All You Could Hear Was “Mayday, Mayday”

I had just finished my house job as a doctor, when you’re still under the wing of someone else.  Then, just out of medical school, I went out into my first proper job to be one of two doctors looking after 3,000 people scattered over 1,000 miles of coastline in Labrador, Canada. 

It was great, there was me and Margaret, both fresh and young, always able to radio call the top doctor in charge, but really we were far too young to have got the job! 

So to get you around, the hospital association had a single engined plane and a pilot, Gray, who was about my age. In the summer you had floats for the plane and in the winter you had skis. There were times in the year at the change of seasons where you had to change from one to the other and just hoped you had the right ones to land at the place where you were going to!

In November, which is when this happened, they waited until the sea was frozen, the lakes were frozen and the land was frozen, so that you could land in lots and lots of places. So we’d just been swapped over to skis. 

We took off at 8am in the morning to go to the northern-most place we covered and, about a minute after takeoff, as we were going over my house and I was looking down, the motor started misfiring and after about 15 seconds it went dead. All you could hear was the air going past, air which was supposed to be drowned out by the engine’s noise, and Gray saying “Mayday, Mayday”.

It was a little plane and there’s no hiding the danger – there were five us on the plane; somebody going home with her brand new colour television, a local vicar,  myself, the pilot and someone else. 

What was going through my head, which I’ve had at other times when things have been quite dangerous, was a kind of gleeful, hysterical, laughter really. I remember thinking, this is going to be something to tell people about, as I listened to the vicar praying. 

As we were only about 200 metres up, we weren’t high enough to circle back round to land, so Gray had to land at the very edge the sea where it was frozen. In the thick of winter the whole sea would have been frozen but then there was maybe 100 meters that we could land on. Too close to the shore and the ice was all broken up by big rocks. Too far out and it would be too thin. And the ‘landing strip’ was curved around the coast. As he brought us down and landed we heard the ice cracking and I remember thinking – this is like one of those cartoons.

I think when we’re faced with sudden impending danger we all have our own idiosyncratic ways of reacting which probably come from childhood. My early experiences had included lots of time at an early age of 4 or so, on the west coast of Scotland. On boats too, fairly wild, and things had gone wrong back then and there’s that same energy. Especially at the age I was on the plane, you think ‘I’m invincible” you think “I won’t die, actually I’m going to live today, tomorrow and for the next 10 years, so bog off death”.

I didn’t know how deep it was, I think Gray probably knew, and so we came to a stop and the ice was cracking. Then we went through the ice. The water came to about 2 inches below getting into the cabin and we had to jump across the 3 foot gap onto the ice. It was brilliantly sunny winter weather and the rest of us were hugging and laughing and really quite eutrophic, that kind of joy when you realise you could have died. We probably would have died had it happened five minutes later when we were over the sea. But the woman travelling with her new colour television didn’t join in the celebration, she was really, really upset as she couldn’t get the television set across the ice!

Years later, Gray died. He’d got married, had a baby and was still flying. He went out in a storm one time in a whiteout and he went down with the plane.