Reporter’s blog: Len Gillis recalls the Austin Airways crash that killed 10 people 45 years ago

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Abitibi Canyon is a remote part of Northern Ontario where life was lived and life was taken

Anyone who visits the Ontario Power Generation Dam and Power Plant in Abitibi Canyon is likely to be impressed by the amazing geography there, as well as the massive dam structure itself.

It’s an amazing piece of industrial architecture in the middle of the beautiful northern Ontario wilderness.

I have visited there twice. Once I wanted to go on an epic canoe trip on the Abitibi River north and eventually to Moosonee. Took 12 fabulous days.

My first visit to the canyon was because of terribly sad news. It was meant to cover a plane crash in which all 10 souls on board an Austin Airways plane would lose their lives if the plane hit power lines in the immediate vicinity of the dam.

I was a young reporter living in Timmins when I received a phone call one Sunday morning stating that a plane to Timmins had crashed in Abitibi Canyon north of Smooth Rock Falls the day before.

I almost didn’t believe the call. The story hadn’t hit the headlines yet. That would be my job. It took me some time to find the crash.

I was the only reporter there. Nobody else was around. It was almost a full day after the crash. The wreck was still smoldering on a remote slope north of the dam. An Ontario police officer showed up within an hour and was surprised that someone had found the place. He let me stay to take pictures.

Construction on the dam began in 1930 and provided jobs to more than 2,000 workers. Opened in 1933, it supplied much-needed energy to a variety of paper mills and mining operations in Northern Ontario.

The project was initiated by Ontario Power Service Corporation, a subsidiary of Abitibi Power and Paper Company. Eventually it was sold to Ontario Hydro.

Back then you needed people on site to run the business. For this reason, a “colony” of residential buildings, a school, a church, a community center, a dining room and a teachers’ house was created there. Here, Ontario Hydro produced nearly 400 megawatts of clean and reliable energy.

Ironically, Ontario created the Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning, also known as the Porter Commission, a few years later. The commission was tasked with examining Ontario’s long-term planning for Ontario Hydro.

It was late summer of 1976 when several members of the commission were on an air tour of the communities of northern Ontario to learn about the needs and requirements of Ontario Hydro in the far north.

It was Saturday, September 4, 1976 – Labor Day weekend – and several members of the commission were planning to return to Southern Ontario. They started from Moosonee and drove to Timmins, where they could take a connecting flight to Toronto.

All of this was revealed during an investigation that took place in Kapuskasing a few months later.

It was during lunch break that Saturday when pilot Doug Clifford was preparing the plane, a deHavilland Canada DHC3 Otter, registered as CF MIT. He called the company’s radio operator at the Austin Airways office in Moosonee and asked for weather information.

The initial information to the pilot indicated acceptable weather conditions for a VFR (Visual Flight Rules) flight, which meant the pilot could fly the aircraft using visual ground references.

Otter CF MIT left Moosonee around 12:30 p.m. that day, the investigation said. A few minutes later, pilot Clifford informed the radio operator that he would land at South Porcupine (Timmins) seaplane base around 2:30 p.m. that afternoon. He had nine passengers on board. A few minutes later the operator tried to contact Clifford to inform him that the weather in Timmins was deteriorating and the weather en route was deteriorating. For some reason this radio message didn’t get through. It was fog. The cloud cover dropped to about 1,000 feet.

The elevation of Moosonee Airport is approximately 30 feet above sea level. And for seaplanes, the nearby Moose River is practically at sea level. The survey was told that part of the terrain around the Abitibi Canyon region is approximately 950 feet above sea level. It is possible that the aircraft had followed the Abitibi River as a ground reference as it headed south towards Timmins, the investigation was told.

As the plane continued south, the ground rose to hit it. The interrogation was told that at 1:37 p.m. that day the aircraft collided with at least two of the heavy high-voltage lines leading away from the dam.

The investigation suggested that Clifford had flown high enough to climb the height of the dam but may have seen the power lines at the last moment and tried to dodge before the plane’s swimmers came in contact with them.

The plane crashed on the slope north of the dam. The plane also went up in flames. The pilot and nine passengers all died.

The wreck was not found for about five hours. Some people who were canoeing on the river saw the fire on the hillside.

On the dam there is a bronze plaque in honor of the deceased.

The names of the victims are engraved on the plaque, along with a tribute to those who “lost their lives in a tragic accident serving the Province of Ontario”.

Len Gillis is a reporter for the Local Journalism Initiative at Sudbury.com. It covers healthcare in Northern Ontario.

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