Hollinger Ungava Transport

Hollinger Ungava Transport, or HUT, was the aviation company whose round-the-clock northern air service connected construction communities and carried essential freight across the remote region. Its dispatch of Alcide Bolduc on a February 1953 supply flight ended in the disappearance of his DC-3, an event that left his children without a father but also brought them a pension from the company.

Service in the northern construction corridor

Hollinger Ungava Transport ran an air bridge between Sept-Îles and Schefferville, with flights passing through Labrador City. The service was already operating day and night in the early 1950s, while the Iron Ore Company of Canada was building a railway through northern Quebec and Labrador to exploit one of the world’s richest iron-ore deposits. HUT’s route therefore served a region where rail connections were still under construction and where air transport supplied the work and communities along the corridor.

The company’s operations depended on pilots who could also bring other useful experience. Johnny Parent, a veteran of the railway industry and HUT’s flight dispatcher, hired Alcide at Mont-Joli in autumn 1951. Alcide had offered his services to the Iron Ore Company of Canada as a mechanic, but his experience as a pilot soon led to his assignment to HUT’s air bridge. The shift from railway mechanic to northern pilot joined the railway project and the air service in a single labor network: the railway was being built on the ground, while HUT carried people and supplies over the distances it had yet to bridge.

Dispatch and disappearance

In February 1953, when a pilot known as Bob was confined to bed with a severe flu, Johnny Parent ordered Alcide to take a load to Schefferville without fail, since he was the only available pilot for the job. Alcide departed from Sept-Îles in a DC-3 with a copilot. The aircraft was filled to capacity with cement bags, mechanical parts, and food provisions, a cargo intended for the northern route’s practical needs rather than passenger travel.

The flight was scheduled for a five-hour round trip: the outward leg by day and the return at night. Some bad weather was forecast for the Schefferville region. Radio contact was lost, apparently as the aircraft became lost in the storm, and it never returned to Sept-Îles. The account does not describe a crash witnessed by the company; instead, the disappearance left the aircraft’s fate uncertain.

Search, support, and later discovery

After several weeks of searching, the company stated that the aircraft had disappeared in the frozen northern wilderness, perhaps wrecked in a remote lake or even in the ocean. HUT offered a generous pension to Alcide’s children. That support had a concrete consequence for Loïc: among other things, it enabled the payment of his education.

For more than twenty years, the fate of Alcide and his copilot remained a matter of conjecture. In the 1970s, during searches for the wreck of the Titanic off Newfoundland, the remains of the aircraft were located on an isolated Labrador peak near the ocean. The scattered bones of Alcide and the copilot were found with the wreckage. The discovery resolved the long uncertainty surrounding the flight, while fixing HUT’s role in the story at the point where routine dispatch, a freight run, and an unfinished return journey became a family’s lasting loss.