We were luckier today. Everything seemed intact, but that didn’t mean we were going anywhere soon. Joe snapped to attention, ordering Mikey and me out of the plane to inspect the damage. Mikey was out before the words were out of Joe’s mouth, though; he seems to have inherited his father’s ability to handle stressful situations.
By the time I managed to squeeze myself through the plane’s tiny side door, Mikey was already standing on the float, assessing the damage. Joe was right behind me. Amazingly, the boss was not angry. He calmly examined the situation, then rubbed his weathered forehead as he decided the best course of action. While I entertained worst-case scenarios like swimming to the nearest fishing camp or diving into the icy water to push the plane free, Mikey spoke.
“Maybe if we stand on the back of the floats it’ll raise the front of the plane enough to free us up,” he said.
Seconds later, Mikey and I were doing just that, jumping up and down ever so slightly to coax the uncooperative float off the hidden rock shelf. Joe paced up and down the left float, considering his options.
Nothing happened.
Mikey and I kept hopping. Joe kept pacing. Then, just when it seemed like we were going to become more acquainted with Great Slave Lake than any of us had originally bargained for, the aviation gods smiled upon us and sent a blast of cool wind across the lake. That gust, combined with our hopping, set the Norseman free. At the same time, Joe flagged down a passing boat (which turned out to be a friend of Dean’s who’d come to escort us to the camp).
Soon the “rock incident” was a distant memory. Joe taxied the plane across the water, slowly following the escort boat to Dean’s camp. Mikey had replaced me in the right seat; he was looking for shallow rocks as Joe guided the plane through myriad channels between the innumerable small islands that characterize this part of Great Slave Lake. After about twenty minutes of taxiing, the boat disappeared through a narrow strait.
That was enough for Joe: the passage was just too tight, too shallow, and too risky, so he turned around and headed for open water. He could visit Dean another time. Soon we were back up in the air, circling low over the rocky point of land that marks Dean’s camp. A group of people was down there, all looking up and waving at the Norseman. Joe McBryan waved back.
After a brief tour
over Yellowknife and the surrounding area, Joe brought the Norseman down on Back Bay and turned to me. “Is that what you wanted?” he asked.
“It is, Joe. Thanks.”
Rod was waiting for us as we came alongside the dock, ropes ready. I hopped out to lend a hand, but realized that I was intruding on a scene that was never mine in the first place. I watched as Joe, Mikey, and Rod chatted away, father and sons doing what too few of us do, whether it’s in Yellowknife or Yemen: pass the time with one another, relishing the simple joy of being together.
For a moment, I was tempted to interrupt them and thank each in turn for the part he has played in helping this book come together. I even started taking a step or two toward the McBryans. Then I stopped, took in the scene one long last time, turned, and walked away.
“You guys wanna go for a ride on the boat?” I heard Joe call out. I knew he wasn’t talking to me.
I had a plane to catch.
Held every two years since 1995, Yellowknife’s Midnight Sun Float Plane Fly-In is a bush pilot’s dream come true. Hundreds of people and more than forty different types of planes descend on Old Town’s waterfront, providing an opportunity for old pilots, new pilots, and wannabe pilots to share their love of aviation.
The pilots who descended on Yellowknife for the July 2011 version of the fly-in were treated to a few special events, Buffalo style. They not only got together for the Ice Pilots Jamboree (an evening of music, food, and stories from their favourite Ice Pilots characters), they also got a tour of the hangar and flew on a DC-3.
You don’t have to be a northern bush pilot to enjoy the festivities at the fly-in. Over the years, planes from as far away as Hawaii and Tennessee have joined the party.
Joe’s Noorduyn Norseman (call letters CF-SAN) boasts a rich history, a litany of owners, and a restoration effort that saw the plane pulled from the scrap heap and knocked back into perfect flying shape once again, courtesy of Buffalo’s mechanics.
The plane was registered to Saskatchewan Government Airways (the province’s first and only government-owned commercial airline) in 1947. There it flew thousands of kilometres of dedicated service before being damaged in a taxiing accident on June 16, 1960, at Île-à-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan. The plane was salvaged, repaired, and put back into service using parts from another Norseman (call letters CF-EZK). It was sold to Saskair in 1964.
The Norseman was soon bought by Ontario Central Airlines, which operated it until the spring of 1971, when it began a circuitous route through several operators in Manitoba, Ontario, and the Northwest Territories. cf-san was damaged again in late 1981, when frost on its wings caused it to crash after takeoff from the airport in Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories.
At that point, cf-san’s fate hung in the balance. The wreck was shipped to Calgary to be rebuilt, but was deemed beyond repair. So it sat until 1993, when it was donated to the Aero Space Museum of Calgary; Joe bought the wreck later that year. Using parts from Joe’s original Norseman (call letters CF-NVJ), which was damaged in the firefighting incident, CF-SAN was rebuilt and registered to Buffalo Airways. Joe flies the plane to this day.
O
n August
20
,
2011
—shortly after I bade farewell to Yellowknife for the last time while writing this book—a Boeing 737 passenger aircraft operated by First Air crashed on approach to the airport in the tiny High Arctic hamlet of Resolute, one of Canada’s northernmost communities. It was foggy that day, but nothing worrisome enough to stop charter flight 6560, which originated in Yellowknife, from redirecting to another airstrip. Twelve of the fifteen people on board were killed.
Little more than four weeks later—as I was putting the finishing touches on this manuscript—a Twin Otter float plane operated by Arctic Sunwest Charters crashed into an empty lot in the Old Town section of Yellowknife as it approached the company’s float plane base on Back Bay, not far from Mikey McBryan’s house. Returning from a trip to a mining exploration camp at Thor Lake (about one hundred kilometres east of Yellowknife), the plane plowed into a residential street, narrowly missing buildings on either side. The pilot and co-pilot were killed; all seven passengers survived. Nobody yet knows what caused the crash.
Then, unbelievably, disaster struck a third time. On October 4, 2011, an Air Tindi Cessna 208B crashed between Yellowknife and Lutselk’e, a small community some 200 kilometres (125 miles) to the east of the capital. Two of the four people on board, including the pilot, were killed when the plane apparently hit the top of a hill about forty kilometres (twenty-five miles) from its destination.
For me, the foray into the world of bush flying was an ephemeral one. Sure, there were times when I felt like I was living the life of a bush pilot, but I never really did. I tagged along, took people up on their offers of hospitality, flew in some amazing aircraft, told a story. But I never experienced the indescribable feeling of sitting behind the controls, looking onto a landscape of stark northern wilderness, and realizing that something terrible was about to happen. This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever found himself or herself in that position.
If anything, those tragedies made my time in Yellowknife even more important to me. For as I look back, I realize that while the stories of people like Joe McBryan, Justin Simle, Carl Clouter, and Scotty Blue were only ever stories to me, they were white-knuckle real to them. The idea of Carl crash-landing a plane in the High Arctic
sounded
exciting to me, but he
felt
it. It’s an important distinction. Having to relive that kind of experience with someone you hardly know cannot be a comfortable undertaking, and I will be forever grateful to those who did. And so, the humble words in these pages are my long-winded way of saying thanks to all of those who let me share their lives, if only for a moment.
Yet for all of those who opened their doors, their memories, and their hearts to me throughout 2011, none deserves more credit than Mikey McBryan. Rain or shine, day or night, –25° or +25°, Mikey was there to help me navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of Buffalo Airways. He took me in, answered thousands of questions about the most intimate details of his life, and never wavered in his commitment to this project... even when his dad was on the warpath. Without him, this book would not exist. I’ll miss the wings at Surly Bob’s.
Then there’s Trena White, my confidante at D&M Publishers. Like Mikey, Trena entered my world as a voice on a phone. Over the course of 2011, she has evolved into so much more: friend, advisor, therapist, cheerleader, sounding board, and, of course, editor. If there is anything redeeming about the words in these pages, as much credit is due to her as it is to me.
In the end, a book, like a plane, is the sum of its many parts. This one is no different. So to all the people I am lucky enough to have love me, who put up with my crankiness, my distractedness, and my absence at some point during 2011, I thank you. My name may be on the cover, but the subtext of
Ice Pilots
is all yours.
I don’t think that’s
Star Wars.
All photos © OMNI Film Productions Limited except the following:
(numbers refer to pages in the print edition)
15 Author in Hangar © Kate Walker;
32 Wright Brothers courtesy Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ppprs-00626);
44 Northern Lights © Busse/NWT Archives/N-1979-052-2131;
46 Prospector © Krause/NWT Archives/N-1990-022-0197;
58 Curtiss-Commando Ad © Curtiss-Wright Corporation 2011;
61 Commando C-46 © Curtiss-Wright Corporation 2011;
151 Dog Team © R. Knights/NWT Archives/N-1993-002-0223;
168 Bush Pilot “Punch” Dickins courtesy William “Bill” Zuk/Wikimedia Commons;
172 Wilfrid “Wop” May courtesy Royal Canadian Mounted Police;
176 Norseman courtesy Brian Johannesson;
199 Lorna deBlicquy from deBlicquy family archives;
226 Fireweed Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Copyright © 2012 Michael Vlessides
Based on the television series Ice Pilots NWT produced by Omni Film Productions Limited
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Douglas & McIntyre
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-939-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-55365-940-2 (ebook)
Editing by Trena White
Copy editing by Peter Norman
Cover design by Heather Pringle and Peter Cocking
Cover photography by Ed Araquel, courtesy of Omni Film Productions Limited
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.