Was it the weather… or
On Sunday evening, February 13th, 1949, Wallace Siple, his wifeIrene, and their five children were hurrying home to Beaconsfield,Quebec after visiting his parents in Norwich, Ontario. Norwich is east of London, just north of Tillsonburg and Delhi, Ontario. It was around 7:20. The sky was overcast. There was a light snow fall, with freezing drizzle in spots. And out the windows, the Siples’ offspring could see the twinkling lights of the lonely farm houses over which they were soaring.
Both Wallace and his wife were pilots. And their family was known as the “Seven Soaring Siples” at the Montreal Flying Club where they were long-time members. They were travelling in the family plane, a two year-old, five-seater Beechcraft Model 35 Bonanza with its signature V-tail that made it the one of most distinctive private aircrafts in the sky. They had just left the Ottawa airport at 7:05 after taking on enough fuel for the final 125 air mile leg of their flight from London to Dorval. The Siple’s children had been on countless flights with their father and mother. In fact, their eldest, 11 year-old Graham, was already preparing for his first solo flight… although he wouldn’t be allowed to qualify for his licence until he turned 17.
Walter, owner of the Siple Aircraft Company and the Autoplane Company (a Mercury-Lincoln car dealership on Côte de Liesse in Montreal), was a superb pilot. He had started flying in 1934 as a bush pilot and had over 5,000 hours behind the yoke in cockpits.
A February 18th, 1949 story in the Montreal Gazette reported that he had “piloted the first Hudson bomber across the Atlantic; organized the South Atlantic Ferry Service; test-piloted the first Lancaster bomber built in the Dominion; designed an aircraft used both by Canadians and Americans; and founded an airline.”
Nevertheless, despite all this aviation experience, something went tragically wrong as the Siple family’s Beechcraft passed through the sky over Alex Stewart’s farm on Stewart’s Glen Road north of Dunvegan.
According to a 1949 Montreal Daily Star account of the accident, Mr. Stewart was upstairs when he heard the roar of the plane’s engine, followed by a loud explosion. He and his family rushed out of the house to the scene of the crash and tried in vain to quench the flames with buckets and shovels full of snow.
The article went on to describe the site as grisly, with the broken bodies of Siple senior and two of his boys thrown far from the wreckage and toys and colouring books lying scattered in the snow. The plane itself had plowed, nose first, into the ground with such a force that a tractor was needed to pry open the doors of the crumpled airframe.
There was a great deal of speculation at the time as to what had gone wrong: was it a loss of fuel, overcrowding, an engine fire, poor visibility or the lack of de-icing equipment. In the end, the air services branch of the Federal Transportation Department ruled out fire, and overcrowding, concluding that “icing conditions caused the crash.” However, the reality is we’ll never really know for sure. Flight Data Recorders — or black boxes as they often called — didn’t really come into use until 1958. Even today, they’re not mandatory for small private planes.
However, it’s interesting to note that less than a month after the Soaring Siples perished in a field just north of Dunvegan, a notice appeared in the Montreal Gazette and Montreal Star declaring that the estate of 33 year-old Wallace Clayton Siple had been “adjudged bankrupt”… as were his two companies: Siple Aircraft Limited and the Autoplane Company Inc.
