The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  There is no way to characterize a day in the life of Buffalo as “typical.” I watched Mikey arrange flights to carry heavy equipment to remote mining camps, deliver massive diesel generators to Inuit communities that rely on them for electricity, ensure a group of bureaucrats would make an early-morning meeting in Whitehorse, and move a single man and his dog to a distant town to start a new life. In other words, if it needs to be moved, Buffalo can move it—and likely already has.

  The backbone of Buffalo’s winter freight operation is its so-called “valley run,” a trip that sees the Curtiss-Wright C-46 fly the 1,700-kilometre (1,056-mile) round trip up and down the Mackenzie River from Yellowknife to four communities that can be accessed only by air nine months of the year: Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope. Several times each week, the C-46 starts its engines and soars over the valley. And if I was impressed by the DC-3 when I first laid eyes and hands upon her beautifully dimpled frame, I had no idea what lay in store for me when the C-46 was moved into the hangar. It is nothing short of a massive, yawning beast.

  The Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando made a splash when it was introduced to the world at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It was heralded as the latest and greatest in high-altitude pressurized aircraft, ready for the enjoyment of the flying public.

  The plane was not formally released until two years later, just as World War II was taking over the global stage. The designers of the C-46 may have envisioned it as a glamorous passenger airplane, but fate turned it into a bare-knuckled military aircraft. Instead of carrying passengers to the far corners of the globe, the C-46 played host to war supplies, paratroopers, ammunition, artillery, and wounded soldiers.

  A total of 1,430 C-46s were built, a far cry from the more than 10,000 DC-3s that dominated the skies during the war. But the C-46 offered benefits that the DC-3 couldn’t even touch. Known by a variety of nicknames to the flyboys who manned her controls in both the European and Pacific theatres (she was called the “Killer Whale,” the “Curtiss Calamity,” the “T-Cat,” or “Dumbo,” after the flying elephant she resembles), the Commando could fly at high altitude and carry massive payloads, two of its most important traits.

  The twin-engine C-46 was helped by the addition of its power plants, the newly invented 18-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-2800, each of which delivered 2,000 horsepower. They were so powerful that they could keep a lightly loaded C-46 in the air even if one engine failed, an attractive characteristic at a time when bullets were routinely screaming through the skies. When both engines were firing, the plane could carry as much as fifteen thousand pounds of cargo.

  Though the 46 made its presence known throughout the war, it was perhaps best known for its role in the China-Burma-India theatre, where it carried supplies over the jagged peaks of the Himalayas from India and Burma to troops fighting in China. The C-46 wasn’t the only plane to serve this role, but it was certainly the best.

  After World War II ended, military service continued for the 46, essentially dooming its potential as a passenger aircraft. Its presence was still felt around the globe, though in far more covert ways. The CIA used the plane to support French forces fighting communist insurgencies in French Indochinese countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and in Thailand. The 46 also played a part in clandestine anti-communist campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as supplying Chiang Kai-shek’s troops while they battled Mao’s Communists. In 1961, the C-46 operated in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The planes even served in the early years of the Vietnam War before being officially retired from active combat duty in 1968.

  The Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando played a significant role in the U.S. military’s World War II efforts in Europe and Asia, and the company was quick to inform the public of its successes in these theatres. After the war, the CIA became an avid user of the plane.

  Life for the C-46 did not stop there. The aircraft’s rapid climb rate and high service ceiling made it ideal for flying over the Andes in countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, and Chile. It easily covered vast stretches of South American jungle where roads did not exist. Today, a handful of C-46s are still in use throughout the world, transporting goods to otherwise inaccessible regions from Alaska to Kenya.

  Buffalo Joe likes the C-46 because the aluminum alloy aircraft is virtually indestructible and can take off and land on small airstrips, making it the ideal candidate for the valley run. The way Joe sees it, the C-46 must be a great plane if it’s still working regularly around the world. As he says, a lot of planes have come and gone since then. Rod McBryan, director of maintenance at Buffalo and Joe’s eldest son, agrees. As Rod says, given the weather conditions in the north, the 46 is the only logical choice to be running tons of goods up and down the Mackenzie Valley.

  Despite its rich history and legendary status in the aviation world, the C-46 is hampered by one significant drawback: it’s a bitch to fly. With its wide fuselage, broad tail, and small rudder, the C-46 is extremely vulnerable to crosswinds and is only rated to land in a twenty-two-kilometre-an-hour (fourteen-mile-per-hour) crosswind. Compounding the issue is the fact that most of the aircraft’s weight is located behind the main wheels, which means the back end can swing around if the plane’s not landed straight. And as Buffalo’s former chief pilot Arnie Schreder says, a C-46 tail that starts to swing on landing will continue to swing on landing. “If you look around the Arctic, there are C-46s strewn all over it,” he says. “And those crashes were always due to wind.”

  If the secret to an airline’s success with the C-46 is expert pilots, then Buffalo has nothing to worry about. The 46 may be the toughest plane in the Buffalo fleet to fly, but Joe’s system of separating the wheat from the chaff among his young pilots means that only the brightest, most competent, and hardest-working pilots get to sit at the controls of that massive bird, and only after they’ve paid their dues on smaller, easier-to-fly craft like the DC-3.

  The “Dumbo” was an imposing figure in the skies over World War II battlefields. Here the C-46 flies in tandem with the Curtiss p-40 Warhawk, one of the most famous fighter planes used during the war.

  That fact holds true for all but one member of the Buffalo team. At six-feet-seven, Scott Blue is simply too big to fit behind the controls of the DC-3. He can squeeze himself in there tightly enough, cross his legs, and cruise. But control the ailerons (the small, hinged “winglets” attached to the trailing edges of the wings) and rudder pedals with his feet and try to bring it down safely in a crosswind? Not happening. So Joe and Scott had no choice: Scott earned his stripes on the C-46.

  “I love the 46 because you can never take it for granted,” Blue says. “It’ll kick your ass, no matter how good a pilot you are.” Even captains who have flown the C-46 for thousands of hours will tell you the plane stubbornly refuses to be mastered.

  “A.J. [Decoste] is one of the best drivers I know, and even he has some days where a landing doesn’t go as well as he wanted,” Blue says. “And that man knows that plane cold. He is an amazing driver! And even he has days where he just can’t figure it out. It’s an amazing machine in terms of what it can do, but you really have to know what you’re doing to drive it properly. You’ve got to treat it with a whole lot of respect.”

  To the novice eye, the cockpits of Buffalo’s vintage aircraft are a dizzying array of knobs, levels, dials, and gauges. Laminated checklists are clipped to the pilot’s and co-pilot’s yokes.

  If any member of the Buffalo crew can speak to the challenges—and joys—of flying the C-46, it’s Jeff Schroeder, a senior pilot who’s been flying the plane for more than twenty years. The first time I met Jeff, we were in the Buffalo hangar standing beside the mammoth airplane. You wouldn’t necessarily think that a guy who has sat at the controls of the 46 for more than twenty-four years and twenty thousand hours—likely making him the most experienced C-46 captain in the universe—would find his j
ob exciting. But as he began to talk about the plane, his enthusiasm became palpable. Here’s a guy who literally shakes when he describes what it feels like to sit in the left seat of one of the most exotic planes on the planet.

  “People always say if you love something, you’d do it for free,” the Winnipeg resident told me with a huge grin on his face. “Well, it’s pretty close to that for me with the 46. There’s nothing that sounds like it on takeoff. When it rumbles, it makes so much noise you think it’s gonna frickin’ explode... it’s exciting.” No doubt. Just listening to the guy talk gave me goosebumps. He became more and more animated with every word. His hands waved in the air, and his voice took on the distinctive growl of a child making rumbling noises as he pushes a dump truck around a sandbox. “And when the temperature hits thirty below, it cracks and moans. You would swear this thing is just gonna explode. It’s buzzing, the props are buzzing, and it’s shaking and it’s rattling.

  “You know,” he brought his arms back to his sides and caught his breath, “it’s been twenty-four years for me, and I still get excited talking about the thing. It’s a thrill ride every time, it really is.”

  When Jeff was checked out on the 46 for Air Manitoba, in 1986, he was that company’s last pilot to receive his captaincy on the Dumbo. At the time, few of his colleagues could figure out why someone would want to waste his time on a flying dinosaur.

  “I said ‘You know what, I don’t see the 46 ever going out of business, other than a shortage of parts or something like that,” he told me, the grin on his face stubbornly refusing to dissipate. “Let’s face it, what else can haul fourteen thousand pounds as cheaply as the C-46 does? There’s nothing else out there—to this day—that can do it.” As Mikey says, the C-46 is a rarity in the aircraft industry: it can pay itself off in a month.

  For Jeff, sticking with a plane that everyone else thought was destined for the scrapheap meant a lot of job security. “I just knew there was a future there, and stuck it out while the other guys went other places. And for the last twenty-four years, I haven’t had to deal with the airlines or layoffs, or work shortages—nothing like that. I guess if you’re good at what you do, there’s always work, eh?”

  Jeff doesn’t live in Yellowknife, choosing instead to commute from his home in Winnipeg and stay in Yellowknife for stints ranging anywhere from two to eight weeks, depending on Joe’s needs. But since Jeff’s other occasional employer—First Nations Transportation—went out of business in 2009, his Buffalo flying is taking on even greater importance.

  The way Jeff tells it, the Dumbo is the most difficult plane in the world to fly. “Three-quarters of all the C-46s ever built have been destroyed on takeoff or landing,” Jeff related matter-of-factly. “That’s when the pilot’s ability has to shine.”

  Jeff’s ability has had that chance on more occasions than he cares to remember. Take, for example, the time Buffalo took on a job that would see the 46 shuttle a huge backlog of cargo from Thompson, Manitoba, bound for the remote community of St. Theresa Point, an hour’s flight southeast of Thompson. Typically, St. Theresa Point residents receive their winter deliveries via trucks that travel the ice road, but this particular year, the ice roads were in such bad shape that the trucks couldn’t get through.

  Shortly after takeoff on one leg of the job, the left engine began making a horrific noise. To Jeff’s chagrin, the engine began leaking oil shortly thereafter. With the plane loaded to capacity, Jeff had little choice but to get her on the ground—fast.

  With the engine sounding worse and worse every second, Jeff had a split-second decision to make. Should he turn around and try to make it back to Thompson, or look for an alternative? Luckily, he remembered that the tiny community of Island Lake—population fifty-nine—had a gravel airstrip, where he was able to bring the 46 down before disaster struck.

  As Buffalo pilots know all too well, their job does not begin and end in the cockpit. To be a Buffalo pilot is to be resourceful. If there was ever a professional who had to mimic the 1980s television star MacGyver—the secret agent who could craft a neutron bomb out of a Swiss Army knife and some old cheese—it’s the Buffalo Airways pilot. So Jeff, Scott, and flight engineer James Dwojak pulled the oil screen off the engine and began their investigation.

  The aluminum shards and flakes waiting for them were a telltale sign of a broken cylinder. When a cylinder breaks, the piston grinds against the cylinder wall, shredding bits of metal along the way. The only thing to do was remove the cylinder, a job that proved easier said than done.

  Unable to wedge the stubborn cylinder out of the engine with their own muscle, the trio then turned to their ingenuity. They ran a couple of heavy-duty ratcheting nylon straps (often called “herc straps”) from the cylinder to the back of a pickup truck, then revved up the truck. The cylinder didn’t budge. The crew had no choice but to call in reinforcements with a replacement engine. Then they hitched a ride back to Thompson with a twenty-four-year-old New Zealand woman who runs a small air taxi service out of Island Lake.

  For most of us, that kind of adventure is a never-in-a-lifetime thing. Here are two men buzzing around in a fully loaded plane that very likely ferried troops during World War II, and one of its engine blows. Put me in the cockpit and the result would be nothing short of a myocardial infarction. For the Buffalo boys? No problem. Just get ’er down and get ’er fixed.

  It’s just another day at the wackiest airline on Earth.

  * * *

  Pilots’ Monument

  Sitting atop an eighteen-metre (sixty-foot) hump of rock in Old Town, Pilots’ Monument was erected to honour the bush pilots of the 1920s and 1930s who helped open the North to the rest of Canadians. The plaque on the monument reads as follows:

  In the 1920s and 1930s a small number of daring aviators broke the silence of the North. Often flying in extreme cold and facing dangerous takeoff and landing conditions, these bush pilots ferried passengers, mail and freight in and out of remote frontier regions and played a crucial role in the development of the Northern economy and the delivery of public services. Blazing air trails over immense areas, these intrepid pioneers helped map the Canadian Shield and the Arctic Barrenlands, and pilots transformed Northern life by bringing this unique region into the Canadian mainstream.

  * * *

  C-46 Facts & Figures

  ·Capacity: 4 flight crew and 62 passengers

  ·Production: 1,430

  ·Length: 23.3 metres (76 feet, 4 inches)

  ·Wingspan: 32.9 metres (108 feet, 1 inch)

  ·Height: 6.6 metres (21 feet, 9 inches)

  ·Maximum speed: 433 km/h (269 mph)

  ·Cruise speed: 278 km/h (173 mph)

  ·Range: 4,750 kilometres (2,950 miles)

  ·Empty weight: 14,700 kilograms (32,400 pounds)

  ·Maximum takeoff weight: 21,800 kilograms (48,000 pounds)

  * * *

  Ice Roads—Not Just for Truckers

  Contrary to popular belief, ice roads are not just for truckers. In fact, they are used by polar dwellers all over the world, from Estonia to Finland, Canada to Russia. At first blush, ice roads are little more than pathways scraped across frozen bays, rivers, lakes, and seas. They allow temporary access to otherwise inaccessible areas and towns. Ice roads are commonly found where the construction of a permanent road is cost prohibitive, typically across the boggy muskeg of the northern tundra.

  Driving across an ice road is a fairly clear-cut undertaking, since the roads are usually straight, with few obstacles. Of course, driving over open water always presents an element of danger, especially when loads get heavy, as with transport trucks. Heavier vehicles need to limit their speed on the ice road to approximately twenty-five kilometres (fifteen miles) an hour or they create waves under the surface of the water, which can either damage the road or dislodge the ice from the shoreli
ne.

  In Canada, John Denison is considered the father of the ice road, having engineered several of the earliest ones in the 1950s and 1960s, including one between Yellowknife and the Eldorado Mine at Port Radium on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake, some 450 kilometres (280 miles) to the north.

  THE FAMILY BUSINESS

  Upon further reflection, “wacky” may be a strong word to describe Buffalo Airways. Sure, day-to-day life there can be, er, unique, but the foundation upon which Buffalo operates is as simple and straightforward as it comes.

  Indeed, from the “rampies” struggling on the frozen tarmac of the Yellowknife and Hay River airports—hoping one day to defy the odds, crack the upper echelon of the Buffalo hierarchy, and actually get behind the controls of a piece of flying history—to the people slogging away in the company’s cargo headquarters just down the street from the hangar, life at Buffalo Airways is work, work, work.

  And it doesn’t matter if you’re related to the boss. If anything, Mikey, his sister Kathy (who manages the Hay River operation), and brother Rod (the company’s director of maintenance) are held to an even higher standard. Rod’s perspective on work/life balance changed with the birth of his first child—daughter Emma Rae was born on May 8, 2010—but Mikey is unrepentantly single. And right now the most important relationship in his life is with his job. In fact, when I met him for the first time, Mikey told me that he hadn’t had a day off while in Yellowknife for over a year. If he’s in town, he’s working. If he needs a day off, he has to go away. “I don’t work at Buffalo Airways,” Mikey said, “I live at Buffalo Airways.”