Flying On Instinct

by L. D. Cross

  With full fuel tanks, the Beaver could fly from Bathurst to northern Saskatchewan or Alberta or into the Mackenzie Mountains. In the time before locator transmitters, searching for a missing aircraft by sight in the North was a long and often futile process. The search expanded to a few hundred miles on each side of the intended route from Bathurst to Yellowknife. Nothing was spotted, so the search was halted. Four months later, Bourassa’s plane was located on Wholdaia Lake, 350 miles (565 kilometres) southeast of Yellowknife near the Northwest Territories–Saskatchewan border. It was on shore and intact except for a broken ski. Inside was a note from Bourassa. He said he had mistaken Aylmer Lake for Lac de Gras, which put him east of Fort Reliance, after which he flew west until the treeline, believing he was then east of Snowbird or Ennadai Lake. Running out of fuel, he was forced to land on the soft ice of Wholdaia Lake which was weak and disintegrating or “rotten.” He was going to walk south around the lake then on to Fort Reliance. He estimated it would take him three weeks to cover the 250 miles (400 kilometres).

  If only he had made a different choice. Maps on board the Beaver showed it was about 125 miles (200 kilometres) to Fort Fond du Lac on Lake Athabasca and only 62 miles (100 kilometres) to Stony Rapids. If he had gone around the south end of the lake as the note said, he would have seen the Native portage trail, as wide as a wagon track, to Selwyn Lake and on to either Fond du Lac or Stony Rapids.

  An aerial search would not locate one lone man on the vast landscape, so ground searchers were called in. The largest search ever undertaken by the Canadian Rangers, No. 7 Company, Yellowknife, began with the help of trappers from as far away as Edmonton. The bush between Wholdaia Lake and Fort Reliance was searched and searched again. No trace was found. No campsite. Nothing. Searchers concluded that Bourassa took a shortcut across the lake, counting the rotten ice would still hold. But the lake is dotted with small islands (aits) and underwater rocks that retain daytime heat and thaw the ice. It was a treacherous situation that could drown a man, and it could have taken the life of Johnny Bourassa.

  When writer Farley Mowat was researching his book People of the Deer, Bourassa had flown him to remote Inuit locations. The 2003 Canadian adventure movie The Snow Walker is based on the Mowat short story Walk Well, My Brother, which tells of a bush pilot who is on his way to Yellowknife when his engine cuts out. He is forced to land on a frozen lake and then walk out. The sad tale of Johnny Bourassa could have been Mowat’s inspiration.

  CHAPTER

  11

  A Bird’s-Eye View

  BUSH PILOTS LIVE ON THE EDGE, but despite the risks, they love their bird’s-eye view of the world. They are there for each other in good times and bad, and experienced pilots can quickly assess the skills of their peers and know who they want to fly with. Nothing can replace hours logged in the air, but successful bush pilots also need many other talents: advanced outdoor survival and first-aid skills; the ability to repair an airplane using little more than duct tape and wire; and knowledge of how their airplane performs in changing conditions over boreal forest, tundra, mountains and Arctic seas. They must also be well-versed in navigation, cockpit instrumentation and Canadian Aviation Regulations. Tom Lamb, Keith Olson, Walter “Babe” Woollett and Art Schade all proved they had the right stuff when they took to the skies over the unforgiving Canadian wilderness.

  “Do not ask us where we fly, tell us where you want to go” was the motto of Tom Lamb and his six pilot sons, collectively known as the Flying Lambs. He started Lamb Airways Ltd. (later Lambair) in 1935 with one Stinson-Reliant SR8, a five-passenger plane with lots of cargo room that could be outfitted with floats, skis or wheels. He operated out of The Pas, 450 miles (725 kilometres) north of Winnipeg, which was a jumping-off point for the North. His first flights brought supplies into Moose Lake, where his father was a successful trading-post grocer.

  Being a naturalist as well as a pilot, Lamb noticed that while he and the Cree lived in the midst of marshes with a large beaver and muskrat population, the animals themselves had few available passageways of any depth in which to swim and build their lodges. He undertook to dredge out parts of the marshland, re-establishing the original canals and waterways, dams and dykes. The irrigation ditches were inspected by foot in summer and on skates in winter, but patrols also could be done from the air by just looking down.

  Lamb took out an ad in the local newspaper promoting his air services. Rivers had long been used as highways in the region, but flying was a means of avoiding dangerous rapids. He also turned his inventive mind to making bush flying easier. He developed special axles, so skis could be jacked up to keep them from freezing into the ground; a rubber bag that fit inside the cargo space, so freshly killed fish and animals would not drip blood in the plane; and heat vents in the walls instead of the floor, so perishable cargo would not spoil. Many Lamb flights carried doctors and medical staff from the National Health and Welfare Department, sent to vaccinate northern residents, set broken bones and fly out the most severely ill to hospital.

  In 1946, Lamb flew internationally with beavers, but not in a Beaver aircraft. He babysat 10 pairs of Manitoba beavers en route to Montreal, then Miami and on to Buenos Aires, where they transferred to a Canso flying boat provided by the government of Argentina and then flown to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, the world’s most southerly town. There they were released to build new lodges in a marshy lake east of the Andes.

  Tom Lamb died in 1969, and in 1970 the Manitoba government honoured his dedication to the northern wilderness and its wildlife by designating a 772-square-mile (2,000-square-kilometre) tract of land near The Pas as the Tom Lamb Wildlife Management Area. Lamb was inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame in 2009 for his exploration and development of northern Manitoba and the Arctic, mercy missions to aid First Nation peoples and his commitment to conservation.

  While some pilots get hooked on the adrenaline and adventure of bush flying and never leave, others use it as a way to log the air time required for a commercial airline job. Keith Olson worked for six years as a bush pilot for Tom Lamb, from 1959 to 1965 and tells many stories of his adventures during that time. Olson earned his private pilot’s licence in Calgary in 1955, then an aeronautical engineering diploma, his commercial pilot’s licence and, just for good measure, his mechanic’s licence. Then he had to find a job. He applied to the Lambs in Manitoba and was hired after a 15-minute aerial demonstration in a Cessna 180 on skis. At first Olson flew short hauls to Moose Lake, then moved on to longer runs to Snow Lake and Thompson. Olson was sent out on his own for three months to work with an Indian agent “up north,” soliciting new business flying cargo and customers wherever they wanted to go. One of the Lambs dropped in occasionally to pick up the roll of bills Olson accumulated in cash payments.

  Every day presented Olson with new challenges. One rule of thumb was that people always had more stuff than the plane had room. Often the Cessna’s doors had to be removed to load in a sleigh, supplies, dogs and a couple of trappers before flying a short distance. “A lot of work for almost nothing, but that’s what you did,” Olson recalled in an interview with writer Shirlee Matheson. “We called them ‘trapper trips’ and charged a 12-mile minimum.” Sometimes Olson flew Native families to their traplines or picked up Native children from remote settlements to fly them to boarding school at Chesterfield Inlet and Churchill. Once he was contracted to fly mineral-staking prospectors to Gods Lake in northeastern Manitoba. It was spring and the lake’s surface snow was melting. As soon as he touched down, Olson he knew he was in trouble. He cut the engine, and as soon as the plane stopped, his passengers jumped out wearing snowshoes. The plane had sunk so much they could rest their elbows on the wing tip. They spent the entire day tramping down the wet snow into a makeshift runway and digging out the skis before they could take off.

  In 1961, Olson was assigned to a 14-month contract with International Nickel Company of Canada Limited (INCO) to supply their drilling camps around Thompson. Then he flew
an army survey expedition that was correcting northern maps and transported Geological Survey of Canada employees who were trekking across the North as far as the Arctic Circle. “All that time we lived in fly-infested tents,” Olson recalls, “or paddled a canoe while swatting mosquitos. The bugs just about drove us nuts. We sometimes had to wear head nets.”

  Olson graduated from flying the Cessna to an Otter and a Norseman; he liked them both: “The Norseman was a challenge to fly but it’s a genuine bush plane. I also loved the single Otter. It would do what the Norseman would do but a lot better . . . The Otter could get off and land slower and in shorter distances. On floats it was able to carry a bit more than the Norseman, and it had good range.”

  Olson became more adept at flying on floats than on skis because there was more business in summer. “But you can get into a lot of trouble on floats because you can’t just stop the airplane. You have to pick your water and estimate the wind and the current to know where you should be able to stop,” he explained.

  Olson spent his last four years with the Lambs flying out of Churchill, where the ocean was his landing and takeoff strip. He had to handle waves, tides, weather and reefs and also locate a secure place to tie up so his plane would not be carried out to sea. “Down south you have trees around the lakes and you can get into the sheltered side,” he explained, “but there is no shelter up there because there are no trees—and no spare parts if the aircraft gets damaged.” August was considered to have the best flying conditions, but even then large chunks of sea ice bobbing in the water near remote settlements like Igloolik on the Melville Peninsula threatened to smash the floats to pieces.

  To make emergency repairs, Olson carried epoxy plastic body-filler similar to that used on cars. In cold weather, he had to use a blow pot to warm the engine and encourage it to start. “We carried brooms to brush snow off the wings then we’d prop them up in front of the engine to hold the tarp from going right against the cowling and put weights around the edges to keep the heat in. The gas fumes inside were suffocating. Maybe that’s why pilots age fast!”

  Nor was fashion a concern. To keep warm, Olson bought a quality parka with a fur-lined hood, quilted nylon air-force wind pants and air-force war-surplus flying boots inside of which he wore two pairs of socks and leather slippers. On top of all this he added industrial one-piece coveralls and a down-filled jacket. With this attire he was ready to fly and keep warm should his plane be forced down. He never had a co-pilot, but sometimes he hired a similarly dressed “helper” who lived in The Pas. “In winter we had to dig out our gas drums from caches in a snowdrift and roll them out. It involved a lot of physical work using shovels or whatever we could find.” And performing toilet functions when overnighting at a remote winter location presented major logistical problems. “In those days you hardly ever had to go, because you never drank anything. You didn’t want to have go to the bathroom,” Olson recalls. “You had to remove the one-piece coveralls if you were going to do any serious necessaries.”

  Olson claims he was never lost, but once he was “temporarily disoriented” flying some schoolteachers in the Norseman on a five-hour trip to Baker Lake from Churchill. The weather was stormy with poor visibility, but if he got to Baker there was a beacon and he could land nearby. But he could not pick up the beacon in the bad weather, so he turned in the direction he felt was the coast and eventually recognized the area between Whale Cove and Eskimo Point (now Arviat). From there, he thought he could make the settlement at Rankin Inlet, and his passengers agreed to go for it. They made it with just a few sips of gas left. After seven hours rattling around inside the Norseman, the occupants were “just vibrating.”

  After his six years with the Lambs, and with a family to support, Olson looked for a change of scene and more regular hours. When he’d started flying the Cessna, he was grossing $240 a month with his room and board included. When he left, he was making $1,000 a month and was paid by the flying hour: $4 an hour south of Churchill and $5 north, plus base pay. Most commercial airlines at the time paid on a cents-per-mile basis. In 1965, the Olson family moved to Winnipeg, where Olson was employed for a year by Transair flying scheduled runs to northern communities in a Beech 18, then in larger DC-3s and Cansos. One day when Olson was wondering if that was all his future held, a friend at the Winnipeg Flying Club told him Air Canada was hiring pilots. He had never thought of them. Olson called, got a job and stayed there until retirement.

  Walter “Babe” Woollett was another bush-pilot natural who eventually made the transition to a large airline. Woollett was born in England and got his nickname because he was the youngest in the family. He served in the RAF from 1924 to 1929, then came to Canada and became a bush pilot with the Fairchild Aerial Surveys at Lac-à-la-Tortue, Quebec. His monthly salary of $250 was an amazing sum at the time. Woollett joined Canadian Airways in late 1930 as a flying mailman airlifting mail from Saint-Hubert, Quebec, to Saint John, New Brunswick, by following the railroad line. His first run did not get off to an auspicious start. His engine conked out three times, and each time he had to set down and fix it. The next year, Woollett transferred to the winter airmail run along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence, throwing mailbags out over a number of villages by aiming at a flag planted in the snow. In 1934, Canadian Airways had the monopoly to supply towns in the Chibougamau goldfields area, and they hired Woollett to fly out of Senneterre, Quebec, in a Fairchild 82 (CF-AXB) doing a job he described as “shuttling back and forth with equipment, food supplies, booze and people of every description including members of the oldest profession.”

  In the winter of 1935–36, Woollett’s aircraft was caught in a blizzard and damaged (“pranged,” as he called it) during a rough landing on a frozen river in northern Quebec. Expecting rescue, he put on the snowshoes he kept in the rear and tamped out a landing strip in the snow for his rescuers. But nobody showed up. After five days, the irritated Woollett stomped out the following message in big letters with his snowshoes: land here you bastards. He and his aircraft were finally located and retrieved, and the grumpy Woollett continued bush flying, doing aerial mapping as well as medical rescues.

  During the Second World War, Woollett worked with the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, overseeing schools in Quebec and Ontario. He received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for this service. Appointed superintendent of the eastern division of Canadian Pacific Airlines after the war, he worked with Grant McConachie developing the company’s Pacific passenger network. Woollett died at his home in Hawaii in 1998 and was inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame in 2003.

  Henry Arthur “Art” Schade epitomized the resourceful bush-pilot pioneers who handled all risks and delivered the goods. On a Christmas Eve mail run in 1933 north of Sioux Lookout in western Ontario, Schade was heading to the tiny settlement of Goldpines, which had started out as a tent camp clustered around an HBC post and served as home to gold prospectors working at Red Lake and their families, as well as a stopping place for prospectors during the gold rush of the late 1920s. Soon it grew to include three stores, three restaurants, a hotel, barbershop, post office, bank, law office, pool hall and tavern. The population fluctuated between 100 and 130 permanent residents and about the same number of transients. During the winter, frozen waterways served as landing strips but the thickness and smoothness of the ice could never be guaranteed.

  Like every other small, remote community, Goldpines depended on bush planes for mail and Christmas packages. Everything was ordered early by mail from catalogues, and all incoming parcels and letters were stored at the Sioux Lookout warehouse ready to be flown to Goldpines. Then everyone waited for the lake to freeze. And they waited. The ice was not thick enough for a ski landing but was too solid for a floatplane landing. On December 24, Art Schade received word the ice was thick enough for his plane with all its packages to land.

  Flying over the area, Schade saw a small Gipsy Moth plane already on the ice and decided to put down nearby. Everything l
ooked good, and there was even a welcoming party of villagers standing on shore with their arms in the air. But everything was not okay. The Moth was stuck in a layer of melting ice and could not break free to take off. Schade did not know this, and there was no radio communication to tell him. He thought that the people waving their arms were welcoming him, not warning him not to land. He landed his big Bellanca only to immediately start sinking through the ice with scarcely enough time to jump out of the cockpit. His plane and all its cargo were soon submerged. Then the weather turned very cold, and everything was locked under a rapidly forming sheet of thick ice.

  Not to be denied their Christmas goodies, the people of Goldpines organized a salvage operation; for 10 days and nights, they kept fires burning where the plane had sunk in order to soften the ice. Next they rigged a makeshift pulley system to haul the imprisoned plane out of the lake and up onto shore. The soggy Christmas mail and gifts were handed over to the postmaster, who dried them out and forwarded them to the addressees. Celebrations were late that year, but with painted macaroni strings, feathers and foil from tobacco tins to decorate the tree, and wild game, stuffed partridge, berries and honey on the table, life was good. Schade still had to get his plane back in working order to fly home. This he managed to do. It was, after all, just part of bush flying.

  Epilogue

  THE LAST FLIGHT OF La Vigilance began on September 2, 1922, with pilot Don Foss and engineer Jack Caldwell at the controls of the Curtiss HS-2L flying boat that had been flown by Stuart Graham on what is considered the first bush flight in Canada. They were delivering gas from Remi Lake in northern Ontario to Lac Pierre, a 90-minute flight. On the return trip, they ran into heavy rain and decided to set down on a small lake to wait for the weather to clear, since they had only enough fuel for one run into Remi Lake. But it was a small lake only about a half-mile long. Getting back up would be problematic.