Retired journalist reflects on covering Swissair Flight 111 disaster off Nova Scotia, 25 years later

Twenty-five years after Swissair Flight 111 crashed off Nova Scotia, a retired journalist reflects on covering the disaster. 

“As soon as you mention Swissair you immediately remember what you were doing,” said Rick Grant, who was a journalist for ATV/CTV News for nearly 40 years.

On Sept. 2, 1998 Grant recalls a marathon broadcast that began after the news of the crash broke on CTV National News.

“ATV/ CTV was a critical component of coverage that night worldwide,” Grant said. “CNN was taking ATV live.”

News crews were sent to the Bayswater area and to Peggy’s Cove. Another team was out on the water. Grant, Keith Johns and Kevin Doyle took the microwave truck and headed to the rescue coordination centre at the HMC Dockyard, which was the control centre for all of the search operations for that night.

“They were able to give us information that was skimpy, but it was the first available official information,” Grant said. “They were very good to deal with. Provided us with a number of interviews as information became available.”

From there, his crew went to Halifax’s south end and eventually onto CFB Shearwater, where Sea King helicopters were flying out.

Meanwhile out in Bayswater and Peggys Cove, teams were providing immediate satellite coverage out to the world.

“It was coordinated on-site by Greg Campbell who probably one of the best technical supervisors in television at the time,” Grant said.

The retired reporter notes how anchors Steve Murphy and Ron Kronstein had no idea what information would be coming in from reporters in the field that night. There was no script.

“And yet they kept that broadcast going providing new information, taking old information, repackaging it and making it relevant to the viewer,” he said.

Over the marathon coverage, Grant was trying to recall his experience covering the Arrow Air Flight 1285 crash in Gander 13 years prior that killed all 256 passengers and crew.

“I had a sense of how grave this was and just how enormous the disaster was and so I was trying to focus on what information we had and put it in some context with the information that I had recalled from covering the previous disaster,” he said.

Within 24 to 48 hours after the crash, the families of the 229 people aboard Swissair Flight 111 began to arrive.

“One of the most outstanding things was how grateful the families were for the hospitality that was shown in Nova Scotia,” Grant said.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, journalists like Grant interviewed family members and followed the recovery efforts, the mission to find and recover the black box, identify human remains and piece together a plane that had disintegrated on impact.

“I remember Dr. John Butt having to identify the remains and what a difficult and long job that must’ve been for him,” Grant said.

Twenty-five years on, his memories are vivid from that night.

“I didn’t have that horrible task of reporting from the boat,” said Grant. “So I wasn’t exposed to that really really difficult situation that those people faced. I know for some, including some CTV people, it was a very difficult thing to be on the water.”

When he looks back, Grant said he would never want to see the disaster repeated but he’s grateful to have been part of the coverage.

“I think CTV can be proud that it handled things as gracefully and as responsibly as can be handled given the loss of life at 229 people.”