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Aviation history to be raised from lake

Randy Boswell - CanWest News Service

Friday, June 30, 2006


Finally, a deep, dark lake in a remote corner of Manitoba appears ready to
give up its Ghost.

A robot-equipped team of divers, scientists and heritage experts has
chosen Canada Day to begin recovering a precious piece of the country's
aviation history that was lost nearly 75 years ago when it sank to the
bottom of Charron Lake.

The Fokker Standard Universal bush plane -- better known as the "Ghost of
Charron Lake" after eluding treasure hunters for more than 70 years -- is
one of the last existing links to a pioneering family of aircraft that
helped open the Canadian North.

Abandoned on the ice after an emergency landing in December 1931, the
Fokker G-CAJD slipped below the surface the following spring. Generations
of frustrated searchers failed to locate the aircraft before an expedition
organized last year by the Winnipeg-based Western Canada Aviation Museum
finally made the historic find.

"This plane really represents the spirit of the pioneers of Canadian
aviation who opened the North," museum director Shirley Render told
CanWest News Service on Thursday. "It's a page of history, a page that had
been lost."

Images taken after last summer's discovery revealed the relic to be
"amazingly intact." Now, with the use of two underwater robotic vehicles,
an $80,000 recovery effort is set to be launched by a team that includes
Vermont-based divers Patrick Madden and Annette Spaulding, Ontario
geophysicists Ken McMillan and Bill Thuma, a federal conservation
specialist and a host of other experts.

The aircraft, which is resting on the lake bottom in about 40 metres of
water, will not be easy to raise. Render said the team members will
attempt to lift it out over the next three weeks but will adjust their
plans according to the weather and the plane's condition.

But if all goes well, she said, the aircraft will be on display at the
museum before the end of July.

The Canadian Airways plane had been flying supplies to a party of gold
prospectors at Island Lake in northern Manitoba when pilot Stu McRorie ran
into a raging snowstorm on Dec. 11, 1931. He was forced to land on the
ice-covered Charron Lake, almost at the elbow of the Ontario-Manitoba
border, and both the pilot and air engineer "Slim" Forrest were rescued,
uninjured, by trapper Tom Boulanger.

But before the plane could be recovered the next spring, it disappeared
under the melting ice.

© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2006
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