Unscheduled Flight

The twin-engined Beechcraft rolling down the runway at Churchill under a lowering, leaden sky carried four assigned passengers and one hitchhiker. Captain Benjamin Scott Custer, onetime director of air safety in the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, now attache in Ottawa, was returning from a cruise with Canada's aircraft carrier Magnificent (TIME, Sept. 13). Captain Sir Robert Stirling-Hamilton, the Royal Navy's observer, was Custer's guest. There were two U.S. Navy pilots. And there was Master Sergeant Jerome Scalise, 50, going home to Virginia for retirement. After 30 years in the Army, Scalise knew his way around: he could get home two days earlier by bumming a ride with Custer.

The Beechcraft was scheduled to run out of the bad weather after a hundred miles or so, but in the first hour of flight both radio and magnetic compasses went haywire. The plane, far off its course for The Pas, flew in a great parabola through icing conditions. Finally, Chief Petty Officer Jack Kastner came down on a strip of muskeg between two lakes. Not a man was scratched.

Five in Camp. The five camped for a while near the damaged plane. Hitchhiker Scalise made an emergency shelter of brush and parachute cloth. The Spam sandwiches intended for lunch lasted five days. Weatherbeaten Sergeant Scalise became cook. His tin helmet made a fine cooking pot.

He boiled a ground squirrel shot by Kastner. It made one meal. Then Scalise found mushrooms and boiled them. Custer was sure they were poisonous, but Scalise dropped a silver coin into the brew and when it stayed shiny, instead of turning black, Custer was satisfied. Scalise shot a porcupine. Says Custer: "It was a lovely dish--we had it for days."

Nine days after their forced landing, the party, packing grouse which Scalise had boiled, decided to try to walk out of the bush. Stirling-Hamilton had a hand compass to keep them on their course, and they headed due south. It was slow going. They bogged down in the soggy muskeg. Farther on, in a tangle of fallen timber, they almost came to a dead stop, made only ten miles in two days.

Twelve-Day Search. Weak from short rations and exertion, chilled by near-freezing rain, they fell to their knees in prayer when a Catalina flying boat (called a "Canso" in Canada) flew over them, wagging its wings. The pilot directed them to the nearest lake, where he landed and set out to meet them. After twelve days, the biggest air search (40 planes, one blimp) in Canada's history was over. Said resourceful Sergeant Scalise, thinking of the regular plane he was to have taken: "I guess I took the wrong taxi."

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