Little did Clive know when he picked up his ringing phone one day in February 1992 that he was about to take the strangest call of his entire life.
On the other end of the line was a worker from the Airdrie Airport, a short drive northeast from Clive’s home in Calgary. Clive owned a small plane, a 1940s Piper J-3 Cub, that he had restored at the airport. But the plane wasn’t acting as any plane should. In fact, it was acting as if it was possessed.
The airport worker told Clive that strange things had happened. Clive’s plane had been securely fastened, with each wing and the tail tied down, but it had somehow broken free of its bonds, taken off, flown a short distance away and landed right on top of another small plane, where it had finally come to a rest. And it had done all this without a pilot.
Clive hung up the phone, took a moment to process what he’d been told, then grabbed his wife and rushed north to Airdrie. There were three witnesses to the bizarre event and all of them were either aircraft owners or airport mechanics with no reason to lie, so Clive couldn’t find any way to discredit the story. Furthermore, all three of the witnesses were shaken by what they’d seen and clearly a little apprehensive to approach the possessed plane. When they led Clive to it, he found his plane exactly as they’d said: on top of another aircraft.
But it hadn’t landed exactly as Clive had expected. It was upside down. The fact that his plane was balanced on top of another without falling off seemed to defy the laws of gravity. Its tail rudder was impossibly balanced on the other craft’s rudder, both of which were rounded and only twelve millimetres wide. If his plane had been positioned a millimetre or two to either side, it would have slipped and crashed to the ground. To make this landing would have been impossible for a human, but apparently not for whatever spirit had flown it earlier that day.
A gust of wind kicked up and blew Clive’s plane’s rudder off of the other plane’s rudder. Clive’s plane fell with a loud clunk that made everyone jump. His plane was still atop the other, but at least Clive could now tie them both in place so no more damage would occur if the wind got any worse. He’d deal with righting the plane the following morning.
A 1940s Piper J-3 Cub
But before anyone could leave in search of rope, the J-3 Cub lifted straight up off the other plane and into the air. Everyone jumped back in fright. Empty, the plane flew away from the shocked spectators, heading south and still upside down. It accelerated rapidly and pulled into an incredibly steep climb. One of the pilots told the others that there was no possible way that type of plane could pull off such a manoeuvre — they simply weren’t built to do so.
Once it was about 100 metres up in the sky, it did a loop in the air and flew straight back down to the runway, where it made a perfect three-point landing and taxied back to the other plane, stopping less than a metre away from it. Clive and the others stood in silence with their mouths hanging wide open. They were all in complete shock.
In retrospect, Clive realized he’d had an eerie feeling about the plane almost as soon as he’d purchased it. He’d gotten it at a great price because it needed some work, and at first he was a little hesitant because he knew it might be difficult to find parts and make repairs to a fifty-year-old plane. But the entire process had gone incredibly smoothly — perhaps too smoothly. It was as if fate was on Clive’s side and there was an extra, unseen set of hands helping him along the way.
After watching the J-3 Cub fly on its own and make an incredible landing, Clive decided to do a little research into it. He discovered that the plane’s previous owner was a pilot who had died a short while before, when the helicopter he was flying crashed in the Yukon. The deceased pilot’s family contracted an auction company to quickly sell off his private collection of aircraft, and that’s how Clive had gotten such a good deal on the J-3 Cub. But had he known that the plane he’d just taken possession of was itself possessed by the ghost of a pilot who refused to leave the cockpit, Clive might not have seen the deal as being half as good as he’d thought.