I put up a post on April 28 to mark the day that Trans-Canada Air Lines flight 3 took off from Lethbridge on a routine flight to Vancouver. The Lockheed Lodestar never made it, and 47 years would pass until there would be any answers.
Dale Brandon wrote to tell me that her mother Audrey (Tavender) Brandon was supposed to be one of three crew members on that flight. “She told me she was walking out the door, suitcase packed, uniform on, and then the phone rang. They had bumped her off the flight.”
Audrey was a flight attendant (stewardess or stew back then), and she made several flights with Captain Bill Pike and co-pilot Bunty Stewart. It was the days when you had to be a qualified nurse and leave your job if you got married. TCA (which became Air Canada in 1965) didn’t like its flight crews getting up to “hanky panky” Audrey told Dale, so they would frequently switch the crews around.
Instead, Audrey’s friend, 24-year-old Helen Saisbury from New Westminster, was assigned to the flight. “She said Helen was a very nice woman. The two graduated from St. Paul’s nursing department together in 1946.”
Audrey stayed with the airline until she married in 1950. It wasn’t an easy decision for her, says Dale, one of Audrey’s three children, she loved flying. “It was like being a movie star. Everyone knew each other, and the crews were very close knit,” she says. “She told me they had a suite back east that all the stews stayed at. If all the stews were at home, someone was out of a bed because they were always flying.”
While I often think about the good old days of flying, I’m not sure I would have liked taking a Lockheed Lodestar over the Rockies when you had to wear an oxygen mask to breathe.
Recollections from Audrey Tavender:
“Cabin maintenance once unplugged my oxygen mask to change it and failed to reconnect it properly. I was so short of oxygen I just went to bed when I returned home.”
“There was also the time we picked up a load of ice on the wings enroute to Vancouver and the aircraft managed to return to Winnipeg, shuddering all the way.”
“I once crossed the Rockies with the cabin door open two or three inches right next to my jump seat. The slipstream kept it there and the cabin wasn’t pressurized.”
“Once we had to return to Vancouver because an alcohol impaired passenger passed out over Hope and I couldn’t find a pulse. He fooled everyone as he did not appear to be impaired when he boarded the aircraft. He woke up on the way to Vancouver and he was not pleased.”
“Leaving Vancouver in a DC-4, having fog close in behind us. Losing a motor on one wing and then, over the Rockies, losing a motor on the other wing. But landing successfully in Kimberley, an emergency wartime field.”
TCA Flight 3 crashed into a creek-bed on April 28, 1947. The wreckage was discovered in October 1994. According to a Vancouver Sun story, it remains among the old-growth trees on a 45-degree slope at an elevation of 1,100 metres. There is a memorial at Rice Lake in North Vancouver.
Audrey died in August 2004 at age 80.
- All of Audrey (Tavender) Brandon’s quotes and photos (except Santa Fe apartments) courtesy of her daughter, Dale Brandon.
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