Early in the night of June 23rd, 1941, the Seeley family in Havelock, New Brunswick, were awoken by a bang. Charles Seeley leapt out of bed to charge down the stairs to find an entire red airplane inside of his kitchen.
Earlier that day, pilots Donald Whitworth and Ed Pangburn had encountered what Whitworth would later call “a conglomeration of circumstances that were all against us that brought the plane down in a crash landing.”
First, they’d gotten stuck at customs. As Americans from New Jersey, they were citizens of a neutral nation as the Second World War raged. Though Canada had been fighting the war for nearly two years already, the American government had, only two days earlier, decided to implement the wartime precaution of having its own citizens present passports at border controls.
Whitworth and Pangburn’s unusual cargo ought to have ensured they got an exemption from the new rule — they were carrying the news. Their little single-engine Travel Air monoplane, contracted to the Newark Air Service, was carrying newsreels (film footage) from New Jersey to Halifax.
Evidently, border control had no idea that they were exempt, while the pilots didn’t know they’d needed passports. The misunderstanding took hours to unravel. By the time the little plane was cleared to enter Canada, it was late in the day.
They headed for Moncton to refuel en route to Halifax. Because of the war, no civil private flying was done in Canada. “The plane was perhaps the only private ship flying in all Canada when it arrived over Moncton,” noted the Moncton Transcript.
The first airplane to fly out of Moncton had done so only 13 years earlier — a mail plane headed for the Magdalen Islands. Since then, Moncton had blossomed into a flight hub, boasting the Moncton Aero Club and the International Airways Flying School (now the Moncton Flight College). By 1941, the city boasted the brand-new RCAF Station Moncton, part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, and its airport had a paved runway, round-the-clock radio operators, and lights to guide planes at night.
As they called the airport on their radio, they got no response. “The messages weren’t picked up,” Whitworth later shrugged, “at least, there were no replies.” (Moncton officials pushed back, declaring that “operators [were] standing by at all hours,” suggesting that the Americans were on the wrong frequency.)
The pilots realised too late that they were desperately low on fuel. They were so low they decided to bail out.
Only then did they realise that they’d forgotten their parachutes.
Pangburn, the co-pilot, didn’t handle this very well. He began dropping flares out the window to try and illuminate their surroundings. It did his precarious mental state little good to discover their flares were duds.
Then, they saw the twinkling lights of Moncton airport.
Whitworth couldn’t really see the airport clearly in the fog. He dropped the plane to a lower altitude to get a better view. Too low — the bottom of the plane clipped a tree. The pilot pulled back up. Running on fumes, he banked a tight turn and began another run at the runway that ended with the beacon lights.
The problem was that this wasn’t the Moncton Airport. They were actually in Havelock. What they thought was a runway was a farmer’s field, and the beacon they were aiming for was a farmhouse.
At first their landing in the field was smooth — most runways were fields at the time. Then they reached the end of the field and hit a rockpile. Only mid-bounce did the pilots realise they were heading for someone’s house.
In an instant, Whitworth (correctly) deduced that the family inside the house would likely be asleep on the second floor. He slammed his throttle down so that the plane’s nose hit the first floor instead.
Mona Seeley, age 3, and George Seeley, age 4, were asleep directly above where an airplane demolished a wall as it entered their kitchen. Despite being only two feet above the plane’s propeller blade, they somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing.
The children’s father, Charles Seeley, dashed down the stairs, across broken glass (“he later discovered, to his amazement, that his feet were unhurt,” wrote the Moncton Transcript). He took one quick look into his kitchen and spotted dust, and through it something red.
“I thought there was a fire!” he explained to Moncton Transcript reporter J.E. Belliveau the next day. “I rushed the kids outside.”
There was no fire. From the outside, it was clear that an airplane had run into their house because its tail was sticking out. “I knew it was a plane because they fly over here all the time,” Charles Seeley explained.
Meanwhile, inside the cockpit in the Seeley’s kitchen, Whitworth looked over to see that Pangburn — who had taken off his seatbelt to drop the dud flares out the window — had been knocked unconscious.
Dazedly, Whitworth stepped into the kitchen. He found himself face to face with “a faded picture of Queen Victoria smiling benignly upon them.” Their propeller had struck an old-fashioned stove. The propeller had broken; the stove was fine. Family pictures were hung on the wall. The dishes were still neatly stacked, unbroken. The same couldn’t be said for the kitchen’s whole north wall.
Outside, the Seeley family “looked in the kitchen and saw, through the broken wall, the pilot walking in circles, dazed,” wrote Belliveau. Whitworth noticed the family staring at him.
“I bought insurance for $4,500 [$90,000 today] about a month ago,” he told them.
When Belliveau showed up the next day, he found pilots and Seeleys alike had moved into a neighbour’s home. They’d patched up Pangburn’s cuts and bruises, and everyone was fine. He reported that the insurancemen had looked at the plane already and that the pilots were heading back to New Jersey that day. The plane itself would be loaded on a train and sent to the States to be scrapped. As for the Seeleys, Belliveau reported that “he and his wife look forward to having their weather-beaten old home renovated.”
