Relatives memorialize air disaster’s victims

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This article was published 30/11/2013 (4508 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MONTREAL — It took Robert Page nearly 50 years to come to grips with the death of his father in one of Canada’s worst air disasters.

On Friday, he wasn’t alone.

He and about 350 relatives of the 118 people who died in the Nov. 29, 1963, crash of a Trans-Canada Air Lines flight came together in the community where it happened to mark the tragedy’s 50th anniversary.

People who had never met but were connected through sorrow listened as the names of the victims were read aloud in a private service.

“They’re spending time talking and getting to know each other and remembering their loved ones,” Page said in an interview Friday. “I hope it’s a time of healing.”

The world was still reeling from the assassination of then-U.S. president John F. Kennedy when witnesses reported seeing Flight 831 catch fire and explode shortly after takeoff from Montreal’s Dorval airport. A federal Transport Canada investigation reported in 1965 it couldn’t determine an exact cause because the DC-8 jet, the biggest in the airline’s fleet, had disintegrated.

Page was 16 when his father, John, a vice-president with H.J. Heinz of Canada, boarded the flight.

John Page, 48, grew up in Toronto and was an accountant. After service as an air force navigator in the Second World War, he joined Heinz, becoming vice-president of sales and marketing in 1963.

“He was on his first trip to the Maritimes,” Robert Page recalled. “Coming back was when he was killed.”

The aircraft crashed around 6:30 p.m. in a muddy field near Ste-Therese-de-Blainville. It created a crater about 45 metres by 22.5 metres. Debris was spread across an area 800 metres by 75 metres.

The impact was reported to have shattered windows in the area and knocked over household items.

“It fell into a field that was quite marshy,” said Martin Rodgers, a local historian. “It was cold, it was raining.”

Hunks of metal littered the ground and what appeared to be clothing hung from tree branches.

A cacaphony of sirens wailed along the Laurentian highway adjacent to the crash site as rescuers rushed to the scene. Fires crackled in the wreckage. Areas turned into a swamp by the heavy rains of the previous days complicated the work of rescue workers, who had to wait for heavy machinery to open a path from the main road to the crash site.

Then the hunt began for bodies and also pieces of the aircraft so a cause could be determined.

Rodgers said no intact body was found. There were 111 passengers and seven crew aboard. Authorities scrambled to get organized.

“In what was the parish of Ste-Therese-de-Blainville, there was one police officer, Mr. Aubertin, who somehow maintained security,” said Rodgers, who oversees recreation for the town.

There have been only two air crashes in Canada more devastating than the one in 1963.

On Dec. 12, 1985, the crash of Arrow Air Flight 1285 in Gander, Nfld., left 256 dead. Swissair Flight 111 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia on Sept. 2, 1998, killing 229.

— The Canadian Press