Sept-Îles serves as the point of departure for the flight that turns Alcide Bolduc’s work in the northern Quebec transport network into a lasting family loss. In the winter of 1953, its portside hotel bar is where he learns that an urgent cargo run to Schefferville needs a pilot; the aircraft leaves from the town that day and never returns.

A port and aviation hub

The episode opens in a nearly empty hotel bar near the port. Alcide is drinking a beer when Johnny Parent, the Hollinger Ungava Transport flight dispatcher, tells him that the pilot expected for the Schefferville run is sick and that the cargo must be delivered. Parent had hired Alcide at Mont-Joli in autumn 1951, initially after Alcide offered his services as a mechanic to the Iron Ore Company of Canada, which was building a railway through northern Quebec and Labrador to reach a major iron-ore deposit.

Alcide’s experience as a pilot soon redirected him from mechanical work to the company’s air bridge. During those years, flights ran day and night between Sept-Îles and Schefferville, the two communities the railway was intended to connect, passing through Labrador City. The town’s significance in this episode is practical: it is the southern endpoint of a demanding transport route serving an immense northern construction project.

The February 1953 departure

On a freezing, sunny day in February 1953, Alcide took off from Sept-Îles in a DC-3 with his copilot. The aircraft was loaded to the brim with bags of cement, mechanical parts, and food supplies bound for Schefferville. Some bad weather was forecast for the region. The outward leg was to be flown by day and the return by night, making the complete journey a five-hour trip.

The aircraft did not come back to Sept-Îles. Radio contact was lost, apparently when it strayed into the storm. The departure from the port thus becomes the last known point in a route whose routine logistical purpose is abruptly overtaken by uncertainty: neither Alcide nor his copilot returned, and the precise moment or place of the disaster was not known.

Search, disappearance, and delayed discovery

After several weeks of searching, the company said the aircraft had disappeared in the frozen wilderness of the Far North, perhaps crashing into a remote lake or the ocean. It offered a generous pension to Alcide’s children. Among its consequences, the payment helped cover Loïc’s education, so the flight’s loss remained connected to the family’s future as well as its grief.

For more than twenty years, what had happened to the plane and its crew remained a matter of conjecture. In the 1970s, during searches for the wreck of the Titanic off Newfoundland, investigators located the aircraft’s remains on an isolated peak in Labrador near the ocean. Scattered bones identified as those of Alcide and his copilot were found with the wreckage. Sept-Îles therefore anchors both ends of the account: it is where the flight began, and the place to which the plane never returned, while its eventual discovery far to the north finally gave substance to the disappearance.