JOHN DeMONT: Ghosts of Swissair still haunt after 25 years

May 26, 2024

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Memories, like old Kodak snapshots, tend to fade with time. So, until recently, Greg Aikins had managed to put much of what happened in 1998 out of his mind.

A writer for a Roman Catholic publication had called.

And on Tuesday, there I was on the phone, asking him about Swissair Flight 111, which crashed into the frigid Atlantic waters 25 years ago this Saturday.

As they had to, after a moment, the memories came tumbling back.

How Aikins was just 39, mere months after becoming the youngest commander in the entire Canadian fleet, when Navy brass ordered him to ready the crew of HMCS Halifax because something terrible had happened near Peggys Cove.

And how by then the world already knew that there were no survivors among the 229 passengers and crew aboard the Swissair MD-11, which had left New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Geneva before trying to make an emergency landing in Halifax.

As part of Operation Persistence, the largest marine peacetime operation in Canadian history, the ship’s mission was to recover human remains and debris from the airplane, meant to help investigators determine the cause of the crash, as well as enforce the exclusion zone around the crash site.

“It was such an anomaly,” said the Montreal-born Aikins, who would captain other frigates and serve on missions all over the world but called the Swissair assignment “the most unusual thing I ever did as a naval officer.”

The recovered plane parts and human remains were processed aboard the Halifax, then airlifted by helicopter to 12 Wing Shearwater, where the identification of the dead and the search for answers were underway.

Based on our conversation, Aikins is not one for overstatement. Yet, even if the words are matter of fact, the images sear.

The young crew member standing underneath a body bag filled with human remains when it broke apart while being lifted into a helicopter.

The despair the captain, a father of four young children, felt whenever the remains of a child, a toy or some other reminder of the age of the crash victims was brought on board.

How, when it came time for Aikins, a certified diver, to carry on the search underwater, he found himself staring into the waters “expecting to see something disturbing.”

A deepening Catholic faith helped with the post-traumatic stress disorder that followed and that dogged so many members of his crew.

Now 64, Aikins lives on St. Margarets Bay, a happy man who brags about his kids and runs a successful marine consulting business.

He likes to get out on the water whenever he can, even if some of the old, hard memories come back when he pilots his sailboat through Peggys Cove.

On Saturday, Aikins plans to find a quiet space. There he will say a prayer for the families of the lost and those who helped recover their remains and still suffer mentally and emotionally for their sacrifice.

So it will be on Saturday when, a quarter of a century later, those touched by the Swissair disaster will mark the occasion.

Some will do so publicly, for example at a ceremony at the Swissair Flight 111 memorial at Whalesback, near Peggys Cove.

Others will act in private like Ken Adams, in 1998 a pilot for Delta Airlines, who flew up the day after the crash from Cartersville, Ga., to act as the lead pilot investigator into the tragedy for the International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations.

After a day at the site, Adams returned to his Halifax hotel room, sat down at a desk and wrote the following words on a sheet of Four Points Sheraton stationary:

Down from the Heavens

Down this dark and stormy night

A ship with many souls

Spirits soon to be released

Stands at Peggys Cove

A lighthouse with soft guiding light

A light to guide these souls

Of this dark and stormy night

When I asked Adams if, in all his years of investigating airplane crashes, he often felt moved to write a poem, he said no.

“The whole scene got into me,” he explained.

What is more, rereading those few lines that he had just rediscovered “brought it right back to me because it gets you right in the heart.”

Adams won’t be within a thousand kilometres of Peggys Cove on the weekend.

Gina Leola Woolsey hopes to be right there, even though, in a way, she has had even farther to travel.

Twenty-five years ago, she was a single mom, without a radio in the pre-internet days, living a continent away.

“I may have heard about (the Swissair crash) but it didn’t make it to long-term storage,” she told me.

But in 2012, Woolsey, a writer, was at a dinner party in Vancouver and found herself sitting by a man named John Butt, formerly the chief medical examiner of Alberta.

Woolsey’s husband had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she was preoccupied with the idea of death.

“I wanted to know everything about his occupation,” she said of Butt, whom she later learned was Nova Scotia’s chief medical examiner when Swissair Flight 111 went down.

This Thursday, at Halifax's Lord Nelson Hotel — in the same ballroom where 25 years ago Butt told the families they would never see their loved ones again — she will launch her first non-fiction book. It is called Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster.

Butt, in case you haven’t guessed, is the medical examiner in question. The 15,000 refers to the approximate number of body parts that had to be analyzed to positively identify everyone on the flight.

Woolsey’s daughter is flying in for the book launch. If they can find a car, they will drive out to Peggys Cove on Saturday to pay their respects. As is only fitting.