by L. D. Cross
In the late 1950s, Reilly was promoted to captain, the first woman in Canada to carry this title. In 1959, she was hired as co-captain of a DC-3 by Peter Bawden Drilling Services in Calgary to fly to major oil fields in western and northern Canada, including Frobisher Bay and Resolute Bay in the Arctic. She became the first to pilot the DC-3 during long periods of darkness and extreme weather, often without radio communication and navigation aids. In 1965, Reilly moved to Edmonton to join Canadian Coachways (later known as Canadian Utilities) as the company’s chief pilot. She had modifications made to her Beechcraft Duke twin-engine plane to improve its performance in severe northern conditions. When Reilly finally retired, she’d flown more than 10,000 hours as corporate pilot-in-command, all without a single crash. She was inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame in 1974 for “her dedication to flight” and “her self-set demands for perfection.”
Dedication came naturally to Ruth Parsons. She was born into a family of bush pilots in 1933. Her four older brothers flew fish, furs, trappers and miners along with their equipment around northern Ontario. Parsons earned her private pilot’s licence in 1952 and her commercial licence in 1954, working part-time at the public library for 50 cents an hour to pay for lessons. As a fallback plan, she enrolled in teachers’ college, earned her certification and taught in Fort William for three years.
When Parsons went to Kenora for float certification, her brother Keith, who was aboard as a passenger, decided to test her skills on the way. His theory was that any pilot who could fly a plane while scared stiff was competent to be in the air. Parsons was not aware of this peculiar instructional technique. As she was lining up to land, he threw his arms up in front of his face and screamed, “What are you doing? Look out, you’re going to kill us!” Ignoring the outburst, she landed safely and taxied over to the dock. Getting out, Keith grinned at her and said, “You’ll do fine, kid.” She did—but she never flew with him again.
In 1955, Parsons began flying full-time, bringing tourists into Gold Point Farm Camp, which was built near an old mine claim on Shoal Lake. The camp was owned by Barbara Machin, whose parents had emigrated from England, bringing elegant furniture from their grand English home to the northern woods. The furniture now graced the main lodge. Parsons stayed there from breakup to freeze-up while flying in guests and supplies in Machin’s Stinson 108. In winter, she returned to an apartment in Kenora, switched Machin’s plane from floats to skis and flew charters for her brothers’ Parsons Airways Northern.
Seeking a good trout-fishing area, Machin decided to build a second camp at isolated Carroll Lake, near the Manitoba border. Parsons had to fly in everything— building supplies, workmen, food, fuel and, later, guests. A local trapper was not pleased about the new neighbours. After a boat and some gas drums disappeared from the camp, Parsons spotted the boat from the air. There were holes chopped in its bottom, and it had been filled with rocks and abandoned near some rapids in the river. There was no proof the trapper had done it, but who else could it have been?
One day after the camp opened, Parsons arrived to find the trapper in the kitchen spinning bizarre tales about his shooting prowess to the guests. He had been on his own too long and was obviously “bushed.” He believed the lake was his and talked to the water.
“Would you shoot me?” Parsons asked him.
“Only if I had to,” came the reply. Yet when Parsons was getting married, the trapper gave her a wedding present, a fully equipped tackle box. He left it at the camp along with a note saying he had a pressure cooker that he had been using as a still, but if she wanted it he would give it to her. Parsons declined his offer. He drowned shortly afterward, possibly after consuming too much of his moonshine.
On what should have been an ordinary milk run to the new camp, Parsons loaded the Stinson (which she called her “station wagon”) and boarded her passengers, who were workmen finishing some trim work at the lodge. It was a perfect flying day as she took off, climbed and cruised at 3,000 feet (914 metres), enjoying the view and marvelling that she got paid to do this. When a passenger started yelling, memories of her brother returned. But this was a real emergency. Smoke was coming from her seat and flames were visible. Parsons put down on a lake in record time as her passengers calmly smothered the fire. It turned out that the plane’s battery had been moved in a modification to the aircraft, but because the cover hadn’t been replaced, the battery had shorted and ignited her seat. Parsons had that oversight corrected immediately.
In 1958, Parsons married Ontario Provincial Police officer Larry Moore and moved to Red Lake, where she did some instructing before returning to teaching. Although Parsons, her husband and three children flew in their Cessna 180, her bush-flying days were over.
Today, women are not only bush pilots, they also fly and repair large commercial and military aircraft and helicopters, navigate hot-air balloons and fly into space. The Ninety-Nines Inc., the world’s oldest and largest organization of licensed women pilots, was founded on November 2, 1929, by 99 female pilots. Amelia Earhart was the first president. Today there are over 6,000 members in the US, Canada and 35 other countries. The Canadian Ninety-Nines, part of the international organization, have a mission “to engage in educational, charitable and scientific activities and to provide a close relationship among women pilots and unite them in any movement that may be for their benefit or for that of aviation in general.” The East and West Canada Sections were formed in 1950 and 1951 and now have 10 chapters with over 240 active members promoting safety through training and education.
CHAPTER
10
Risky Rescues
and Tragic Losses
FOR DECADES, BUSH PILOTS HAVE fulfilled many roles, transporting passengers working in mineral exploration and mining, public health, recreation and tourism, firefighting and smokejumping. In so doing, especially in the days before radio and cellphones, pilots were the eyes and ears of the North. A bedsheet spread flat on the ground or a cross made of conifer branches on the ice signalled that any passing pilot should land if at all possible to offer assistance. At any time, a routine supply drop or forest patrol could turn into an emergency run where lives were at stake.
While bush pilots flew many diverse groups of people into remote regions, they also risked their lives on mercy flights to bring out ill and injured patients. The first known air-ambulance flight in northern Canada occurred on August 28, 1920. J.W. Thompson was flown from Moose Factory on James Bay to Cochrane, Ontario, by bush pilot William R. Maxwell, a former RAF captain, in a Curtiss HS-2L. Thompson had contracted an inner-ear infection that had spread to the mastoid bone behind the ear. Without a mastoidectomy, he could have lost his hearing or even his life. Later, Maxwell would become the first director of the Ontario Provincial Air Service (OPAS).
By the late 1920s and through the 1930s, such medical evacuation (medevac) flights became more common. The longest emergency medical flight lasted from November 27 to December 20, 1939, when W.E. Catton flew a Junkers W34 from Winnipeg to Repulse Bay, Northwest Territories, and returned with a man whose frostbitten hands had turned gangrenous. The first civilian air ambulance in North America was established after the Second World War by the Saskatchewan government to cover great distances and serve remote communities.
The man who would become known as “King of the Medevacs,” Wilhelm Adolph “Willy” Laserich, was born in northeastern Germany. He arrived in Canada on board a Norwegian sealing boat in 1951 at age 19 and worked his way north. By 1957, he had earned his pilot’s licence in Edmonton, then moved with his new wife Margaret Rose to Hay River and their first house, complete with outhouse. Before working as a pilot, Laserich picked up work as a diesel engineer in an ice plant where fish were frozen for air delivery south. Laserich earned his living as a bush pilot for 50 years and became a hero to residents in remote communities, where his trademark orange toque was a welcome sight.
From a base at Cambridge Bay, Laserich clocked over 40,000 hours in the ai
r, the equivalent of circumnavigating the world 800 times. He conquered the most extreme weather and survived emergency landings at night and sinking into spongy muskeg. He took off when the only visual reference was the line left by the snowplow, only to rise up above the clouds into sunny skies. Laserich called it a risk, but a calculated one. “There’s bad weather and there’s dangerous weather, and up here it’s critical you know the difference,” he commented.
Once, after dropping 6,560 feet (2,000 metres) in mid-flight because an iced engine powered out, he calmly landed on a frozen lake. He flew Norsemen, Twin Otters and Beavers, ferrying dead bodies for funeral services, whale meat for feasts and prisoners for incarceration. He found injured hunters, stranded pilots and lost miners. But his hero status rested on the 5,000 medical evacuations he completed with a perfect safety record, including the transportation of a man whose arm had been torn off in a mining accident and packed in an ice-filled suitcase that accompanied him on the flight to hospital in Edmonton. When a bronchiolitis epidemic hit at Gjoa Haven, in present-day Nunavut, Laserich evacuated the children four at a time. When it spread to other communities, he flew 24/7 for two weeks. Then there were the happy trips—the six births on board.
In 1970, Laserich applied for an operating licence to operate a charter service out of Cambridge Bay. In spite of local support, his petitions were continually refused, but the government in Ottawa did pay enough attention to slap him with over 200 citations in 1977. He was cited for infractions such as accepting a meal from an elder after a medevac flight and not declaring the value of the food as income, and for flying in temperatures below -40°C/F. “It’s -40 three months at a time!” Laserich protested. He faced over $1 million in fines and a year in jail.
On January 18, 1982, the longest and most expensive aviation trial in the North to that date came to a conclusion. Judge Frank Smith delivered his verdict to the court held inside the Cambridge Bay Hotel, which was packed with people who were alive thanks to Laserich’s mercy flights. “He’s the stuff of the bush pilots of old,” Smith said. “He is supplying a service that he is uniquely qualified to perform.” He found Laserich guilty of one count of running an illegal charter service, assigning a fine of $250 and giving him a lifetime to pay. When Laserich tried to settle his debt, it had already been paid. But legal fees had bankrupted him, so the following year, his three children pitched in and launched Adlair Aviation, since the operating licence had finally come through. Laserich was still branded an outlaw and troublemaker by government air-transport authorities, and his ongoing legal hassles spurred him to refer to himself and his crews as Willy’s Bandits. Despite this, he was held in high regard in the Arctic communities he served. He never refused someone in need.
Bishop John Sperry, an Anglican minister in Kugluktuk in the 1950s and 60s, remembered when his wife Elizabeth, a midwife, was asked to accompany a pregnant woman to Yellowknife. Laserich flew in from Cambridge Bay to pick them up. It was pitch black and the weather was turning nasty. During the flight, Iris, the pregnant woman, went into labour. There was nowhere to land, so the baby was born in mid-air. Willy contacted air-traffic control to tell them to add an extra passenger to the manifest. In recognition of her in-flight birth, the baby was called Angel. Over the span of his flying career, five more babies were born with Laserich at the controls.
Willy Laserich died of heart failure in 2007, after being medevaced from Cambridge Bay to a hospital in Edmonton in his own Lear Jet. He was accompanied by his sons—René in the cockpit and Paul at his side. He was 75. Willy Laserich was inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame in 2010.
Laserich and other bush pilots undertook many incredibly risky rescues and mercy flights, but sometimes that wasn’t enough. Para Rescue was initiated in 1942 by Wop May while he was in charge of No. 2 Air Observer School (2AOS) in Edmonton, as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. The city was on the northwest staging route between the US mainland and Alaska after the US joined the war in 1941. Many inexperienced pilots were called upon to fly over the challenging terrain. Mechanical failures, unpredictable weather and primitive navigational aids caused many “premature” landings. 2AOS participated in many northern mercy missions to find these missing aircraft and crews, often with unfortunate results. Wop May found this unacceptable and decided to do something about it. He began organizing an air-rescue team, the first formal para-rescue team in the world.
Team members would parachute into crash sites and administer first aid to the injured. Twelve volunteers stepped forward and received rudimentary training in how to jump from a plane and pull the D-ring handle on their chest-pack parachutes. They wore no reserve chutes, and wind drift was calculated by throwing an Eaton’s store catalogue out the open door. During one of the first jumps, a parachutist plunged through the cloth wing of a parked aircraft. Obviously, more training was required. In early 1943, May dispatched two of his volunteers, Owen Hargreaves and Scotty Thompson, to the smoke jumpers school in Missoula, Montana, to be trained by the US Forestry Service. For six weeks, they studied the finer points of parachute operation, physical stamina, situational analysis, letdowns (how to release a parachute when you are hung up in a tree), proper body position exiting the plane and landing techniques. They returned home with their new skills and borrowed equipment to train two other volunteers. But May’s para-rescue team needed proper facilities and that required military muscle. In 1944, Air Vice Marshal T.A. Lawrence, Commander of the North West Air Command in Edmonton, agreed to integrate this civilian rescue unit into the RCAF. The first course began later that year and included jump training, bush lore, wilderness survival, mountain climbing and medical aid. It was a tradition that grew through the decades, and in 1998, the Canadian Forces School of Search and Rescue (CFSSAR) was established at the Canadian Forces Base at Comox on Vancouver Island, BC.
Many downed pilots and their passengers have had reason to be grateful for the skills of search-and-rescue personnel, but not all searches for lost planes have a happy ending. “If I ever crash, they’ll never find me,” said legendary pilot Charles “Chuck” McAvoy. He was almost right. McAvoy and fellow pilot Daryl Browne had been ferrying American geologists over the central Arctic tundra in heavy snow and poor visibility. When McAvoy didn’t land on schedule with the two geologists in his 1938 Fairchild 82, Browne set out in his Otter to look for him. It was June 9, 1964. With 10 years’ flying experience under his belt, McAvoy had taken part in nearly all of the northern search-and-rescue missions, often finding downed pilots before the RCAF could. Now he was the focus of a desperate search. “I stayed awake 50 hours to search. That’s the longest I’ve ever spent in my life without putting my head on a pillow. A lot of people were looking for him because he had found a lot of other people,” Browne said.
Bush pilot Chuck McAvoy poses beside his aircraft in the Yellowknife area in 1960. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA PA-176297
The hunt for McAvoy lasted for months. Local pilots and the RCAF flew round the clock, but nothing was found. It was as if the land or the network of lakes had swallowed him. For almost 40 years, his fate was one of Canada’s aviation mysteries. It was even the subject of the 1973 “Ballad of Chuck McAvoy,” written by Frank Ferguson and sung by Ted Wesley:
Now they tell you that Chuck McAvoy still flies his ghostly
plane,
Lookin’ for a place to set her down.
When the fog is thick and misty in this cold and barren land,
You can hear his engine searchin’ for the ground.
On August 3, 2003, a helicopter pilot flying for a mining company found wreckage, human remains and McAvoy’s identification at a crash site near Lupin Lake on the Northwest Territories–Nunavut border. He was flying a crew of geologists back to a nearby camp when he thought he saw something in a jumble of rocks. Circling back and passing 200 feet (60 metres) directly above, he saw plane wreckage. Landing nearby to get a better look, the pilot saw that the downed plane was largely intact, and he
speculated that McAvoy might have been attempting to land when he caught a skid and rolled. “It’s camouflaged in the rocks pretty well,” he said. “You’ve got to be close and if you’re off a bit, you can’t see it there. You’d just think it was rocks, it’s blended in so well.” McAvoy and his two passengers are believed to have died on impact.
Thirteen years before Chuck McAvoy vanished, the disappearance of bush pilot Johnny Bourassa had also launched an intensive search. After serving as an RCAF pilot during the Second World War, Bourassa returned home and delivered mail between Peace River and Fort Vermilion by horse and buggy in summer and dogsled in winter. In 1950, he was hired to fly a charter service from Yellowknife to Bathurst Inlet in a de Havilland Beaver. On May 18, 1951, Bourassa lifted off from open water heading northeast to the Salmita Mine gold find. He refuelled there and switched from floats to skis since his destination in the high Arctic was still frozen. At Bathurst Inlet, his supervisor told him to put in only the amount of fuel needed to return to the Salmita Mine fuel cache. It was expensive to restock northern caches, so pilots were instructed not to carry extra fuel back south. Bourassa did not want to stop at Salmita so he filled up and departed directly to Yellowknife. When the supervisor stopped at Salmita the next day, he saw Bourassa’s Beaver floats and assumed he had crashed en route. He retraced the route to Bathurst but found nothing. There he learned Bourassa had fully fuelled his plane; the search area had just grown exponentially.