to the public. To spoil the ending, the inquiry could not come up with the cause of the accident “with certainty”, but they did have good theories that eventually matched the CAB’s probable cause of EAL304.
The commission concluded that once the plane started speeding down towards the ground, they did not have the height to recover. Similar cases on DC-8s like this had some pilots only recover after descending 13,000 feet. When the upset happened to TCA831, they were probably between 5,000 and 7,000 feet. The real question concerning the crash was why the pilots felt the need to fully trim their plane nose down, which investigators knew happened, since that was the only way the stabilizer could get into the position it was found in. It was also known that the pilots were pulling up with all of their strength at the moment of impact, showing that they were attempting to save the plane.
The commission came up with 7 possible scenarios to explain this behaviour:
- 1. Failure of an airspeed indicator,
- 2. Icing or blockage of the static system,
- 3. Leakage in the static system,
- 4. Unwitting engagement of auto pilot,
- 5. Failure or icing of the pitot system,
- 6. Erroneous Indication of Aircraft Attitude, or
- 7. Unprogrammed extension of pitch trim compensator.
Scenario 1 was dismissed, as it was rare, and it would’ve been noticed by this crew before getting put in a dangerous situation.
Scenario 2 was considered unlikely that this would “occur to an extent that both the Captain’s and First Officer’s instruments would be seriously affected” and that this sort of fault should have been apparent to the pilots before or immediately after take-off. This type of failure is similar to Aeroperu flight 603 in 1996, and those pilots noticed things going very wrong after take-off. The pilots on TCA831 did not note such a thing to ATC.
Scenario 3, in the worst case, would allow pressurized air into the static system. It was considered unlikely that this would affect both the captain’s and the first officer’s systems at the same time. Like scenario 2, this would been noticed and reported immediately, before the upset.
Scenario 4 would’ve gone like this: the auto pilot is accidentally engaged during the climb, then the captain trims the nose down to have a less steep climb angle. The auto pilot would fight this and trim back up. During this fight, the captain trims the plane full nose down as he disengages the auto pilot, causing the mis-trimmed position of the plane. However, according to the report, “it is unreasonable to expect that at this time the aircraft was in such an attitude and speed condition that recovery could not be accomplished.” Essentially, they think that the plane would’ve been recoverable from this position, and therefore dismissed this scenario.
Scenario 5 is interesting, and was one of the things that led to the crash of Air France flight 447 in 2009, though under completely different circumstances. Though a mechanical failure of the pitot system was unlikely, the failure of the pitot heater (or the failure to turn it on) could result in the pitots being frozen over, causing inaccurate indicated airspeeds to the pilots. If both pitots froze over at the same time, it could’ve misled the crew into thinking that they were slowing down towards a dangerous stall, making them believe that trimming full nose down would’ve been the best option to gain speed to the point where the plane was unrecoverable. Ultimately, this scenario was not dismissed, but was not considered the most probable one.
Scenario 6 is another interesting one, as it has led to multiple crashes, including Air India flight 855 in 1978 and Korean Air Cargo flight 8509 in 1999. If the artificial horizon indicator fails, particularly in the pitch direction, it could lock into a false state. If that false state was pointing up, the captain could’ve continuously tried to trim down until he got into an unrecoverable situation. This would’ve been easy to do in cloud, without reference to the ground or horizon, which were the conditions on the evening of the crash. If the artificial horizon indicator fails through a lack of electrical power, or it fails to follow the vertical gyro, a warning flag should’ve appeared that would’ve alerted the captain, though they did state that there was a remote chance that the flag just didn’t appear. The other way a warning flag would not appear is if the vertical gyro itself failed, and the indicator follows that. It seems like the gyro associated with the bank angle was working, and though a reading was consistent with a properly operating vertical gyro, it does not rule out the possibility that the captain’s vertical gyro itself was not operating properly. Like the previous one, this scenario was also not dismissed, yet was not considered the most probable one.
Scenario 7 is perhaps the most unique one of the bunch, being a problem exclusive to the DC-8s of the time: the Pitch Trim Compensator (PTC).
The PTC is a system in the DC-8 that moves the elevator because, at high subsonic Mach numbers (between Mach 0.7 and Mach 0.95, aka between 70% and 95% of the speed of sound at the plane’s altitude), “the airflow pattern over the wing results in the formation of local shock waves which cause the centre of lift on the wing to be shifted rearward.” In layman’s terms, the average lifting force was moving back due to airflow patterns on the wing at high speed, causing a tilting force downwards. The PTC is meant to apply an upward elevator force on the first officer’s yoke to “compensate” for this tilting force. The faster the airspeed, the greater the compensation required. Below Mach 0.8, there should be little to no force applied by the PTC. Most cases, aircraft should be able to fly without this system even being noticed, or at least without any problems. However, what happens if the PTC malfunctions and extends at lower speeds, as it had on other DC-8s?
Tests were done with a fully extended PTC coupled with the nose down trim at the speeds normally performed on climb. What they found was that the manoeuvring ability of the plane was “adversely affected”, and that “a pilot could experience difficulty in maintaining proper aircraft attitudes, particularly in turbulence.” In one test flight, where they had a fully extended PTC, a speed of 220 knots, and trimmed to full nose down, “any attempt at manoeuvring the airplane with the elevator system resulted in sharp reversals in the airplane’s manoeuvring stability.”
If they were flying without any visual reference to the ground or the horizon, it would be even more difficult to stay level. What was the weather encountered by TCA831 and EAL304? They were both in cloud, and they both encountered turbulent air. In normal flight, this would be fine, but if they had a malfunctioning PTC and were trimming nose down to compensate for the malfunctioned compensator? It would have been easy for the pilots to lose control and go into an unrecoverable dive. Once they get fast enough, the fast moving air plus the elevator up force makes it impossible to use the motors to trim upwards. The PTC on EAL304 was known to have problems, and this scenario was eventually ruled by the CAB as the probable cause of the crash of EAL304.
The more and more I look at this, the more I think “wait a minute, why does this sound familiar?” Then I stumbled upon the website of Bob Bogash, a retired Boeing engineer that spent 30 years with the company and participated in a number of investigations. In particular, his personal article that compared the DC-8 and the 737 MAX. A system, meant to stabilize a plane that could get into unusual attitudes otherwise, malfunctioning, leading to a crash with the stabilizer trimmed full nose down. Very similar indeed, but different and almost opposite in other ways. While the PTC pulls the elevator up to avoid pitch downs, the MCAS pushes the stabilizer down to avoid pitch ups. When the PTC malfunctions, pilots trim as nose down as they can to regain control, only to lose control when it dives at a fast speed, while when the MCAS malfunctions, the pilots pull the elevator up, and, if going at a fast speed with the elevator up, makes it impossible to manually trim up.
After much deliberation by the commission, they came up with their conclusions. Conclusion 2 does temper expectations: “It is concluded that the actual cause of the accident cannot be determined with certainty”. They didn’t have enough evidence to say “these things almost surely crashed the plane”. However, conclusion 4 also pushes the three scenarios that they couldn’t rule out as possible reasons why the pilots purposely applied near full nose down trim: scenarios 5, 6, and 7. However, they believe that scenario 7 is the “most probable cause” of the accident, considering the problems with other DC-8s. To quote the report:
In aircraft CF-TJN, 2.0 degrees of AND [aircraft nose down] trim was available and it appears that the pilot applied at least 1.6 degrees of the available trim. It is unlikely that the flight crew were aware of the serious stability and control problems that we now know can result from the combination of extended PTC and AND trim, even if they had been aware that the PTC had extended. The aircraft would then be in a condition where a slight displacement from its trim point would lead to divergent oscillations. In other words, a minor change of attitude, easily caused by the existing turbulence, would build up into large displacements. The inadequate control available to the pilot and the lack of an external horizon reference would likely result in the aircraft eventually assuming a dive attitude.
The recommendations in this report are interesting, as they cover the three scenarios that couldn’t be ruled out, even if they think that just one of those scenarios happened. However the first one involves something already pointed out: calling for mandatory flight data recorders. Five years later, the nation went one beyond and also made cockpit voice recorders mandatory in addition to flight data recorders.
The second recommendation calls for DC-8 pilots to be fully aware of the stability of the DC-8 with the full extension of the PTC and the stabilizer trimmed to counteract this effect. Before this commission was complete, Douglas made changes to the DC-8. Before, the maximum pitch trim for nose down was 2 degrees. After the two accidents and many other incidents, they changed it to just 0.5 degrees, minimizing the chances of a severe mis-trim scenario.
The third recommendation actually points to scenario 6, and calls for “an improved vertical gyro system to be installed in DC-8s which would give the pilot immediate warning of any type of failure which would affect aircraft attitude information”, and the fourth recommendation points to scenario 5, calling for “the pitot heat circuit in the DC-8 [to be] modified so that a positive warning is provided to the pilot if the pitot heat is either not switched on or has failed.” They saw that, though these scenarios probably did not happen on TCA831, the fact that these were actually possible led to them making these recommendations, trying to prevent these types of accidents.
The fifth recommendation calls for “an improved means of indicating horizontal stabilizer position to the pilots of DC-8s”, while the sixth recommendation actually calls for a mandatory “after take-off” checklist. The Commission probably came across this during their collection of statements from the stand, and believed that this was unsafe. The seventh recommendation calls for airworthiness directives (ADs) to actually be followed, as during their investigation, they found that TCA did not properly follow an AD of inspecting the elevator control tab push rod assembly, nor one involving the main oil screen in the engines. Though these had nothing to do with the crash, it was still worth pointing out for safety.
Despite the mystery that still lingers with this crash, I believe that the investigators did all they could to find the closest thing to the truth as possible, and conclusion 1 shows that the commission agrees with this sentiment:
“It is concluded that the investigation of the crash as organized and directed by the Department of Transport was complete and thorough in every respect and that every detail which could have been relevant or pertinent to the cause of the accident was carefully explored by experts in their particular field.”
Throughout my research into Canadian air investigations, I have come to believe that this Commission of Inquiry is debatably the first ever “independent” air accident investigation in Canada. Though Department of Transport investigators did the fact-finding, all of the evidence gathered was then reviewed and analyzed by an independent commission.
An interesting thing accompanied the investigation: a camera crew. The CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, lost two producers in the crash that worked on the bilingual variety show Show for Two Cities. CBC then decided to send a camera crew to film and follow the investigation. They filmed the crash site and the extensive digging, the hanger in Dorval where the pieces were examined, and the Montreal courthouse where the inquiry was taking place. They had the full cooperation of investigators, authorities, and witnesses, according to Voices from a Forgotten Tragedy. The crew made the groundbreaking narrative decision to not follow the personal stories, and decided to put their main focus into the investigation and inquiry itself. On November 7th, 1965 at 10:00pm, a few months after the release of the final report, CBC’s Document TV series of hour-long TV documentaries aired “At the Moment of Impact”, directed by Jim Carney and narrated by John Drainie. According to the authors of Voices from a Forgotten Tragedy, it was a “careful and compassionate account of the crash”. Judging by the description, it feels that this was similar to a documentary about Swissair flight 111 that aired in the US under the NOVA PBS series, where they had a camera crew following that investigation as well. Unfortunately, this documentary is not on the internet, so I haven’t watched it for myself, though I am trying my best to do so.
For the families of the victims, the pain is still there. Most of the passengers on board were men, returning to Toronto after doing business in Montreal. Many of them left their wives widowed and their children fatherless. These women were painfully thrust into the life of a single mother, a position not common in 1963, and many boys were forced to grow up quickly to provide for their families. After the media storm and the settled lawsuits, these people disappeared from the public eye, as did the crash itself, only occasionally popping up on important anniversaries. For a moment, it seemed like the tragedy was completely forgotten.
Bob Page was one of those boys that lost his dad, John. He came to live his life with this emotional baggage, becoming a physician, and married his wife, Jean. Jean came to know of the story, and thought it was an intriguing one that Bob knew little about beyond the effects it had on his family. While Jean thought it would make for a great book, Bob resisted the idea until May 2007. During a gathering between Jean, Bob, and Ern, Jean convinced Bob to tell the story to Ern, then challenged Ern to write a book. Then came the enormous effort to try and find as many stories as possible from people that were affected by the crash. Most people were hesitant to share their stories, including people from the Page family, and some flat out refused. Most overcame that hesitancy, and shared with the group.
On the 45th anniversary of the crash, November 29th, 2008, Bob and Ern bought a classified ad in The Globe and Mail and begged people to submit their stories via their phone numbers and/or via their emails. From there, the calls and emails poured in, from the people that still lived in Toronto and Montreal, to people that have since spread around the world, as far as New Zealand. To introduce their journey and recoup research costs, the DVD Our Search for Memory was made and on sale in 2009. Amongst other things, the DVD actually had Jim Carney’s 1965 documentary, which was played in a meet-and-greet at the Toronto home of a victim’s daughter in May of that year. Many of these people watched Jim Carney’s documentary for the first time, with tears being shed throughout. Ern and the Pages did heaps of research in the archives in Ottawa and Sainte-Thérèse–Blainville area. Eventually, they released their book Voices from a Forgotten Tragedy in 2013, the year of the 50th anniversary of the crash. It is a brilliant book that needs to be read if you are interested in this accident, and it was a great source making this article. Unfortunately, in 2015, Bob Page and Ern Dick decided to stop publication of their book and DVD, and took down their website tcaflight831.com. The book is now on the Internet Archive, available to borrow at one hour increments, and copies of the DVD do seem to exist, including one at Windsor’s public library, the nearest city to Bob Page.
On the 50th anniversary of the crash, about 350 relatives of the victims gathered in Blainville. The Joseph-Filion museum in nearby Saint-Thérèse had an exhibit on the crash, and shuttle buses were provided to relatives to get to the crash site, now a suburban neighbourhood by the name Des Hirondelles, to the memorial plaque installed on the 40th anniversary in the nearby Parc des Hirondelles, and the memorial in the Sainte-Thérèse cemetery built a couple of years after the crash, listing all of the passengers and crew on board. For many, it was the first time they ever visited the community where their loved ones died, a community that didn’t forget about the accident. It would be the first time that many of those people met with other people that suffered a similar loss. The first time these people finally grieved with each other. It was an emotional day that probably brought many comfort and closure.
Translation of the Plaque: (from Voices from a Forgotten Tragedy)
Crash of DC-8F which occurred on November 29, 1963 on this property (near the current intersection of Rue des Grives and Rue Vianney)
“Here is the wandering swallow/Who with the tip of its wing/Skims the still water of the marsh”
— Excerpt from the poem “Thoughts of the Dead” by Alphonse de Lamartine
Plaque unveiled November 24, 2003 by the Cultural Commission in collaboration with the History Committee of Blainville
Today, it’s been over 60 years since the accident happened. It does feel like the public awareness has died down a lot in the past 10 years, particularly with the shut down of tcaflight831.com. Even within the group of people interested in air accident investigations, this accident does not come up a lot (if at all), despite being the deadliest air accident in Canada that wasn’t Swissair 111 or Arrow Air 1285. Even during the depths of the MCAS debacle, the only person that noted its true past equivalence was the previously mentioned Bob Bogash.
It is still remembered in Blainville, with their city history mural, made in 2016, at their Equestrian Park displaying a drawing of a plane with the accident crew, who fought to save their plane. It’s even in a children’s illustrated notebook about the history of Blainville. However, in the rest of Canada, it is still in the shadows, waiting for an inquisitive person to go down the rabbit hole.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
If you made it this far, thank you for reading! This accident felt like a story that had to be told, and it took a long time to write.
Special shoutouts to Bob Page, Ern Dick, and Jean Grant-Page for the work done to make their book, even if the book did not sell many copies. Without them, I would not have as much of an understanding of the human side, nor would I have access to as many pictures from the accident site.
