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.
Related:
© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.
11 comments on “Trans-Canada Air Lines”
This came up for me today, thank you for posting! My mother was Delia Altwasser, she joined TCA I think in 1938 or 1939 and left in 1943 when she married my father. I’d be interested in reading the book, I think she is third from the left on the cover. She was one of the ladies who stayed at the Santa Fe on Oak St., she once told me it was still in use until sometime in the sixties. She regularly flew between Winnipeg and Vancouver, including Lethbridge, she was early enough to wear the original tan uniforms. She passed away in Vancouver in 2016, aged 97. BTW, I think there was another pilot named Pike at TCA, who she knew, she knew all the crew on Flight 3.
I remember the same thing happened in 1963, a TCA flight was scheduled to leave Dorval airport. A family friend was driving to Montreal to take it. My dad had offered to drive her to the airport and park her car in our driveway in Montreal. She was delayed at the border crossing into Canada, which made her later than she had planned. Although my dad went as fast as he could, the plane was taking off as they arrived at the airport. Our friend was very up set. She rescheduled to leave the next day. As they were driving back to our house they heard of the crash in Saint Therese, the one she should have been on. She changed her tune.
I have to correct my last statement about Miss Hamblin. It turns out that she was the daughter of Jack Hamblin( my Grandmothers second husband and not his sister. He died before she was found btw
Don, Contact “The Canadian Maple Wings Association” which is printed at the top of the cover of the book. That is the alumni for flight attendants.
Sad about that flight. Condolences to those affected. Anyone reading this know of the first jet from Toronto to Vancouver? I think it was in 1959. I was a small boy aboard that flight. We received commemorative wine glasses in boxes placed on each seat before we boarded. Originally I thought it was TWA, but a retired employee has corrected me.
My grandparents Alex and Mary Gray were scheduled to be on that flight. They were in Toronto for their daughter’s funeral. At the last minute my grandmother couldn’t find her hat pin and refused to leave. Good thing she always got her way.
[…] Audrey Brandon and Trans-Canada Airlines […]
Used to fly TCA between Victoria, Pat Bay, and Vancouver when Iwent to school in the 50s. The one way fare was $5. 🙂
Thank you for this sad, surprising and informative article. After finding my father’s photo album of his stay as a labourer at a relief camp in Madawaska, ON from 1934 to 1936, one of more 160 camps across Canada that built emergency landing fields, I began researching the government’s initiative.
Without the government’s Unemployed Single Men’s Relief Scheme, the Trans-Canada Airway would not have been completed. And the creation of the commercial airline Trans-Canada Air Lines and its first flight in 1937 might not have been achieved.
Incidentally, he proudly joined TCA as an aircraft mechanic and retired 36 years later. Did working on a landing field influence his decision? Perhaps…
Oops corrected my Trans-Canada Airway research website address! Thanks.
Further to my comment, my father joined TCA in 1939.