The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  So for all the heartache that comes along with being part of the Buffalo family, it also offers its pilots adventures of the most far-flung kind. Today, Ice Pilots has helped give young pilots a glimpse into the kinds of adventures awaiting them north of 60. Like Scotty, though, Justin didn’t have the luxury of knowing before he arrived what the company was like. So when Justin first showed up at Buffalo’s door, he had no idea what was awaiting him on the other side.

  The deeply furrowed landscape of Ellesmere Island seems like the last place anybody would want to land a plane. Yet Buffalo’s business has taken its pilots here many times, usually to military research stations at Eureka and Alert in Nunavut.

  As with most Buffalo pilots, Justin’s route to Yellowknife was anything but straightforward, though he was long fascinated with the idea of flying. Justin was born just outside of Langley, British Columbia, but it wasn’t long before his parents started dragging him all over the world as different business opportunities presented themselves.

  “We spent some time in Saudi Arabia,” he told me over lunch one day at the Gold Range Diner, a Yellowknife institution and one of Justin’s favourite lunch-hour dining spots. The Gold Range Diner epitomizes the dichotomy of modern-day Yellowknife. From the outside, it’s rundown, maybe even a little grotty. The bright yellow building has seen better days. The paint is peeling, the wooden steps worn. The interior—with its brick-coloured linoleum floor and Asian decor—feels and smells like a building past its prime. Sit down for a while, though, and you see what really makes the place tick. Here are people from all walks of Yellowknife life—blue collar and white collar, Native and non-Native—enjoying surprisingly good food in a friendly and welcoming atmosphere. The first time Justin and I sat down in the diner, I was shocked to enjoy one of the best chicken curries I’d had in a long time.

  “We also lived in Oman,” he continued. “When I was five we moved to Dubai, and we lived there for two years.” The rest of Justin’s childhood reads like pages from the Canadian atlas: six months in Rossland, British Columbia; four years in Vancouver; three years in Ottawa; four years in Winnipeg; six months in Castlegar, British Columbia; and eighteen months in Edmonton.

  The idea of flying always fascinated Justin, so when he was fifteen—and didn’t yet have a driver’s licence—his mother began diligently driving him to the airport for lessons. He soon got his private pilot’s licence, and then spent two years at Mount Royal College (now Mount Royal University) in Calgary. With a crisp new commercial pilot’s licence in his hand and a fresh outlook on life, Justin took the road north to Yellowknife for the same reason that hundreds of other young, eager Buffalo pilots have: there were no jobs anywhere else.

  “About thirty-five people graduated from my class in flight school,” he explained. “And from that class, maybe ten of us are working now. So if you wanted a job, you had to do what it took.”

  That’s exactly what Justin did. “I threw all my worldly possessions in the back of my Mustang—one suitcase, a sleeping bag, and a box of assorted shit—and started driving north,” he told me.

  Justin struck me as the kind of guy who will stop at nothing to makes his dreams happen, having done everything necessary to get himself what he considers the best flying gig on Earth. For Justin, there is no place he’d rather be—at least right now. “I guess I’ll have to grow up and get a real job eventually,” he said with a wry smile. “But until then, I’ll just keep doing this.”

  A combination of things keeps him at Buffalo. “As a pilot, you develop a real connection with these planes. It’s something special, and it’s so different.”

  It’s the land too. “The North is so huge, so raw, so beautiful. There’s hardly anybody that lives here, and there’s so much to see. I’ve flown planes across the world at low levels. And there are some beautiful places, but there’s no place in the world like the North. It’s harsh, and it’s a dangerous place that can kill you. But it’s beautiful.”

  And even though he is sitting right in front of me in his customary seat in a noisy diner, Justin went away for a few seconds. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. “In the fall, the tundra turns red for about a week right before the snow flies. You’re flying over the ground and there’s muskox and caribou everywhere. Even now after doing it for ten years, the beauty of it is never lost on me.”

  * * *

  Too Close for Comfort

  After Buffalo delivered two CL-215 water bombers to Turkish government officials in Ankara, Arnie Schreder stayed on for a while to teach the eager Turkish pilots how to fly them. Each young pilot would take the plane up for a spin, then bring it down for a landing.

  Ice Pilots videographer Todd Craddock stationed himself at the far end of the runway, filming the takeoffs and landings. All was going well until one pilot forgot to lower the landing gear as he approached the runway. The bottom of the 215’s fuselage scraped horribly against the runway, showering it with sparks and filling the air with the ungodly shriek of metal. Craddock stood at the end of the runway filming the incident, until he thought the plane was going to plow into him, forcing him to run for his life. Fortunately, the pilot was able to compose himself, pull up from the runway, and get the 215 airborne again.

  * * *

  The Gold Range

  Located in the heart of downtown Yellowknife, the Gold Range Hotel and bar is the most infamous drinking establishment in the Canadian North. From Taloyoak to Tuktoyaktuk, everyone knows about the “Strange Range.”

  Over the years, the Gold Range has played host to a number of business ventures, including a strip joint, boarding house, and the rough-and-tumble bar that exists to this day. It’s not uncommon to walk by the place—day or night—and see a couple of patrons drunkenly fighting on the sidewalks outside. In the mid-1980s, its general manager claimed that the bar sold more beer than any other in Canada.

  Yet there’s more to the Gold Range than its nefarious reputation suggests. It’s a working-man’s bar, yes, but a meeting place too. In years gone by, if you wanted to find out which company was hiring labourers or needed to pass information along, the Range was the place to do it.

  During my time at Buffalo, the City of Yellowknife announced its intention to buy a chunk of real estate on 50th Street, including the Gold Range, as part of a plan to clean up downtown.

  Cleaner? Perhaps. Less interesting? Most definitely.

  * * *

  CL-215 Facts & Figures

  ·Capacity: Two flight crew and 18 passengers (utility version)

  ·production: 125

  ·Payload: 5,346 litres (1,176 imperial gallons) of water or 6,123 kilograms (12,000 pounds) of chemicals

  ·Length: 19.82 metres (65 feet)

  ·Wingspan: 28.6 metres (93 feet, 10 inches)

  ·Height: 8.98 metres (29 feet, 6 inches)

  ·maximum speed: 605 km/h (376 mph)

  ·Cruise speed: 291 km/h (181 mph)

  ·Range: 2,260 kilometres (1,405 miles)

  ·Empty weight: 12,065 kilograms (26,600 pounds)

  ·Maximum takeoff weight: 17,100 kilograms (37,700 pounds) from water and 19,730 kilograms (43,500 pounds) from land

  THE LAND BEFORE TIME

  Another night at Surly Bob’s.

  I can’t remember how long ago we descended the narrow staircase to this subterranean temple to sports and greasy food, but if time is measured in Coronas, it’s been a while. Yet even though my eyesight is becoming fuzzier with each bottle, I can still appreciate the surroundings. From the outside, Surly Bob’s doesn’t look like a hell of a lot. In fact, the hand-painted sign on an otherwise nondescript stone-faced building is easily overlooked, except for the rather surly looking bird painted on the door.

  Like so many things in Yellowknife, though, the cover doesn’t do justice to the rest of the book, and
Surly Bob’s is no different. The sports bar may be just a square room with various flat-screen TVs dotting the walls, but Bob (who, as it turns out, isn’t that surly) serves up traditional pub-style dishes like burgers and sandwiches, fish ’n’ chips, fajitas, soups, and salads at reasonable prices. And like so many small-town places of this vintage, it’s almost impossible to step into the place without meeting someone you know. Especially when you’re with Mikey McBryan, a man whose popularity rises exponentially on Wednesday nights... Ice Pilots nights.

  Mikey is sitting across from me, the outline of his head becoming fuzzier with each bucket of Coronas that Bob delivers to the table. I’ve never been a drinker, so I shouldn’t be particularly surprised that Mikey is way ahead of me on the beer front. But I never would have expected the prodigious rate at which he packs them away. I’m into my fifth; Mikey has probably doubled my count.

  While I’m barely coherent, Mikey seems unaffected by the alcohol now coursing through his veins. Unless you count the number of times he says fuck, that is. Here in Yellowknife—particularly in the Buffalo hangar—the word gets a fair bit of airtime. And as the number of beers consumed increases, so does the number of times the word pops up in our speech. I like to call it the Fuck Quotient.

  Swear words notwithstanding, Mikey is still as lucid as ever. Actually, he sounds smarter than ever to me as we talk about how Yellowknife is the perfect place for Buffalo to call home.

  “We don’t pick Yellowknife,” he says. “I mean does anyone really wanna be in minus fuckin’ fifty degrees every day? Would I rather be in Vegas doing this? Yes. But in Vegas you’ve got to compete with trucks, which is a far superior form of transportation.”

  “Wait a second. Are you saying trucks are superior to airplanes?”

  “Pound for pound, air travel is one of the most inefficient ways of delivering cargo,” he says. “Assuming you’ve got an airport that can handle it, the most you can haul with an airplane is about forty thousand pounds. A truck can take sixty thousand pounds. And don’t even talk about boats. You can put millions of pounds on a boat.

  “So leaving the ground actually has a lot of negatives. There’s reasons why airplanes don’t haul cargo like they used to. A truck can haul three times as much, operate with one driver and can deliver for pennies a pound. Airplanes cost dollars per pound to ship.”

  In some respects, it’s surprising to hear Mikey talk so disparagingly about air cargo. At least half of Buffalo’s annual revenue comes from shipping goods from Point A to Point B (the other half being very lucrative summer firefighting contracts with the government). On any given day, there’s likely a Buffalo aircraft soaring over northern skies with a planeload of mining equipment, food, building materials, or fuel.

  Unlike the flagship airlines that operate in Canada (Air Canada and WestJet come to mind), most of Buffalo’s cargo transportation happens on planes used exclusively for that purpose. So while other airlines might dedicate a bit of empty space on a passenger plane for cargo, Buffalo fills entire planes with the stuff.

  It may not be as glamorous as hauling people around, but that’s quite all right with Mikey. “There’s a reason why a shit truck driver earns more than a cabbie: nobody wants to haul shit round. So that’s basically what we are: flying shit trucks.”

  That’s an oversimplification, considering the sheer volume of stuff Buffalo hauls. Mikey figures the company moves at least five million pounds of cargo every year. The C-46 probably accounts for three million pounds of cargo annually, at thirteen thousand pounds four times each week for fifty-two weeks.

  Yet predicting how much cargo Buffalo will haul in any given year is as unpredictable as Joe’s temper. “You could do one job that could be two million pounds,” Mikey says. “And if you get a good contract—like a diamond mine when they’re starting out—you could do two million tons.”

  Despite that, Mikey believes ships and trucks are ultimately killing the aviation industry. “The only thing keeping planes in the air is overnight freight,” he says through a mouthful of chicken wing. “With Internet ordering, everyone wants it here now. That’s what keeps aviation alive. You order that hoodie or sweatshirt online and you want it in Canmore the next day, it has to go on an airplane.”

  The X factor in Mikey’s equation is one he is well acquainted with: the North. In the North, towns are small and road-building is prohibitively expensive. All of a sudden, air travel becomes more attractive than in more populated areas. “Let’s say it costs about a million dollars a mile to build a decent road,” Mikey says, stuffing a lime into a Dos Equis and handing it to me. “If a community is five hundred miles away and there’s four hundred people in it, that’s a million dollars per person to bring in cargo. So in the short term, it’s much cheaper to fly stuff in. If the community had 400,000 people living in it, you wouldn’t even think about it. You would build the road out of necessity, since it would be physically impossible to fly everything in.”

  Permanent roads are few and far between in Canada’s northern reaches, so Buffalo is there to fill the gaps. That’s why the system works so well: there’s a niche for Buffalo in the North. It’s one of the last places in the world where the company could exist in its present form.

  Maybe it’s the stunned look on my face, my glassy eyes, or the drool beginning to form around the edges of my mouth, but Mikey feels a need to explain with an analogy. “You know the movie The Land Before Time, where they were trying to find Paradise Valley? That’s where we are. We’re in that last nook where the dinosaurs are surviving. But they won’t survive forever, just like we won’t. We’ve only survived because we’re sheltered between two canyons.”

  I’m skeptical. Sure, operating in a secluded place may have helped Buffalo succeed, but it’s not the only reason the company has managed to thrive through good times and bad. These guys know what their core business is, and they do it well—really well. How else do you explain flying around in planes whose designers, builders, and first pilots are long dead and gone?

  Explanation #1: They know where to get parts.

  “Over ten thousand DC-3s were built, so there’s ten thousand of every part out there somewhere,” Mikey says. “And that’s just on the airplanes, let alone the parts they built to support those airplanes.” Compare that with a plane like the Electra, which saw only 170 built before production stopped in 1961. Talk about an impossible undertaking; try finding parts for that plane.

  Not surprisingly, Buffalo’s Yellowknife hangar has its own machining facility to help when pre-made parts cannot be found. “We can do everything here except the engines, landing gear, and instrumentation,” Mike says.

  Explanation #2: They know where to find mechanics.

  Quick quiz: What’s easier for Mikey to find, new pilots or new mechanics? If you answered new pilots, you’re wrong. “It’s ten times more difficult to find mechanics than pilots,” Mikey says. “Pilots are literally a dime a dozen. If I wanted a pilot to fly a DC-3, one would show up tomorrow. But if you said you needed someone to work on a DC-3, you’re gonna have to go find him somewhere or pull him out of jail. With mechanics, it’s not like we need a guy, it’s like we need that guy!”

  Born in Winnipeg, thirty-four-year-old mechanic James Dwojak has seen his fair share of breakdowns during his ten years at Buffalo. James knows as well as anybody that to be a successful airplane mechanic in the North, you have to be tough, tenacious, and versatile.

  Clearly, the solution does not come as easily as placing a Help Wanted ad in a newspaper. “We’d get people answering the ad, but they’d have no experience,” Mikey says. “You can teach a pilot to fly a DC-3 in ten hours. But in ten hours you know nothing about the mechanics of a DC-3.” Luckily, Buffalo has built enough of a reputation in a small enough industry that skilled mechanics often find them.

  Explanation #3: They have a hell of a lot of experience work
ing on vintage planes.

  Don’t ask Mikey McBryan if maintaining a vintage plane is any easier than maintaining a twenty-first-century jet. He’ll tell you the question is out of context, and context is everything.

  “It’s easier for Buffalo, because we know what we’re doing. If you sent a DC-3 to WestJet and asked them to fix it, it would take up all their time. Put a 737 in here and it would take all our time. It’s not like new airplanes don’t have problems, but you can go to the Walmart of schools and learn how to fix it. Plug it into a computer and the computer fixes it. But with a DC-3, DC-4, or C-46, you’re working on something that you can’t go to school for. You’ve gotta work on it to learn.”

  Explanation #4: They know where to get the planes.

  “Airplanes are easy,” Mikey says. “Just go to an airport and you’ll find an airplane.”

  Although not quite as simple as that, the airline industry is a tightly knit one, which allows for a fair bit of shared information. As Mikey tells me, more often than not, the planes find Buffalo, not vice versa. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t had to invoke his own ingenuity to track down Buffalo’s latest purchase. In one well-known Ice Pilots episode, Mikey finds a CL-215 water bomber using Google Earth and travels to remote Venezuela to finish the deal. More recently, he bought one in North Carolina—through eBay.

  It was around midnight when I stumbled out of Surly Bob’s and made my way back to Mikey’s place, hoping not to become one of those grim northern legends: a drunk who falls asleep in a snowbank in the middle of a Yellowknife winter night, never to wake up again. For his part, Mikey hooked up with a few friends at Surly’s and made his way to Harley’s, excited that it was Monday, the day they introduce the new stripper for the week. He didn’t get home until around three in the morning, but when Tuesday rolled around, it was me who slept in and then nursed the dull ache of a hangover, while Mikey was at the hangar at 7:30 AM as always, making ready to meet his dad when the sked rolled down the runway.