Why Me

Heroes Remember

Why Me

Transcript

The trip that I never will forget is one where we went to, two aircraft, went to Keflavik, Iceland and we were due to fly out of Iceland after a couple of days and come back to Goose Bay, which was about an eight hour flight on the Lancaster. And we taxied out to the runway, end of the runway and the other aircraft was right behind us. We took off, but they had some sort of a malfunction that they had to fix. And I was working the radio, so about an hour or so later I heard a message from them saying from the base that they had taken off. And so reported to the captain of our aircraft. We were there for about an hour and a half I suppose ahead of them flying back, and we got, as we neared Labrador, near Goose Bay, the weather closed in, and by the time we got to Goose Bay, there was no way we could land and the tower told us the airport’s closed. You’ll have to keep flying to Greenwood, which we knew would be a bit of a stretch in terms of fuel. We got enveloped in this terrible storm and began to get into some serious difficulties, and I guess the most dramatic moment was when the navigator, his name was Jim Grano, Flying Officer Jim Grano, he slammed his maps and his protractor and stuff down on the navigation table and said, “That’s it. I don’t’ know where we are. I don’t know where we’re going and I don’t know what we can do.” Because there were a number of other factors which were not coming into play. I mean one is that your compass is very, very dicey up there in those northern latitudes. We navigated them by dead reckoning. I mean there was no such thing as GPS that you could get a position like that. It was a complicated procedure. We were still shooting you know with the astro light at night to get positions, accurate positions. So it was clear we were in serious trouble. And we flew and we flew and we flew in the general direction of Greenwood. And by pure, pure fluke the pilot who was operating his radios which were on tower frequencies, tuned his into the frequency of Chatham and suddenly picked up Chatham Tower. Chatham Tower gave us a bearing to get in over Chatham. You couldn’t land there either because the storm was also sweeping there. I couldn’t operate the radios because the static was so bad that we just couldn’t get out anywhere and it was clear that the ice was playing hell with our ailerons which were fabric on this old aircraft that we were flying. So when we got the bearing over Chatham, the pilot took a vector from there towards Greenwood and we flew again, flying blind until we picked up a tower, the tower of Greenwood, let down over the North Mountain and landed after 13 hours and 20 minutes in the air. We had about 10 to 20 minutes of fuel left in the tank. So it was basically a one-pass landing. The ailerons were all shredded from ice pellets and what have you. So we immediately, of course, we head to the bar to celebrate the fact that we had made it, and it was there that we learned that the other aircraft was overdue which meant that we were almost immediately scrambled for search and as the storm passed we then flew up and got into Goose Bay, and we searched for them for about a week, found nothing. The next spring, an Inuit or Maliseet Indian hunter found what was left of them, which wasn’t much because the animals had been at them, but found some wallets and stuff. And they brought the two remains back to Greenwood and we had a funeral. I was barely twenty, I guess, when that happened and it was one of those things, you know the people in the other aircraft were people I had flown with on missions and they were all friends or people who’d been in my course in Clinton, Ontario. And for the rest of your life you wonder why me? Why them? Why did we make it and they didn’t? They had been in exactly the same predicament except they had flown into a mountain in Goose Bay or south of Goose Bay. A hundred miles south of Goose Bay. So you wonder about these mysteries you know. But it was them, but it could just as well have been us.

Description

Mr. McAndrew describes surviving a storm tossed flight which saw his aircraft diverted from Goose Bay to Greenwood.

John Allison ‘Jack’ McAndrew

John McAndrew was born in Dalhousie, New Brunswick on February 15, 1933. His family moved to Charlottetown, where he grew up. He decided to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, hoping to become a pilot, but was selected to become a radio officer, flying in a converted Lancaster bomber on anti-submarine patrols over Canada’s Eastern waters. For him, peacetime service proved uneventful and he moved on to a successful career in broadcasting. At the time of his retirement Mr. McAndrew held the rank of Flying Officer.

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