The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  Contrary to what most people think, the primary responsibility of the 215 in firefighting operations is not to put out fires, but to reduce their intensity, thereby giving ground crews a chance to attack the fire using hand pumps, chainsaws, axes, and other hand tools. The 215 can scoop some 5,000 litres (1,320 gallons) of water off nearby water sources (rivers, lakes, oceans) at airspeeds between 140 and 150 kilometres an hour (87–93 miles per hour). The 215 needs a water source about 1.5 kilometres (1 mile) long and 2 metres (2 yards) deep; it can fill its tanks in about ten seconds and empty them in one. Typically, the planes are also equipped with foam-injection equipment that mixes the water with fire-retardant foam. Assuming a suitable water source is close by, the Duck can deliver as many as 125 loads of water and retardant in a single day.

  The 215 is a marvel of engineering technology. The craft is designed to take off and land on short, remote airstrips, and operates efficiently at low speeds. Its high wings offer its crew greater visibility over water sources and drop zones, which can mean the difference between success and disaster in the insanely difficult conditions its pilots often fly. The plane is easy to manoeuvre in the heavy gusts, violent updrafts, and fierce turbulence that characterize forest fires. No wonder the Turks wanted the two planes so badly; production of the 215s stopped in 1990, and the planes are not easy to come by, a result of their utility and palatable price tag.

  For Buffalo Joe, the water bomber deal could not have come at a better time, as Buffalo was struggling financially after worldwide recession struck in 2008. The Turkish government contacted Buffalo, interested in buying the two planes, a deal that could add as much as seven million dollars in revenue to the Buffalo coffers. It’s not the kind of business transaction Buffalo usually engages in, but these were tough times and Joe needed the money to keep the company on solid financial footing.

  Once the deal was sealed, the Buffalo crew had one major hurdle to leap: the Atlantic Ocean. The CL-215 is a short-range, low-flying aircraft designed to scoop water out of lakes and dump it on nearby fires. Crossing vast expanses of open ocean? Not part of the plan. CL-215s are essentially flying boats, but they are not designed to withstand the high waves of the open sea, nor do they have the fuel capacity to cross it. Yet with seven million dollars on the line, Joe and his team were willing to get creative.

  Joe turned the task of crossing the Atlantic to long-time mechanic Cory Dodd, a Winnipeg native who has been with Buffalo since 1993. Cory had to find a way to modify the CL-215s to get them across 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) of open ocean between St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Portugal’s Azores Islands, a ten-hour flight. The solution came in the form of two 1,890-litre (500-gallon) rubber bladders installed in the cabin of each CL-215 and connected to the plane’s main fuel system.

  With the question of how to get the planes to Turkey seemingly solved, Joe next had to decide who would take the trip. It was little surprise he chose Justin, who at that point had eight years of Buffalo service under his belt. Justin was lucky enough to be sharing the controls of his plane with Arnie Schreder, a bush pilot legend, Justin’s mentor, and then the chief pilot of Buffalo Airways. Two guns for hire—Dave “Rooster” Poole and George Furey—flew the second plane.

  The CL-215 is perfectly designed for scooping water off lakes and dumping it over nearby fires. The planes are highly sought after by countries with vast stretches of forest, a fact Buffalo Joe was undoubtedly aware of when he sold two of them to the Turkish government.

  For Arnie, anticipating what might happen after the expedition to Turkey was just too much to ask given the risks inherent in the venture. The trip began with a six-hour flight to Winnipeg, a normally casual jaunt made stressful by the fact that the 215s do not have aircraft radar on board and need to be flown under what is known as Visual Flight Rules, or VFR. VFR is a set of regulations that permits pilots to operate aircraft only in weather that is clear enough for them to see where they’re going. If clouds set in or the ceiling drops, they’re out of luck. To make matters worse, the 215s have no de-icing equipment, since they are exclusively flown in the summer, and their fat wings are an easy target for ice formation, which has caused the untimely demise of more than one pilot.

  The next leg of the journey saw the 215s travel from Winnipeg to Montreal, Quebec—a 14-hour, 1,800-kilometre (1,100 mile) flight—followed by 1,600 kilometres (1,000 miles) to St. John’s, Newfoundland, the easternmost city in North America. Arnie thought the trip over mainland Canada would represent the most difficult part of the journey to Turkey, and in some respects he was right. But he could not have anticipated what he and the rest of the crew would encounter while in St. John’s, an event that would forever change their perspective on open-ocean flying.

  With the formidable journey staring them in the face, the crew knew they had to be as prepared as possible for anything the North Atlantic might throw at them.

  “You’d be an idiot to not know what can happen before you take that trip,” Justin told me. “And if you didn’t know what could happen and you agreed to do that trip, you’re stupid.”

  The North Atlantic is characterized by thousands of kilometres of featureless expanses of water, as well as unpredictable, violent weather. It has claimed its share of air disaster victims, beginning in May 1927 with the deaths of aviators Charles Nungesser and François Coli, who crashed while trying to cross the ocean from Paris to the United States in a Levasseur PL. 8 biplane. On February 2, 1953, a Skyways Avro York disappeared over the North Atlantic; neither the plane nor its thirty-nine passengers were ever seen again.

  Those incidents were likely swirling in the back of the minds of Justin and his colleagues as they began their transatlantic preparations in St. John’s. Among other things, the crew spent some time participating in a survival-training course, just in case they had to “ditch,” or make an emergency landing on water. When a plane ditches—whether because of engine failure or weather conditions—the pilot’s main concern is bringing the plane to a level landing on the water without destroying the aircraft. Ditchings are rare among commercial craft, but they occur fairly often in other kinds of aviation. Perhaps the most famous successful ditching in recent history occurred on January 15, 2009, when US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of Canada geese after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport and then safely landed in the Hudson River. All 155 passengers and crew survived.

  Staving off hypothermia is a major concern in open-ocean ditchings, and the only way to preserve body heat is by wearing a high-tech survival suit, which Justin, Arnie, George, and Dave did for the first time in St. John’s. The bright orange suits are heavy, tight, and rubbery and cover the entire body from the ankles to the neck—almost claustrophobic. They not only make it difficult to move freely, they’re hotter than hell. The crew realized that they’d have no chance in the icy waters of the North Atlantic without the suits: the orange cocoons would have to stay on for the entire ocean crossing to Santa Maria, one of the Azores Islands.

  With the crew trained in the fine details of North Atlantic survival, the waiting game began. For the 215s to complete the flight successfully, three things needed to occur simultaneously: clear skies, a tail wind, and temperatures above freezing.

  Just as Justin and his colleagues were feeling good about their chances of making it unscathed to Santa Maria, disaster struck: a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter carrying eighteen workers to an off-shore oil platform ditched fifty kilometres (thirty miles) east of St. John’s. Only one survivor was found.

  The tragedy highlighted the sometimes precarious nature of flying over open ocean, yet Justin and the others remained focused on the job. When all three conditions were finally met, the planes took off on what may have been the most dangerous flight of Justin’s and Arnie’s careers. “When you look below you and see fifty-foot swells rolling... that’s something to see,” Justin said.

  As stressful as the flight was for
Justin, the 215s made it to the tiny airstrip on Santa Maria without incident. That night, the crew celebrated its success with a night on the town in Vila do Porto, population 5,500. “It was sure nice to put that big chunk of ocean behind you,” he adds.

  With the most dangerous leg of the journey over, the crew looked forward to the second over-ocean portion of their trip, the 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) between Santa Maria and Cascais on mainland Portugal, a six-hour flight. Given their ease of passage between St. John’s and Santa Maria, everyone decided to leave the survival suits in the back of the plane for the second leg.

  Perhaps the decision was made a bit too hastily. Only an hour out of Santa Maria, the 215 piloted by George and Dave experienced a dangerous phenomenon known as an “engine overspeed” on its left engine. When an overspeed occurs, the engine and propeller turn far faster than they are designed to do, either by pilot error or by mechanical malfunction. The pilots lost complete control of the left engine, forcing them to turn back to Santa Maria and make an emergency landing.

  As Justin tells it, the overspeed was no laughing matter: “An engine failure in a CL-215 at that weight and those cold temperatures is a serious deal.” Indeed. With only one engine working, a 215 cannot stay airborne for long, and the stress on the hobbled engine is incredible. Imagine driving your car as fast as it can go and then slamming it into first gear. The worst-case scenario with an engine overspeed? The propeller sheds its blades, which then rip through the plane’s fuselage.

  In the meantime, Justin and Arnie were safe in Cascais, waiting for their counterparts to arrive. When it became obvious that the second water bomber would be delayed in Santa Maria awaiting replacement parts, Arnie and Justin made their way to Ankara, Turkey, via Spain and Malta. It was only half the agreed-upon delivery, but their clients were thrilled to have even one 215 on home soil. The second plane arrived a few days later, to the delight of the Turks.

  Though the CL-215 odyssey would rank as one of the most unusual missions Arnie Schreder flew in thirty years of contract flying with Buffalo, comprising almost forty thousand hours, nothing could have prepared Arnie for his last revenue flight (a flight the pilot gets paid for, as opposed to a training or mechanical checkup flight) with Buffalo. Enter Dambusters.

  To many people, the term “dambusters” has a historical context, thanks to one of the most daring and immortalized raids carried out during World War II. On May 16, 1943, nineteen British Lancaster bombers took off from a little-known airfield in Lincolnshire, en route to three heavily defended reservoirs in Germany. Their mission: destroy three dams deep in Germany’s industrial heartland, thereby crippling the German army. To do so they used a 4,175-kilogram (9,200-pound) bomb designed specifically to bounce off the water and explode once it impacted the dam. Two dams were destroyed, the third badly damaged.

  Since that day, the feat has been attempted only once, as a U.S. military experiment in 1946 that went horribly wrong when the bomb bounced too high off the water and destroyed the plane that had just dropped it. Until Arnie, that is.

  After six months of work by one of the world’s foremost authorities on spinning objects—not to mention the fifty-odd other people who helped bring it all together—a British production team called on Arnie to drop the newly designed bomb (designed not to explode) from a Buffalo DC-4 to see if the raid could be replicated for a made-for-TV special called Dambusters. The stakes were unbelievably high: despite lots of practice runs, Arnie would only have one shot at the real thing. One mistake—which could see the bomb bounce high off the water and tear the DC-4 to shreds—could mean his death.

  “Nothing went right,” Mikey said. “In fact, the only thing that went right was the last moment, when Arnie dropped the bomb and it skipped over the water—right into the dam! Those were probably the best four seconds of my life. There’s not very many things in life you work that hard on for four seconds of reward.”

  Arnie wasn’t the only one putting himself at risk that day. According to Mikey, it’s the most dangerous thing he’s ever done too. “We had people all over the place, and that bomb could have gone anywhere. But Arnie just comes in and tick, tick—bang! Dead centre. If he had a hundred more tries, I don’t know if he could do it as perfectly.”

  It was the last revenue flight the legendary Arnie has ever flown for Buffalo.

  “What a way to go out,” said Mikey.

  Experiences such as these may be par for the course for a Buffalo flyboy who reaches the exalted status of chief pilot, but they are anything but normal for the greenhorn, as Justin was when he first arrived on the Buffalo scene back in 2001. And yet, something about Justin seems, well, special. It’s almost as if he’s meant to be where he is.

  You might have even guessed that back on Justin’s twenty-first birthday. There he was, his first day at Buffalo, and on the sked down to Hay River that evening, Joe let him take control of the DC-3. “That was my birthday present,” he told me.

  Yet just like the young men he works with today, Justin had to put in his time on the ramp before he could graduate to the upper echelon of the Buffalo hierarchy. He was checked out on the DC-3 on April 7, 2002. I’m not sure if it speaks to deep-rooted psychological scarring from spending so much time with Joe, but Justin can remember, almost to the minute, how much time he spent beside Joe on the DC-3. “I flew with Joe for thirteen months, one week, and three days,” he tells me. “And then they checked me out on the DC-4 on my twenty-third birthday, May 29, 2003.”

  In classic Buffalo fashion, Justin did whatever was necessary to keep the company running, even after he’d reached the exalted status of pilot. He told me about his early days in Yellowknife, when Buffalo was having difficulty finding long-haul truck drivers to courier goods between Hay River and Edmonton.

  “I’d fly the sked across the lake in the morning, from Hay to Yellowknife, then sleep the afternoon in Yellowknife, from noon until around 3 PM,” he said. “When I woke up, I’d get the sked ready, fly back to Hay River and unload it. Then I’d get in the long-haul truck, drive halfway down to Edmonton, and meet the guy driving north from Edmonton in Dixonville, Alberta. We’d run across the road and switch trucks:

  “ ‘How’s it running?’

  “ ‘Good!’

  “ ‘How’s it running?’

  “ ‘Good!’ ”

  Justin would hop in the truck and finish the twelve-hour drive back to Hay River, where he would load his truckful of goods back on to the sked, fly it to Yellowknife, and get a few hours of sleep before starting the entire process over again.

  This type of ridiculous work ethic is a simple fact of life at Buffalo. At first blush, it may seem harsh, even draconian. But to the people who make their living here, there are benefits as well. “All the people who work here are really close,” Justin says. “You’re working pretty hard and you spend a lot of time with the people you work with. So they become like your friends; you hang out with them after work too.”

  If anything, the conditions at Buffalo mean your co-workers are generally good people. As Justin explains it, prima donnas don’t last very long in Yellowknife. “It’s a tough place to make a living; it’s not for everybody. The benefit is that you don’t get assholes here. Because everyone has gotta work hard and work together, eh?”

  Though the benefits of such an arrangement are obvious, it comes at a price too: as Scott Blue described to me one evening in a Yellowknife restaurant, having a social life outside of Buffalo is nearly impossible. “The thing that really gets to me at Buffalo is that I’ve become sick and tired of turning down weekends in Calgary or back home in Toronto, or not being able to have time off when I want it.” Scott’s life is one where being on call is a constant bedfellow, his plans are subject to change at a moment’s notice.

  Such conditions don’t make it easy to have a relationship. “I tried dating girls when I first got here, but I n
ever knew when I would be shipped off somewhere or gone. So they all got bored and found someone else.”

  As troublesome as they may be, these sacrifices are worth it to Scotty, who—like most of his Buffalo comrades—has seen and done things most pilots will never experience. “It’s really a crazy place,” he says with a conspiratorial smile. “I remember my first summer flying to Sawmill Bay [on Great Bear Lake, some 400 kilometres or 250 miles northwest of Yellowknife] and landing a DC-3 on a strip that had hardly seen a plane in years. The year before, they had taken a DC-3 in there, and the props were ripping through trees when they landed.” Scott spent part of the day exploring the camp—which has seen varied uses over the decades, including timber sawmill, loading dock, and air force airfield—along with the machinery, vehicles, and buildings left behind when it was abandoned in 1987.

  Experiences like that may not be routine, but they’re commonplace enough to keep a guy like Scott content to call Buffalo home for the foreseeable future. “I could go somewhere else,” he says, hinting that some of Canada’s major airlines have already made overtures to him. “But where else could I fly a C-46 to Eureka?”

  Good point. Even for those of us fortunate enough to have spent time in the North, Eureka is the remotest of the remote. A small research base set on southern Ellesmere Island in the far northern reaches of Nunavut (79°59' N latitude), Eureka is the second-northernmost permanent research station in the world. Only Alert—perched on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island—is farther north.

  “Back in the day, it was routine to get piston-pounding airplanes that far north. But now they just don’t go up there anymore. So it may be one of the last—if not the last—times a C-46 goes that far north. I’ll never forget doing that; it was unbelievable.”