I was telling my friend Lorna about the time we landed on the Trans-Canada Highway. When she heard I was the acting co-pilot and was 10 years old at the time, she said "You should write a blog post". So here's the story, from an airplane in 1962 to my Caboose in 2022.
My dad and I left Swift Current on a father/daughter trip in our black, yellow and silver 4-seater Cessna 180 with the registration CF-JVC. She was Juliet Victor Charley, a name that's still familiar to me 60 years later.
We picked up my two young cousins in Winnipeg, and were heading to Gravenhurst, Ontario to visit my dad's brother, my Uncle Jim Nodge. I sat in the front beside my dad and Darlene Stacey, 14 years old and her sister Shirley, 8 years old, were in the back.
Just into northern Ontario and getting close to Lake Superior the weather suddenly turned nasty, pouring rain and a low cloud ceiling were pressing us down closer to the highway.
We may have been a bit lost, my dad never mentioned that, but I remember having the map on my lap and I wasn't a very good navigator. The highway was below us, and I knew that was a reassuring sign.
Bad weather and poor visibility are a pilot's worst enemy, so Dad watched for an empty stretch on the highway and brought the plane down nicely on the centre line. He taxied to an approach and a surprised motorist soon pulled over to tell us there was a landing strip not far away, at the town of Ignace.
The girls and I squeezed into his truck for the ride to the small airport and other motorists - by then there were quite a few curious onlookers - stopped the traffic in both directions so dad could take off.
Seeing the plane lift above the trees I was fully confident we would see him shortly at the airfield, which we did. We had supper at a restaurant and were soon comfortably settled into a motel room, rain still drenching the town and our plane, which was safely tied down beside the grass runway.
I don't remember feeling scared or even very concerned, maybe I was too young to realize how dangerous the situation could have been, it seemed like an adventure to me. Dad was always calm in his plane and we followed his mood, but he was probably hiding great relief.
A loud knock at the door woke me up around midnight. I answered it (my dad in his one-piece long-johns had to get his pants on). An unsmiling RCMP officer asked me if Paul Nodge was there.
Dad immediately knew the problem. It was normally my mom who closed the flight plan when we landed and in the unexpected situation we had found ourselves in, he had forgotten. I vaguely remember feeling disappointed in myself, I knew about flight plans and should have reminded him. Looking after three young girls and his airplane, he also hadn't thought to contact my mom when we checked into the motel.
Search and Rescue planes had been out looking for us. My mom had been notified the plane was missing, and neighbours were consoling my Aunt Betty.
I don't know if a fine or maybe a reprimand was handed out for not closing the flight plan, I never heard. My dad had many thousands of hours piloting a succession of small planes on wonderful trips, that he was more likely to talk about.
We continued on to Gravenhurst as planned but I don't recall anything else about the trip. It's the name of that tiny town, Ignace, Ontario, that has stayed with me ever since.
It still have the newspaper clippings, glued in my childhood scrapbook and stored all these years, souvenirs of our unplanned stop in the rocky forest of the Canadian Shield.
This one from the Gravenhurst weekly.
More publicity in the Swift Current Sun.
Hey, it was no muddy field Mr. Reporter, it was the Number 1 Trans-Canada Highway!
It wasn't the best week for the Nodge family. See the adjoining news story about Mrs. P.J. Nodge (women didn't have first names in those days), and her 2-year-old daughter. Those journalists again! That was my brother Gord.
Maybe my mom was distracted at that intersection, thinking about her husband and hoping for better weather and also that he would remember to close flight plans on the rest of the Ontario trip.
But the fender-bender was T. Leier's fault, he missed the stop sign and had to pay a whopping $20 fine.
