Flying On Instinct

by L. D. Cross

  May had to return to pick up the trapper’s frozen corpse and take it back too. Nobody knew anything about the man, and his final possessions were bizarre. Among them were 32 kidney pills, $2,410 in Canadian and American bills (worth approximately $60,000 today) and two glass jars containing five pearls and seven pieces of gold dental work. He had been packing a .22 Winchester rifle, a model 99 Savage, a .30-30 rifle and a large supply of ammunition. No motive for his crimes was ever established.

  In 1932, Canadian country-music singer Wilf Carter immortalized the event when he recorded the song “The Capture of Albert Johnson” at RCA Victor in Montreal. But who was Albert Johnson? The initial 1930 investigation of his identity focused on an obscure individual named Arthur “Mickey” Nelson who trapped and prospected in the same west-central Yukon area and owned guns similar to Johnson’s. In 2009, Discovery Channel televised the August 11, 2007, exhumation of Johnson’s corpse. DNA samples were taken before the body was re-interred and compared with DNA from relatives of all potential Mad Trapper candidates. The test results excluded all of them with 100 percent probability. Analyses of isotopes in Johnson’s teeth indicated he was not Canadian but likely grew up in the American Midwest or possibly Scandinavia. He was determined to be in his 30s at death.

  Heroic bush pilot Wilfrid Reid “Wop” May (left) and airplane mechanic Jack Bowen in the Northwest Territories in 1932. GLENBOW ARCHIVES NA-1258-106

  After the chase, May returned to flying men and equipment into the North as resource companies raced to find oil and minerals. But the vision in May’s eye, injured during his employment at NCR, was deteriorating, and the eye became so painful that he had it removed in 1937. That ended his flying career. With the start of the Second World War and the need for skilled pilots, May managed recruit training in Edmonton as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan and formulated techniques used by quick response aerial search-and-rescue teams at crash sites. The techniques worked so well that the US government awarded May the American Medal of Freedom in 1947. Like Oaks and Dickins, he received the McKee Trophy for establishing air services to remote regions and was inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame in 1974. May died of a heart attack while on a hiking trip in Utah in 1952.

  CHAPTER

  7

  From Bush Life

  to Corporate Life

  GEORGE WILLIAM “GRANT” MCCONACHIE was one of the few pilots to make a successful transition from domestic bush flying to the international corporate boardroom. McConachie was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and grew up in Edmonton. Hooked on flying from childhood, he read everything he could find about aircraft and hung out at the Edmonton airfield. Sometimes real-life heroes like bush pilots Punch Dickins and Wop May would give in to his pleas and take him up for a ride. He couldn’t wait to take flying lessons and saved money for them by looking after aircraft on the field.

  McConachie studied engineering at the University of Alberta and took flying lessons at the Edmonton and Northern Alberta Aero Club. A quick study, he soloed in a de Havilland Moth, a light plane designed for recreational use and civilian training, after only seven hours of cockpit instruction. The club grounded him twice for carrying passengers without a commercial licence. In one instance, he took off with the club president’s plane for four days—without permission. It was rumoured that he had flown a miner to the US, but there were no records, nothing could be proved and McConachie had charm and the ability to say all the right things at the right time. He could sell a ketchup popsicle to a man wearing a white suit.

  McConachie had big dreams, envisioning an over-the-pole route to Europe instead of the longer route across the Atlantic then in use. In 1931, with his commercial pilot’s licence finally in his pocket, the 22-year-old McConachie looked for a flying job. As other pilots were finding out, during the Great Depression the Canadian government was not interested in airmail or air freight, and people could not afford to fly as paying passengers. So McConachie turned west, so far west that he planned to cross the Pacific Ocean to fly for Chinese National Airways. They were offering $300 a month, with the proviso their pilots had to serve in the military during times of war. After taking the train to Vancouver on the first leg of his journey to his new employer, McConachie dropped in to visit his father’s brother. It was a serendipitous event that would change his life. Not wanting to risk his nephew’s life in a country then at war with Japan, Uncle Harry proposed a business deal. Harry would buy a plane and Grant would fly it. He bought a much-used old Fokker aircraft and told him to start his own airline. McConachie did just that. He chose Edmonton, the bush pilots’ gateway to the North, as his base of operations. His first commission was flying fresh fish in Alberta from Cold Lake to Bonnyville. He took jobs other pilots wouldn’t touch. He loaded in fresh fruit and vegetables and sold them from the plane, anything to make money. In a few months, he had repaid Uncle Harry and become a real bush pilot, flying trappers, surveyors, prospectors, huskies, oil barrels, meat and fish all over the North and barnstorming at fairs in the summer. Within a year, his company, Independent Airways, had three planes underwritten by Uncle Harry.

  In November 1932, a trapper came to authorities in Edmonton with an urgent message. Two men had serious burns from a gas-pipe explosion at the telegraph station in Pelican Rapids and would not survive the trip out by dogsled. Getting them out by air would be a chancy proposition. The area was heavily forested, and the ice would still be too thin to support a plane. McConachie was the only pilot who thought it was a manageable risk. The military refused to send a doctor along but did throw in some medical supplies. McConachie sent a message back to have the men moved 10 miles (16 kilometres) to Oboe Lake, which had a beach where he could land, and to set a small bonfire there so he could judge wind speed and distance.

  When McConachie and his mechanic Chris Green reached the pickup site, they saw a huge fire with smoke that obscured the view of the lake. Skimming in just above stall speed, McConachie looked for an area of beach wide enough to set down on; he then cut the engine. The plane dropped onto the sand, spewing up fine gravel and twigs. Then came a horrible tearing noise. The plane stopped when a tree root slashed right down its fabric fuselage. McConachie jumped out with the medical kit and ran over to where the two victims and some trappers had taken shelter from his violent landing. Two charred and oozing bodies were lying on makeshift litters. McConachie bandaged them while Green bandaged the plane. With the four men on board and ready to go, McConachie realized he didn’t have enough room to take off. There were no brakes on the wheels to hold back the plane while he revved the engine, so he reverted to the old rope-around-a-tree technique. When the plane reached full power, he stuck his arm out and made a chopping motion. A trapper lifted his axe and chopped the rope. The plane shot forward and lifted off to fly to Edmonton.

  In the mid-1930s, Natives help bush pilot Grant McConachie (fourth from left) make emergency repairs to an undercarriage strut of his fish-hauling bush plane. library and archives canada c-061897

  There was no downtime for McConachie between assignments. Only a busy bush pilot made money. It was time to start flying fish again. Along with the colder weather came fog, and just as McConachie was about to take off early one morning he saw his Uncle Harry coming out of the mist. While on the train from Toronto to Vancouver, he had impulsively got off to see his nephew. They chatted for some time as tiny water droplets built up on the propeller blades and turned to ice. McConachie didn’t notice the problem until he was halfway down the runway. He knew he didn’t have enough speed to take off, but he had no room to stop either. Slowly the plane lifted off the ground, but it had no power to climb. McConachie just missed the smokestack near the CN railyards, then electric power lines appeared directly in his path. He turned sharply, but one wing clipped the ground and the plane cartwheeled end over end. Rolling into a ball to protect his head, he waited for the gas tanks to explode, wondering if he would look like those burned men he had evacuated from Oboe Lake. The
plane stopped rolling in a field. All was silent. Then he heard the noise of people and vehicles. As McConachie moved to get a better look, the pain was instantaneous. Small wonder—his legs were bent at unnatural angles, it hurt to breathe and metal was sticking out of his thigh. First responders gave him whisky, and by the time he was pulled free of the wreckage the pain had lessened. In hospital, the X-rays showed 17 leg fractures, broken hips, plus shattered fingers, ribs and left kneecap.

  After two months of recuperation, McConachie still limped badly. The reconstructed knee would not bend. He decided to be his own doctor and asked some barroom buddies to bend it for him as he placed it over the edge of a table. It hurt like hell and swelled up like a balloon, but now he could move it a bit. Months later, the knee buckled as he lifted fuel drums out of his plane, but after the pain subsided he had almost full flexibility. He would need it on his next assignment, when he flew a team of prospectors to an abandoned gold mine in the Stikine Range. Dodging sharp peaks and landing in deep snow on Two Brothers Lake, he and his passengers had to tramp the snow down with their snowshoes to make a runway so McConachie could take off to fly back to Edmonton.

  On the airfield in Edmonton, McConachie was hit with a bombshell. Uncle Harry and his business partners were in trouble; in fact, they were bankrupt. McConachie’s planes were slapped with liens, and Independent Airways was grounded. McConachie managed to smooth-talk the creditors into releasing one plane so he could barnstorm to pay off the debt. The plane crashed. The cardinal rule of bush flying is that you always pick up everyone you dropped off, but McConachie now had no way to pick up the prospectors at Two Brothers Lake. After six frantic weeks trying to beg, borrow and do anything short of stealing a plane, he was able to fly in with a mining company team and pick up the emaciated prospectors, who could barely stand. When he went to the hospital to talk with team leader Barney Phillips, instead of a reprimand, McConachie got a job offer. Phillips was starting his own bush operation, United Air Transport (UAT), to serve his miners in the West and take on other jobs as available. Would McConachie fly for him? The answer was yes. Based out of Calgary, UAT hauled over one million pounds (453,600 kilograms) of fish from 1934 to 1935.

  In 1935, oil executive Bob Wilkinson wanted to be flown from Calgary to Vancouver, and McConachie agreed to take him on the first commercial flight across the Canadian Rockies. The press followed their progress, and they were met by the mayor of Vancouver, who thought this was the start of a regular commercial air route. When he found out it was not, he refused to cover McConachie’s bill at the Hotel Vancouver. Since there was no agreement in writing about who would pay for accommodation, McConachie had to barnstorm the entire summer to pay it off, joining the prairie circuit of Ringling Brothers Circus and offering passenger rides for a-penny-a-pound of body weight. He stopped only long enough to marry Margaret MacLean, a nurse he had met while recuperating in 1932.

  As the national economy improved and interest in fast mail delivery revived, UAT landed airmail contracts between Fort St. John and Fort Nelson, Edmonton, Whitehorse, Vancouver and Prince George, but with 12 planes on floats or skis, they still could not turn a profit. They needed larger, wheeled aircraft and prepared runways. The company bought three Fleet Freighter aircraft, and in 1939, it became Yukon Southern Air Transport.

  At the beginning of the Second World War, business was slow and pilots were scarce. The federal government had decided in 1937 that it needed a nationwide air carrier. Fearful that the two US airlines would expand into Canada, it formed Trans-Canada Airlines (TCA). There were private interests that wanted their own national airline, too. Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) began buying up small bush-flying companies, including Yukon Southern in 1941, and started Canadian Pacific Airlines (CPA) with McConachie as one of their executives. When the war in the Pacific and the threat of a Japanese attack on North America raised concerns about moving men and machinery on the West Coast, McConachie did aerial surveillance for the CANOL project and the 1,600-mile (2,575-kilometre) Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek, Yukon, to Fairbanks, Alaska. The highway was completed in 1943.

  McConachie received the McKee Trophy in 1945 for his pioneering efforts in forging air service to the North. He became president of CPA in 1947. His fleet of DC-8s fulfilled his dream of a polar route, and he inaugurated CPA passenger service to Australia, Japan and Hong Kong, adding another 15,535 miles (25,000 kilometres) of flight routes by 1957 and flying worldwide negotiating new deals.

  McConachie died of a heart attack in 1965. In 1968, his wife and two sons were present for the opening of Grant McConachie Way, an expressway leading to Vancouver International Airport.

  In pioneer bush flying, Edmonton was referred to as the Gateway to the North. Edmonton companies built and repaired the planes and boats used by adventurers to discover and extract northern riches—fish, furs, gold, silver, radium or diamonds—and fly them to southern markets. Maxwell “Max” William Ward was born in Edmonton, where bush planes were a familiar sight in the skies and on the ground at the municipal airport. He was inspired by famous Edmonton bush pilots like Dickins and May, and wrote, “My whole idea of adventure, of living, was tied up in the notion of joining their ranks some day in a magnificent flying machine.” As a child, Ward spent a lot of time walking around the fabric-covered wooden craft. He carved planes from pieces of wood at home and ran down the street holding then aloft and making “vroom” sounds like a zooming plane.

  After a short stint at Canadian National Railways, Ward joined the RCAF, receiving his wings at age 20 in 1941. He was promptly assigned to the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan as an instructor. He wasn’t good at following instructions himself, often flying lower than assigned and flying off to meet his sweetheart, Marjorie, in Calgary.

  Max Ward pilots his small CF-DJC de Havilland Fox Moth at Snare River, 90 miles (145 kilometres) west of Yellowknife, in 1947. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA PA-089954

  Following the war, Ward went to Yellowknife and bought a small de Havilland Tiger Moth biplane to fly passengers and freight as Polaris Charter Company Ltd. But the plane was small and had a limited range, needing to be refuelled every 130 miles (210 kilometres). On one trip to Edmonton, he had to land on a baseball diamond in Athabasca, interrupting the game in progress. Pulling out a 10-gallon (45-litre) drum he carried with him in the cockpit, he proceeded to refuel his plane, taxi and lift off, waving to the surprised players as he flew away. Ward next purchased a de Havilland Fox Moth. It held three passengers and up to 500 pounds (227 kilograms) of cargo and would be a step up for his business. He took the train to Toronto to pick it up. Flying back from Toronto, he landed at Kenora, Ontario, for the night. It wasn’t until he hit the pile of gravel on the airstrip that he knew he should have looked more closely. The runway was being graded and the work crew had left a pile just where he came in. Ward walked away with cuts and bruises, but his smashed-up plane took five weeks to repair.

  Ward’s next adventure occurred when his engine quit while he was flying into Arsenault Lake. After making a perfect landing, he found the problem: there was no oil. Somehow the oil-pan drain valve had opened, and he had been leaking oil throughout the trip. Now the Fox Moth needed a new engine. Ward hiked to a nearby drilling camp, hitched a ride back to Yellowknife, ordered a new engine from de Havilland on credit, went to Edmonton by train to take delivery, hitched a ride back to the drilling camp with another pilot and then walked four miles to and from the lake every day while he installed the new engine. Then he flew back to Yellowknife and another nasty encounter. Unable to show Air Transport Board bureaucrats that he had the required commercial flying licence on his own, he acquired a partner who did have such a commodity, and they established Yellowknife Airways Ltd.

  Ward left the company in 1949 over operating differences and moved his family from Yellowknife to Lethbridge, where he earned a living as a construction worker with Marjorie’s father and flew for Associated Airways just to keep his skills sharp. In 1951, after just
six months with the company, he crashed while taking an HBC manager to Bathurst Inlet in the high Arctic. His departure had been delayed, his compass was useless so close to the north magnetic pole, and the sun was setting faster than his plane could fly, so navigating by sight was impossible. Then the fog came in. Ward knew he had to get down and tried to see a suitable spot. What looked like a lake turned out to be a high hill. He slammed the skis into it and ricocheted down the other side. He radioed for rescue, then waited five days for help to arrive. The first rescue plane got lost and had to refuel, but finally an RCMP plane spotted them and radioed in their position.

  Ward finally got his own Class 4B Charter licence to operate a commercial air service. He bought the first de Havilland Otter used in Western Canada for $100,000, twice the cost of the average bush plane of the day, but the Otter was bigger and faster and had a range of 600 miles (965 kilometres), three times that of his little Fox Moth. The plane credited with developing the North, the Otter could handle an impressive payload while gliding onto and off lakes. With the same overall configuration as the Beaver, but longer and heavier, with a wider wingspan and capable of seating up to 11 people, the Otter easily landed entire sheets of plywood and 16-foot (5-metre) lengths of lumber. One builder noted that you could tell which cabins had been built after the Otter was in service because their roofing consisted of whole sheets of plywood instead of sawn lengths that had to be pieced together. More planes, more work and more money followed.