Closure at last for family of pilot lost 60 years ago
U.S. REPATRIATES PARACHUTE OF CANADIAN PILOT LOST 60 YEARS AGO
It looked like nothing more than a bundle of filthy straps washed up on a beach outside Jacksonville, Fla.
“I know I drove past it at least five times,” park ranger Zack Johnson told Florida media. Hurricane Irma had just struck the area, and there was no shortage of debris on the beaches.
But Johnson, a former Navy man, decided to take a closer look at this particular pile of flotsam, and soon found his attention drawn to faded, stencilled text on one of the straps: “LT (P) TROY.”
This easily overlooked bundle would turn out to be the missing link in a family tragedy from nearly 60 years earlier.
The last anyone saw of Lt. Barry Troy, he was piloting his F2H-3 Banshee into a dense bank of fog off the Florida coast.
It was Feb. 25, 1958 and members of Troy’s Nova Scotia-based 871 Squadron were in Florida for training exercises with the United States Navy. On this particular day, Troy and two others were to take off from Naval Station Mayport and land on the nearby HMCS Bonaventure, a vessel destined to become Canada’s last aircraft carrier.
The few remnants of Troy’s plane would speak to the sheer violence of the crash. When U.S. Navy vessels scrambled to the Canadian’s last-known position, they found only the Banshee’s nose wheel and Troy’s flight helmet.
At the jet’s speed and altitude, it would only have required a few seconds of disorientation in the fog to plunge nose-first into the Atlantic. At that speed, the collision would have been akin to striking concrete.
“Entered dense fog bank at 200 ft above ocean. No further communication,” read a terse post-incident report.
The body of the 29-yearold fighter pilot was never recovered. The Royal Canadian Navy declared him dead and his name was inscribed into the books of remembrance held in the Peace Tower. The aviator’s name is on his parents’ tombstone with the epitaph “lost at sea.”
The trauma of the crash never left Troy’s New Brunswick family, however. The navy initially provided little information about the crash, only telling the family that Troy was missing. They didn’t learn of the aviator’s fate until it was reported in the Moncton Times.
“There was never any finality to this story,” Troy’s brother Dick, told CBC radio last year. “My mom and dad grieved for many years, and we all did.”
Troy’s younger brother Edward became the Catholic bishop of Saint John. His mother Lillian lived to be more than 100 years old.
Edward became a lifelong member of the Shearwater Aviation Museum Foundation as a tribute to his lost brother.
“It is important to me that Canadian Naval Aviators not be forgotten,” he wrote in a note accompanying his 2014 membership dues.
For decades, the haunting possibility remained that Troy may have escaped the aircraft only to drown or die of exposure in the Atlantic.
Zack Johnson’s chance discovery, however, seems to confirm an instant death. The beach discovery includes Troy’s parachute harness, which would have been tightly buckled around the aviator at the time of his death.
Also found were Troy’s parachute, parachute cover and an inflatable life-jacket.
On Feb. 26, 60 years and one day after the crash, a solemn ceremony was held at Naval Station Mayport to officially repatriate the items to a Canadian delegation that included Dick Troy, the RCAF’s senior historian and Colonel Tom Dunne, Air Attaché at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
“He was our big brother; he was our hero. We lost him, and now we have him back in a way,” said Dick Troy, according to an account of the ceremony in the Florida Times-Union.
The items are set to be donated to the Shearwater Aviation Museum, on the grounds of the Canadian Armed Forces base in Halifax where Troy had been stationed.
IT IS IMPORTANT TO ME THAT CANADIAN NAVAL AVIATORS NOT BE FORGOTTEN.