`ORDEAL IN THE ARCTIC:' A CHILLY VIEW

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 15, 1993                   TAG: 9302130178
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
`ORDEAL IN THE ARCTIC:' A CHILLY VIEW
If you sit down tonight to watch ABC's "Ordeal in the Arctic," bring along a cup of tea. It's a movie that's hard to warm up to.
This is the dramatized account of a real-life event, the crash of a Canadian Forces military cargo plane on Oct. 30, 1991, resulting in the northernmost air/land rescue effort ever mounted.
The plane, a C-130 Hercules, was on a routine run from Greenland to Alert, a base in the Northwest Territories. It was carrying 18 passengers and crew when it inexplicably crashed about 10 miles from its destination.
The 13 survivors endured four days of sub-zero temperatures, gale-force winds and white-out blizzards, most of them huddled in the plane's burned-out tail section. Two others, suffering severe back injuries, remained outside, cared for by those who were mobile.
"Nobody seems to know why the plane crash-landed," said Richard Chamberlain, who plays the pilot, John Couch. "They were used to making those non-instrument landings all the time."
Only three characters - played by Chamberlain, Melanie Mayron and Catherine Mary Stewart - capture a viewer's interest. Two others - co-pilot Joe Bales (Page Fletcher) and Bob Thompson (Richard McMillan), manager of the air-base store - are identifiable. All the rest are injured, interchangeable crew members.
This is unfortunate, because Chamberlain said survivors told him that the effort to survive and keep others alive was very much a group project: "They all told me it wasn't just Couch or [co-pilot] Joe [Bales], it was a real team."
According to the movie, based on the book "Death and Deliverance" by Robert Mason Lee, the heroes are Couch, who put the lives of the injured above his own, and Wilma DeGroot, a physician (Stewart). DeGroot offers some medical advice but is pictured as the cheerleader who keeps up spirits by encouraging the group to sing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" and calling roll periodically to see who's still alive.
"In real life, she was somewhat less of a heroine than the book made her out to be," said Chamberlain, "and some of the men were a bit annoyed by that."
In the television story, two passengers, hair stylist Sue Hillier (Mayron) and Thompson, are thrown clear of the wreckage but are too badly hurt to be moved. When Thompson goes into shock, Couch, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, wraps his own parka around him.
Meanwhile, Canada's search-and-rescue forces, SARTECHS, battle the elements to find the survivors.
The movie was shot mainly at the Canadian Forces Base at Edmonton, Alberta, home site of five of the 18 people on board the Hercules as well as many of the personnel who tried to save them. Chamberlain talked to them and to Couch's widow.
"I gathered he was a really great guy and an incredibly conscientious pilot," Chamberlain said. "The saddest thing she told me was that just before that flight, she had to go somewhere, and he had spent a week on his own with the children, who were about 3 and 2. But they were so young that they don't remember the wonderful time that they had with him."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB