The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  Although there is no such thing as a typical day in the life of Mikey McBryan—managing a small airline in one of the harshest climates on Earth will keep you on your toes—he is usually at work by 7:30 every morning (often earlier) to get ready for the arrival of the sked (airline lingo for a plane that’s part of a scheduled service) from Hay River. From then on it’s a whirlwind of activity that includes anything you could imagine: quoting jobs to prospective clients, flying to distant countries to buy long-forgotten and disused planes that could be coaxed back to life at the hands of Buffalo mechanics, managing the company’s ever-growing public image (a task he’s particularly fond of), or designing another round of T-shirts to sell at his now wildly successful Buffalo Airwear Internet store. Like his dad, Mikey finds little time to rest.

  It’s hard to imagine Mikey dedicating himself as much to his work as his father does, but there’s certainly enough on his plate to keep him consumed 24/7. Buffalo employs seventy to eighty full-time employees, whom Mikey calls the “hard-core employees.” Then there’s another twenty-odd people who work for the company on a contract-by-contract basis, usually pilots who come in for a week or two at a time, or who specialize in certain aircraft.

  It’s not as though Buffalo has a lock on northern cargo transport, either. Sure, the company is one of the biggest players in the northern game, but Mikey knows that First Air, a passenger and charter airline based in Ottawa, is always breathing down his neck with its two Yellowknife-based Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft. “And the only way we know how much they compete with us is because we get so much busier when they have a plane down,” Mikey told me. “That’s how you know your competition.”

  If Mikey is the least bit leery of his rivals stealing some of his business, he certainly doesn’t show it. “We all technically do the same thing: we go into communities with no roads. I guess the difference is these other companies are basically passenger airlines, while we’re primarily a cargo company.”

  Yet as so many people—both in the Canadian North and around the world—have come to know, Buffalo is much more than just an air cargo company. The simple fact that there are very few airlines on Earth that can claim a unique fleet such as this is testimony enough to the company’s place in the pantheon of modern-day air travel. As Mikey says, while there are other airlines around the world that fly a few of these old warbirds (Alaska’s Everts Air Cargo and Colombia’s Saldeca are two), none can claim such an extensive fleet of flying history.

  With so many things to look after, it’s no wonder that Mikey’s work day continues long after he’s left the confines of Buffaloworld. Whenever we go to lunch, Mikey’s phone rings every few minutes. And when his phone’s not ringing, he’s constantly sending and receiving texts and emails, hundreds per day. On one frozen February afternoon, Mikey and I are sitting opposite each other at his favourite Yellowknife haunt, Surly Bob’s sports bar. (Mikey also has a soft spot for the local strip club, Harley’s Hard Rock Saloon, particularly on Monday evenings, when a new stripper arrives from Edmonton for a week-long stint in the Knife). We’re not looking at each other, though, as our heads are buried deep in our iPhones. “You know,” Surly Bob growls as he hands us our meals, “you could just look at each other and talk.”

  As if. Mikey gets fifty to sixty-five calls on a slow day, a hundred if things are getting hot and heavy. The guy goes through a new cellphone about every four months and is an expert on cellphone technology.

  Like so many people his age—he was born in 1982, when I was making my way through high school—Mikey is more comfortable with technology than he is without it. He doesn’t seem to care all that much about what he wears, what he drives (a beat-up 1989 Buffalo Airways Ford Ranger), or the condition of his house, which seems to be in a state of perpetual renovation and/or repair. But when it comes to technology, Mikey is dialled in.

  The focal point of Mikey’s living room is a massive sixty-two-inch flat-screen TV. When he’s not at work, he spends a fair bit of time in front of it, simultaneously watching and working on his MacBook Pro. Sure, he’s got his satellite TV, Blu-ray player, and other digital accoutrements that adorn the living rooms of most North American families these days. But what separates Mikey from the rest of us mere viewers is that Mikey is a student of technology. He is addicted to social networking and thinks that Facebook may be the greatest innovation since the Ski-Doo.

  “I can probably attribute thirty thousand dollars a year in merchandise sales directly to Facebook,” he told me one evening as we relaxed in his living room. “So how can I not be fully behind that kind of technology?”

  Yet as much as it may have profited him, Mikey also appreciates Facebook for its ability to thrust its users—all of its users—into the global spotlight. “Sure, the people who are private will always be private,” he says. “But I think people tend to be narcissistic; that’s human nature. So thanks to Facebook, everybody is a celebrity now.”

  Admittedly, some of us achieve greater celebrity than others, regardless of the Facebook phenomenon. I don’t have people throwing themselves all over me in distant airports. I don’t have strange women texting me photos of their scantily clad and/or unclad bodies. And I don’t have business owners from all over the globe sending me cases of their wares, in the hopes that I may eat it, use it, mention it, or wear it on my wildly successful TV show. Mikey does.

  As I reflect on his celebrity—and the phenomenon that Ice Pilots has become—I begin to realize just how much foresight, intelligence, creativity, and business acumen this frat-boy-cum-TV-star possesses.

  As you might expect, Mikey’s indoctrination into the world of aviation did not start at adulthood. Buffalo Airways has been a constant in his life for as long as he can remember.

  He was born and raised in Hay River, Northwest Territories, a town of slightly more than thirty-five hundred people perched just north of the 60th parallel. The town sits where the Hay River empties into Great Slave Lake, and has built a reputation as a transportation hub for the rest of the Northwest Territories (it calls itself “The Hub of the North”). This is largely due to the fact that Hay River is the northernmost point in North America connected to the continental railway system. Hay River is also a major staging point for the many barges that ply the waters of the Mackenzie River during the summer, when northern communities along the river stock their larders as much as possible before winter sets in.

  Until 1968, when the highway to Yellowknife was built, Hay River was literally the end of the road, which made the town the ideal place to run an airline. Yellowknife may be the home of Buffalo’s massive hangar, and the site of all of its northern-based maintenance, but Hay River is the company’s legal base of operations.

  “I was always in the hangar,” Mikey told me. “I was honestly—legitimately—raised by rampies.” He was a snot-nosed kid, always lurking around the hangar, constantly underfoot. He would be passed off from rampie to rampie, and he would drive around in courier vans with them each day. They even took young Mikey on fishing and ATV trips. “So I really was raised by them.”

  Buffalo started its twice-daily Hay River–Yellowknife passenger service the year Mikey was born, so Joe was not a constant figure in his son’s life when Mikey was growing up in Hay River. “Every day he was gone to Yellowknife and wouldn’t come back until later that night. That’s all I’ve ever known,” Mikey said as we waited in the hangar one morning for the sked to arrive from Hay River.

  “Hey,” I asked as the DC-3 touched down in front of us with the yelp of rubber hitting asphalt, “is your Dad gonna greet you with a big hug and kiss? Tell you how much he loves you?”

  “More like he’ll tell me about something I’ve screwed up,” Mikey said with a laugh. He understands how his father operates, and if there’s any resentment corked up inside Mikey’s body, he does a hell of a good job covering it up. To the contrary, while Mikey may spend a fair bit of ti
me griping about the old man, I know he admires his dad. “He’s not motivated by money at all,” said Mikey. “He’s motivated by one thing: doing the job. He’s completely customer oriented.”

  In a land where unique personalities are the rule rather than the exception, Joe is in a class of his own. His slicked-back pompadour speaks to his affinity for the 1950s, when he was an adolescent. This man is the product of a bygone era, and one that Mikey says he never quite left. In fact, Mikey considers his dad a cross between Howard Hughes, James Dean, and Married with Children’s Al Bundy. “Of the six billion people on Earth, there’s nobody else who could run Buffalo,” Mikey said.

  That may be a bit of a stretch, but Joe is perfectly suited to helm the company. He is stubborn to the point of being unyielding, a trait that helps him keep his commitments to his clients. He is unconventional and uses any means necessary to deliver cargo across vast tracts of untamed wilderness. When your fleet is largely composed of World War II–era planes, thinking outside the box is an important characteristic.

  And perhaps most of all, Joe McBryan is simple. Not simple-minded, but rather there is nothing fancy about this man. In all the time I spent in the hangar, I knew I could count on Joe to bring his lunch to work every day, whether it was a bologna sandwich or a plastic container containing leftovers from last night’s dinner. Jeans and a plaid work shirt—that’s Joe McBryan.

  The way Mikey sees it, Joe has created a universe for himself, one that insulates him from the outside world. “He’s created himself this world that he can live in so he doesn’t have to go outside, really. He lives completely and eccentrically in his own world.

  “He’s never grown up, because he’s never had to,” Mikey added. “The moment he became his own boss, he made his own rules.”

  “This whole thing,” he said, waving his arm to indicate the hangar, “is like Disneyland for Joe. It’s all his design.”

  And yet, as Lone Ranger as Joe may seem, the success of Buffalo rests on the fact that the McBryans—all of the McBryans—play an integral role in running the airline, despite their seemingly vast personality and skill differences. “With most family businesses,” Mikey said, “everyone’s a welder or everyone’s a mechanic or everyone’s a fisherman. But with us, it’s different. My dad’s the only pilot, my brother’s the mechanic, my sister’s the people person, and my mom’s the accountant. So we all have our strengths and weaknesses, but we’re all so different. It’s almost like we’re not even family at all.”

  Though these differences may make for unusual moments around the Thanksgiving table, the McBryans have managed to blend their differences into a fairly tasty stew. Together they make sense. Take one piece out, though, and the result is incomplete. “We can’t do each other’s job at all, and yet we all can’t not work together,” Mikey said. “We all need each other for the whole thing to work.” In other words, Joe may not need Mikey to fly a plane, but Joe needs Mikey in order to fly the planes. It’s an arrangement that works well for the people of the North.

  Mikey struggles to identify exactly what his role is (I think “New Media Visionary” has a nice ring to it), even though the TV show calls him general manager. Either way, he has no problem saying what he isn’t. “I started as a pilot, and didn’t do too good. Then I tried to be a mechanic, and didn’t do good at all. Then I went into metalwork, but I wasn’t very good at that, either. That’s when I went to business school, I finally figured out what I’m good at.”

  When someone in the office up and quit and Joe needed a replacement to work up charter quotes, Mikey was handed the job.

  “Essentially it was because nobody else would do it; everyone else was busy fixing and flying the airplanes,” he told me.

  Not that Mikey needs to feel bad about anything on the work front. As far as I can tell, he has been the driving, on-the-ground force that has changed Buffalo Airways from a business to a worldwide phenomenon. Ice Pilots, of course, is the foundation of that genesis.

  After graduating from high school, Mikey went to business school at Red Deer College in Red Deer, Alberta, a city of some 100,000 people about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. Going to school in Red Deer was a no-brainer for him, given his close ties to the city. Buffalo maintains a hangar in nearby Penhold, which allowed Mikey to go away without really going away. “I was still under the umbrella,” he told me. “I was still in the Buffalo bubble.”

  Bubble or not, being away from the daily grind in Hay River and Yellowknife afforded Mikey an opportunity to focus on his business education, though the demographics of his school sometimes made it hard to stay focused. “We Hay River guys, we’re not the best-looking guys and all. But Red Deer College had four girls for every guy, because it was all nursing and business students. So we all had the hottest girlfriends!”

  One afternoon during his third year there, Mikey was sitting in a marketing class when he received a call from David Gullason, an executive producer at Vancouver-based Omni Film Productions. After introducing himself, David explained that he had recently read an article about Mikey and Buffalo Airways in The Globe and Mail.

  “David asked me if I wanted to be on television,” Mikey said. “I said ‘Yeah!’ ”

  “I had read about British tourists—they call them ‘propheads’—going to Yellowknife to see these old planes,” Gullason told me over the phone one day. “We were looking for an in-the-moment show that had elements of history and science, and this had both. And obviously there was this huge, great unfolding story. What could be better? The planes, the Arctic, and the people who fly them.”

  Imagine yourself working at Buffalo Airways in spring 2008. You’re trucking along, doing your job every day in blissful anonymity, trying to survive the unpredictable rigours of the cold, the dark, and Joe’s temper. You think you’ve got it all worked out. Sure, you’re working your ass off and sometimes Joe tears you a new rectum, but the place feels like home, the characters like family. Life reaches a comfortable stasis.

  Then, without warning, a couple of strangers show up, one of whom is carrying a serious-looking video camera. You’re told that your work life is now going to be immortalized on film and broadcast to millions of people in Canada and around the world. And (this is a big and) every move you make, every word you say, every screw-up you commit—large or small—is going to be documented, logged, and potentially made the focus of a TV show episode. How would you feel?

  If you answered “really friggin’ uncomfortable,” you’re not alone. And chances are, you probably would have made your discomfort known to the strangers now skulking around the hangar, sticking a camera in your face at the most inopportune moments and asking you pointed questions about your life and your work.

  That is where I found myself in January 2011, when I walked into the alien world of Buffalo Airways, immersed myself in its daily rhythms, and shared the triumph and defeats of the people who work there. Sure, I had faith in my abilities. I had always managed to make people comfortable enough to share the most intimate aspects of their lives with me. But I knew that gaining people’s confidence, trust, and friendship would not come right away.

  In those early days, I hung around—a lot. People looked at me suspiciously, wondering what the hell I was doing in their lives. Either they wouldn’t talk to me, or they simply offered blunt, unemotional responses. Sometimes (though thankfully rarely) they were downright hostile. I felt like an outsider because, frankly, I was an outsider. Sure, I had Mikey to act as my buffer, but I still felt the stares, heard the questions. As Joe so bluntly put it at our first meeting: “Book—what book?”

  Eventually, I managed to make progress with even the most leery Buffalo employees, but Joe was staunchly resistant to the idea that I even existed. Usually when I asked him a question he grumbled something as he hurried to another part of the hangar. Sometimes his responses were accompanied by a glare that would melt Yellowk
nife permafrost.

  One time I gauged Joe incorrectly, fooling myself into thinking he was in a talkative mood, and asked him about the airline’s genesis, hoping for some historical context. “You gotta know this shit,” he scowled. “All you gotta do is go on the computer, Google it, and then you get all that information and write that shit up.”

  “I just think the book could use a bit of historical context, so I was wonderi—”

  “Well, if you’re writing an article on Ice Pilots, I’d be very careful about getting into too much detail. Number one, I ain’t gonna do an autobiography. And number two, I ain’t gonna do a history of Buffalo Airways.”

  It helped my ego to know that the TV crew had found itself in the same boat just a couple of years earlier; ever suspicious, Joe wanted nothing to do with them. He would say things like “I don’t know why you guys are following me around—this is Mikey’s movie.”

  Joe’s ire over the show—and the intrusion into his personal and business life—only grew when he heard the name proposed by the TV production company. “Honestly,” Mikey told me conspiratorially, “we all hate the name Ice Pilots. It’s the worst name ever.”

  But Mikey understands the logic behind the moniker. As he tells it, the producers wanted the name to max out at eighteen letters, so the entire title could fit on a satellite TV guide. It couldn’t be called Buffalo Airways, for fear it would be confused with the city in New York. “As much as we hate it, Ice Pilots NWT is a grammatically perfect name,” Mikey explained. The word “Ice” not only connotes the frigid environment well enough, it also taps into the success of another successful Yellowknife-based reality TV show, Ice Road Truckers. “Pilots” is self-explanatory enough, while “NWT” hints at the remote geography of the place.