The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  The mystery of Chuck’s disappearance was deepened by the fact that search conditions were ideal throughout that entire summer. The sun shone almost twenty-four hours a day, and the skies proved clear and bright most days. Yet despite hundreds of sets of eyes and as much manpower as the air force could dedicate, there was absolutely no sign of the Fairchild or the three men. The RCAF had no choice but to conclude that either the men had died in an inflight fire, or they lay at the bottom of one of the thousands of unnamed lakes that dot the tundra. Either way, the official search was called off.

  Like many other Yellowknifers, Joe refused to accept Chuck’s disappearance without a fight. For months to come, pilots of all stripes donated their planes, time, and money to continue the search for the Fairchild. Each time, a disappointed pilot would return to Yellowknife with the same report: no sign of Chuck.

  Others ultimately grew accustomed to the notion that they would never see Chuck or his plane again, but Joe was not so easily convinced. For the next thirty-nine years, one month, and twenty-six days, Joe made the search for Chuck his personal holy grail. He spent countless hours on solo flights across the lonely Barrenlands looking for his friend and mentor, and never failed to remind other pilots to keep their eyes peeled for Chuck.

  By some cruel twist of fate, it was not Joe’s lot to solve the mystery of his old friend. That distinction fell into the lap of a twenty-four-year-old helicopter pilot from rural Saskatchewan named Curtis Constable. On August 3, 2003, Constable was transporting a crew of four young geologists back to their camp near Lupin Lake, about 300 kilometres (185 miles) southeast of the Arctic Ocean community of Kugluktuk, flying a route they had traversed many times before that summer. It was a well-travelled route that led to the Lupin Mine. Something caught Constable’s eye sixty metres (two hundred feet) below: a glint of sun off a piece of metal on the tundra.

  Constable landed the helicopter to investigate further. As he walked closer, he became the first human being in thirty-nine years to lay eyes on the Fairchild, lying serenely camouflaged atop a pile of sun-bleached rocks.

  “There’s Chuck’s airplane,” Joe said to me as we lingered over a picture of the wreckage, a nondescript metal frame spread gently over a small patch of tundra. “Try finding that in the bush.”

  It wasn’t long before the men realized they had stumbled upon something important. Human remains and camp equipment were strewn about the area. Constable’s most important discovery was Chuck’s wallet, its contents still largely intact despite the passage of time and the ravages of weather. Among the items he found inside was a membership card for the Flamingo Las Vegas. Yup, that was Chuck all right.

  Joe was relieved that the mystery of Chuck’s disappearance had been solved, but the irony of the discovery was not lost on him. “I still can’t believe that little prick found him,” he said. “I looked for him for thirty-nine years. I was looking for Chuck longer than that kid was alive.” The discovery made headlines across Canada.

  Before the discovery, many theories had floated around about what had happened that fateful day back in 1964: a makeshift repair job Chuck had performed earlier on a wheel caused the crash; Chuck got lost and ran out of fuel; the plane crashed through the ice.

  To the contrary, Joe says the state of the plane shows that it was a controlled crash in level flight, as if it were taking off or landing. In Joe’s mind, an engine failure sent the three men to their untimely demise. Still, the fact that the fuselage and wings were intact shows that Chuck flew the plane to the very end, trying to bring it down for a landing where no plane had ever landed before. In fact, other than fire damage to the engine compartment and cockpit, the rusting frame still looked very much like an airplane.

  In classic McBryan style, Joe was not satisfied with merely learning the details of the crash. He needed closure, and he knew others were feeling the same way too. So Joe organized a trip to the crash site for McAvoy’s siblings and the geologists’ families, some of whom came from as far away as New Jersey. It was a moving experience for everybody, Joe included.

  Yet not everyone was quite as touched when news of Chuck’s discovery reached the outside world, particularly Jim McAvoy, who was seventy-two at the time. For Jim, Chuck’s death had been a foregone conclusion. It was just a matter of time. “He was a lousy pilot,” Jim said of his younger brother in a 2003 National Post article. “He didn’t have much experience and he would try to outdo me all the time and he wasn’t capable of it.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” Jim said of the discovery of his brother’s plane, his lack of emotion likely the result of years of disagreement between the two about how best to run their charter airline. “He and I didn’t get along too good. That was a long time ago.”

  Although he didn’t mention them, Joe’s feelings on the subject are vastly different. To this day, Joe keeps a scrapbook in his office that is dedicated solely to the search for and discovery of Chuck’s Fairchild 82. The heavy binder is stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs, original Royal Canadian Air Force search-and-rescue reports. We pored over its pages, the silence heavy between us. He pulled a photograph from a protective plastic sleeve and laid it on his desk for me to see. It was the scene he witnessed back in 2003 when he landed at the crash site for the first time.

  “This is the whole scene,” he said softly. His fingers traced the image and came to rest on a skeleton lying near the plane. “That’s Chuck there.”

  It was Joe, of course, who brought Chuck—and his plane—home. This time it was on a DC-3.

  * * *

  Fred Carmichael, NWT’s First Aboriginal Bush Pilot

  Born in 1935 and raised on a trapline near Aklavik, Northwest Territories, Fred Carmichael lived in a tent throughout his childhood and teenage years, running dogs and working as a trapper. He received his private pilot’s licence in 1954; four years later he became the first aboriginal person in the Northwest Territories to get a commercial pilot’s licence.

  Fred started Reindeer Air Service in 1959 and flew old warplanes like the DC-3 and C-46. He built a reputation as a positive role model for aboriginals throughout the Northwest Territories and employed Native people throughout his airline. In 1982, he launched Antler Aviation, followed eight years later by Western Arctic Nature Tours, which introduced the stark beauty of the North to visitors from the world over.

  Fred also served his people when not in the air. In 2000, he was elected president of the Gwich’in Tribal Council. In 2002, he was appointed chair of the Aboriginal Pipeline Group, an aboriginal group advising on the development of the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, which will carry natural gas more than 1,100 kilometres (680 miles) along the Mackenzie Valley to southern Canada.

  In 2006, Fred was inducted into the Aboriginal Business Hall of Fame. The Aklavik airport is named for him.

  * * *

  Max Ward: The Entrepreneur Bush Pilot

  He was a handsome, charming young man who etched his name across the history of the northern skies like few others have.

  Maxwell William Ward was born November 22, 1921, and like so many of his pioneering compatriots, gained flying experience in the military as a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Soon after leaving the force, Ward bought a de Havilland Fox Moth and started his first company, the Polaris Charter Company. After one of many battles with bureaucratic forces that would define his career, Max closed the company in 1951.

  Two years later he was back, this time with a de Havilland Otter and a licence to operate a commercial air service. In 1953, he opened Wardair. Attracted by its relatively large payload, mining companies took to the Otter, and the airline grew rapidly. Max added many planes to his fleet, and he was responsible for ferrying thousands of tons of food, animals, and equipment to the far-flung corners of the territory.

  But Max had even bigger dreams and was soon flying Canadians overseas
to tropical destinations. By the mid-1970s, Wardair was Canada’s largest international air charter carrier. By 1984, the airline was flying scheduled routes throughout the North and West, making a name for itself with the first-class service it offered to all its passengers.

  Max sold Wardair to competing Pacific Western Airlines in 1989, which ultimately became part of Canadian Airlines.

  SUMMER DAYS

  Summer is the time in the North when all the promises of spring—those little teasers that begin with ever-increasing sunshine and end when the last piece of ice melts off the last lake—come true. People who have spent the past couple of months slowly becoming accustomed to the idea of warmth and light rush out of their homes in droves. Like the flowers that burst into bloom on the lands around the city, the residents of Yellowknife explode outdoors, eager to take in all that this glorious season has to offer before it fades into yet another grey winter.

  People move more slowly now too. In winter, Yellowknifers hurry from place to place and task to task, hunched over and bundled up against the bite of winter. Now, the pace is decidedly more relaxed. People walk as though they’ve got nowhere else to be but this place at this time. Even the cars move slowly, cruising down Franklin Avenue, downtown Yellowknife’s main drag, as if every day was cause enough for a Sunday drive.

  In some ways, the summer version of Yellowknife—particularly Old Town—is reminiscent of a seaside village. Great Slave Lake seems more like an inland sea than a lake. The wide water is a constant backdrop; boats come and go from docks peppered along the shorelines; houseboats bob gently in the sheltered waters of Back Bay; float planes roar to life with a splash. There are even fishermen hawking the day’s catch from the backs of their pickup trucks.

  Away from the water, colour has returned to the landscape. The white and grey of winter and spring have given way to glorious green. Most people walk around in shorts, although I am always surprised at the number of people who opt for jeans and jackets, even when the temperature pushes into the twenties (seventies Fahrenheit). Maybe on some level they don’t trust the sun, having been deceived by it one too many times.

  Life at Buffalo Airways takes on a decidedly different groove in summer too. Though there is still a buzz of activity in the hangar—nobody whose last name is McBryan ever really goes on holiday—the place seems more relaxed, friendlier. People smile more, bark less, and seem to have more time to enjoy themselves. Maybe that’s why the Omni TV crew chooses this time of year to pack up its gear for a few months before returning in September: happy, contented people do not make for intriguing television programming.

  “It’s better TV in the winter,” Mikey said one sunny afternoon. “Plus summer is boring, because it’s actually nice. Everyone loves coming to work; it’s like summer camp.”

  The nature of business at Buffalo Airways changes too. Sure, Mikey and friends are still running charters to all corners of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but the jobs are fewer and farther between. The Mackenzie Valley run, one of the cornerstones of Buffalo’s winter business, grinds to a halt, as barges use the Mackenzie River to carry hundreds of thousands of pounds of food and other goods to the communities of Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope.

  Planes that have stood long dormant jump to life. The change is particularly acute for the CL-215 water bombers, which are enlisted into firefighting service by various provincial and territorial governments as soon as the snow is off the ground. Every pilot capable of flying one of those strange, amphibious aircraft is scrambled to wherever the whims of nature take him. I traded text messages with Scott Blue as he headed down to Fort McMurray, Alberta; Justin Simle was in Fort Simpson.

  In fact, firefighting is a huge part of Buffalo Airways’ business, accounting for approximately half of its entire annual revenue. I suspect there are a couple of reasons why this critical element of the Buffalo puzzle fails to make it to the television screen with any regularity. First of all, the television crew is simply not around during much of the firefighting season. Perhaps more importantly, Buffalo’s firefighting contracts are all with provincial or territorial governments, which are not particularly keen on having the things they pay for immortalized on video, presumably for insurance and liability reasons.

  It’s too bad, really, since from what I can tell, firefighting is some of the most exciting flying a pilot can do, period. There is nothing commonplace about flying a DC-3, DC-4, or C-46, but for adrenaline junkies, fighting fires is the way to go.

  Rick Sinotte is one of those guys. Small, spry, and boasting a weathered face that you can’t help but like, Rick is a gun for hire, a pilot who works for Buffalo on a contract-by-contract basis as the situation dictates. Rick flies one of Buffalo’s two Beechcraft Barons, which serve a very important role during firefighting operations. They’re the “bird dogs.”

  In the world of aerial firefighting, the bird dog is the spotter, the plane that safely leads water bombers into and out of the action over a fire. Though a variety of aircraft are used as bird dogs around the world, their task is primarily the same. “In conjunction with the air-attack officer, we do the reconnaissance over the fire and assess what resources are needed there to contain that fire,” he told me one warm summer afternoon in the Pilots’ Lounge.

  The air-attack officer then directs the land and air firefighting operation. “We call in the water bombers, then show them what we want them to do and where we want them to drop,” Rick said. “The air-attack officer watches the drop to make sure it goes where we wanted it to go.”

  Rick has been flying for forty-five years, but he still gets excited when talking about the thrill of flying a small plane through clouds of smoke some twenty metres (sixty-five feet) above the burning treetops. “It’s fun flying,” he said with a wry smile. Yet despite the apparent risk of his work, Rick is quick to set the record straight. “It’s like anything else,” he told me. “There’s a real safe way to do it. And that’s what we do.”

  Cameraman Sean Cable has had more than his fair share of experiences during his years on the Ice Pilots NWT crew. Here he gets uncomfortably close to a northern fire under attack by Buffalo’s CL-215 water bombers.

  Firefighting is old hat for a guy like Rick. Over the five decades he’s been a bush pilot, he’s seen and done just about everything there is to see and do behind the controls of a plane. Then there’s Scotty Blue, who sits squarely on the other side of the spectrum. Sure, Scotty has been flying for several years now, but the summer of 2011 is his first in the right seat of the CL-215 water bomber (luckily, he fits!), a position that completely changes his view on life at Buffalo Airways.

  “Honestly, I was wondering what my future at Buffalo would be like,” a hungover Scott confided in me one afternoon as we chowed on a delicious Sunday brunch at Thornton’s Wine & Tapas Room (located right beside the Yellowknife Shooting Club). “But you fly the Duck [CL-215] for a day and you’re like, ‘Holy crap, I may have been thinking about beelining to the airlines, but I don’t have to do that anymore. I might be quite content doing this.’ Honestly, I don’t think there’s too much flying out there that is more fun than water bombing. It’s the most exciting type of flying I’ve ever done. It’s a big reason why I’ve worked at Buffalo as long as I have: I always wanted to get into the water bombers.”

  To hear Scotty tell it, to see the gleam in his eyes, his long arms gesticulating wildly, his voice getting louder with each sentence, is to realize that water bombing is testosterone flying at its best. “You’re on standby, so you’re sitting around the tanker base doing nothing all day long. Then the alarm goes off and you run out to the plane—you don’t even know where you’re going. You start the plane and let the oil warm up, and that’s when they give you the coordinates of your destination.”

  Once in the air, Scotty and his pilot—in conjunction with the bird dog and the air-attack officer—find the closest s
uitable lake and make the first of what can be dozens of round trips between the fire and the lake in a single day. And when the lake is just a few minutes from the fire, the plane can drop fifteen to twenty loads of water every hour. “It can be repetitive like anything, but the rush of it is hard to describe. You look ahead and there’s a whole bunch of planes around, and there’s fire and smoke everywhere.”

  “Sounds scary,” I said.

  “There was a moment earlier this summer where we were flying through some smoke over Slave Lake and it got really dark and I was a little scared. I’ve heard stories of embers coming in through the ventilation system and stuff like that. So you’ve gotta be on your toes.”

  Indeed. Water bombing is among the most technically challenging flying there is. The plane scoops up about 5,445 kilograms (12,000 pounds) of water in seconds, and dumps it even more quickly. With such significant weight changes occurring every few minutes, pilots have to be aware of what’s happening around them at all times, and ready to adapt at a second’s notice.

  One of the most demanding moments comes when the plane skims the water with its probes extended (the probes allow the water to enter the plane’s belly tanks). The resistance at that moment is so great that some have equated it with hitting a brick wall. “You have to go to total take-off power as soon as you hit the water,” Scott said. “Ten seconds later you pull the probes up, the plane starts accelerating, and you take off.”

  The same thing happens in reverse when the water is dumped. “As soon as you drop, the plane instantaneously wants to climb, because you’ve just dropped twelve thousand pounds of water,” he said.

  Ultimately, while water bombing may be the adrenaline rush a guy like Scott needs to stay happy and engaged, it’s not the most predictable employment. Water bomber pilots operate at the whim of Mother Nature. If the fires burn, you fly. If not, you sit. And as the summer of 2011 began to wane, Scott had seen only thirty-two hours in the cockpit of the Duck. It would keep him sufficiently interested and engaged to stay in the Buffalo fold—for the time being. Still, as we sat there pondering Scott’s place in the aviation world, I couldn’t help but wonder if his days in Yellowknife were numbered.