The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  For Scotty Blue, to step into the cockpit of “the Duck” (a CL-215 water bomber) was a reaffirmation of why he joined Buffalo in the first place. Few airlines can offer young pilots such an eclectic array of aircraft and missions.

  The general ease of warm temperatures and long days does not mean the essence of Buffalo will change anytime soon. As long as Joe McBryan is steering the proverbial ship, there will always be more work to do. Mikey related to me a conversation he has with Joe about this time every year:

  Mikey: “I want to go on vacation this month.”

  Joe: “Don’t take it this month. This may be the month where we get Electra work.”

  Mikey: “Okay, well, how about March?”

  Joe: “March? Well, you never know, we always do fuel hauls in March.”

  Mikey: “Okay, I want to take it in June.”

  Joe: “June? No way, that’s firefighting season.”

  Mikey: “Okay, what about September?”

  Joe: “Well, you can’t then, because that’s after fire season and everyone else is on vacation.”

  “Every month is the wrong month.” Mikey griped to me. “It’s always two or three more months down the road.”

  Mikey says there’s no seasonal rhyme or reason to life at Buffalo. “It’s not really by month or season,” he says. “You can have a really slow week followed by the craziest, busiest week you’ve ever imagined.”

  This lack of predictability seems to have been a huge factor in shaping Mikey’s personality. He is as dedicated a worker as anyone I have ever met, but he seems to have no plans for the future, for either himself or the business. Mikey is living in the moment in every respect, and will deal with change if and when it’s thrown at him. The result is a sense of liberation few people ever know.

  “None of this is planned,” he said as we relaxed over a cold one on his deck overlooking Back Bay. “If you drive from New York to L.A., you don’t plan every rest stop along the way. It’s the journey, right? And you can never guess what’s around the next corner.”

  I find Mikey’s take on things refreshing, albeit a bit uncomfortable when he starts talking matter-of-factly about the end of Buffalo Airways. Like so many people, I have come to love this quirky, renegade airline. We want it to exist, because we need to know that there is more to this world than the homogeneous, fast food, cookie-cutter crap most of us choose to ensconce ourselves in. Mikey is not bound by the same shackles.

  “Look at Joe,” he continued. “He went to bed one night and he was one of a hundred people flying these old airplanes. And the next day he woke up and he’s the last one. And he’ll either die or retire. But he can’t really give up the world that he created. And it can’t exist without him. Shit, we can barely exist with him sometimes.”

  Mikey seems to embrace his role in the scheme of things here. If Joe is the Ghost of Christmas Past and Rod the Ghost of Christmas Present, then Mikey is definitely the Ghost of Christmas Future. “For me, Buffalo Airways is the here and now. I don’t care about the stories of twenty years ago about some guy who’s dead now; it’s already happened. I want to know what’s going to happen next. I don’t want to read the history books; I’m looking at Google News because I want to see what’s happening now. Even newspapers are too old for me.”

  Just as all the McBryans perform a different job for the company, this focus on different parts of Buffalo’s history—past, present, and future—seems to work. Joe is a link to the past, a bygone era whose old-school traits of hard work and “get ’er done” have kept Buffalo viable in a competitive industry with equipment that most people wrote off decades ago. Rod keeps things going on a daily basis. Without his expertise, the planes don’t fly now, and the whole thing comes crashing down, perhaps literally. Mikey is the visionary. For him, Buffalo is about so much more than the airplanes. It’s about opportunity, and it’s about seeing the world through a different lens.

  “My dad and my brother just don’t get it. My dad says why waste your time talking to a writer and making a book when you can be outside shovelling the walkway. But I say why waste my time shovelling the walkway when I can be talking to a writer and making a book?

  “My brother says, ‘Why bother?’ I say, ‘Why not?’ ”

  You can’t argue with the guy’s success. He’s one of the stars of a successful TV program. His apparel business is growing at a dizzying rate. He’s got a book being written about him and his company; a website—Buffalo Airways Virtual—dedicated exclusively to fans around the world who want to simulate Buffalo flights; and even a few copycat shows “inspired” by Buffalo (Arctic Air, Flying Wild Alaska, and Dust Up). So when Mikey talks about an animated series à la Thomas the Tank Engine, featuring Buffalo’s planes, I respect the idea’s potential.

  To Mikey, Buffalo’s potential client base is limited, which is why looking outside the company’s traditional revenue streams makes sense. “There are about fifty people in Canada who would be willing to pay sixty thousand dollars to charter one of our airplanes,” he told me, adding that the TV show has probably increased their business by about 10 percent. “But on a good week, we’ll get a million people watching Ice Pilots.

  “We’re no longer an airline; we’re a brand.”

  A big part of that brand is Mikey’s Buffalo Airwear store, which has seen its sales grow exponentially since Ice Pilots came on the air. “I went from selling T-shirts on a rack behind my desk in my office to what we have now,” Mikey said. And what they have now is quite something. The Buffalo Airwear store is a dedicated space in the Buffalo terminal, conveniently located for DC-3 passengers and curious passersby alike. On my first trip to Yellowknife, the store was manned by only one person, manager Peter Magill. On a return trip a few weeks later, I was surprised to find that Peter had hired a full-time assistant whose sole responsibility was to fill Internet orders.

  And while those Buffalo commodities are red-hot now, things were a little tighter back in the early days of what Joe calls “Mikey’s T-shirt business.” “Back then, I really only sold to Europeans and the staff,” Mikey told me as we took stock of the hoodies, T-shirts and even underwear filling the shelves of the little shop. “I had to be diligent because profit margins were so thin—no freebies, no deals. I even bought my own: I have never, ever taken a T-shirt for free. The same goes for my father and my brother.”

  Things have certainly changed. Not that Mikey is throwing product at people (I was secretly hoping he’d toss me a goodwill hoodie or some other kind of swag; it never happened), but he could if he wanted. He tells me that he is now the second-biggest buyer from North Vancouver supplier and printer Bold Merchandise, behind only Canadian rock band Billy Talent.

  Yet the store represents much more than a profit centre for Mikey. Here is where he can be truly autonomous, where he can reach his creative and business potential. It’s an atmosphere quite unlike that inside the hangar. “My father micromanages everything else. It’s so bad that he has to sign every single purchase order. If you want to buy a can of WD-40, he has to approve it first.”

  Joe may be controlling when it comes to the airline side of things, but you can’t argue with his success. Buffalo owns almost every single plane in its fleet, something few other airlines can boast. Mikey was reluctant to get into specifics about dollars and cents with me, but I could tell he struggles with the “multi-millionaire” tag that the show has bestowed upon Joe and the rest of the McBryan clan. “It’s still very expensive for the products that make the planes run: the hangar, the heat, the people,” Mikey told me one night as we took in his evening dose of reality TV—this time it was Pawn Stars, an American show that chronicles the trials and triumphs of daily activities at Las Vegas’s Gold & Silver Pawn Shop.

  “Aviation is a very thin homeostasis, meaning all the money you make has to go back into the company to make more money. You only make
money when you’re broke and you steal from yourself before the sheriff gets it or you sell out.”

  That grim reality is one of the primary drivers of Mikey’s endless attempts to diversify the Buffalo brand. Yet diversification comes at a cost, and Mikey knows it. It wasn’t long before our conversation turned to the fact that as much as Mikey has done for Buffalo’s bottom line, he is also losing his connection to its core business: flying stuff (and people) around the North.

  He revealed this to me one afternoon in his office. “Look, I’m sitting here with you, and I’m not out there looking at the planes. In some respects it’s like selling out.” And while most of us may cringe at the notion of selling out, Mikey sees it as a necessary step in the evolutionary chain of any business that wants to grow.

  “Say you had your favourite kind of pop from your hometown,” he says, “Canmore Cola. You knew the owner, and you’d go get your can of pop, and feel good about it. Then you tell all your friends and they tell all their friends and it gets more and more popular.

  “Only now, his supply doesn’t meet the demand, and he has to get a bigger store. He keeps growing because the demand is there. Eventually, he’ll be forced to go national, and in doing so, he turns his back on the person who got him there in the first place: you. People think that’s selling out, but you’re virtually forced to do it.”

  And if that is the route Buffalo eventually follows, so be it. Mikey will have no regrets. “The more I go down the rabbit hole of opportunity, the more I’m losing what is at our core: Buffalo Airways. Because sending a DC-3 T-shirt to Paris has nothing to do with the DC-3 flying to Hay River.”

  That is where the Buffalo symbiosis kicks in again, though. Mikey may be the one pushing the company to places it has never been before, but Joe¸ Rod, Kathy, and Sharon are the ones keeping the planes flying to the places that they’ve always been. The core business, it seems, is in good hands.

  “Joe’s the one keeping it real,” Mikey said one Saturday afternoon as we watched the DC-3—with Joe at the helm—rumble down the Yellowknife runway on its way back to Hay River. “The more he tells you to fuck off, the more Buffalo is staying legit. Because once that plane stops flying, everything else comes to a grinding halt. Our heart will stop beating.”

  This reality has not stopped Mikey from being Mikey, though, and revelling in all Ice Pilots has done for him. In short, Mikey loves being a celebrity.

  For a kid from a small town in the Northwest Territories, being thrust into the public eye can be intoxicating. I can see it in Mikey’s eyes when we talk about the concept of Mikey As Celebrity. “For me,” he says, “the TV show opens up the world. Before Ice Pilots, I was stuck seven days a week in the hanger. Now I can go on Global TV news, on Canada AM in Toronto. I get to meet authors, people I would otherwise never have met.”

  It’s not like Mikey hides the fact that he loves the attention Ice Pilots has granted him. He calls himself “shameless” when it comes to publicity. Nevertheless, Mikey never puts on a false front for the camera or his fans. He is who he is.

  “I find that most people are scared of criticism,” he tells me one morning as we drive to the hangar in the glory of twenty-four-hour sunshine. “They run their lives based on what they think other people will think of them. It really holds people back.”

  Not Mikey. Both on and off the screen, he wins his way into your heart by marching to the beat of his own drummer. On one of the most well-loved episodes in Season Two, Mikey and Joe venture to England to inspect a few Electras that a British airline is trying to sell. Joe spends his time elbow-deep in the operations of the craft; Mikey provides comic relief. At one point, Mikey heads down to the local pub with a bunch of employees from the airline, his face completely painted in support of England’s soccer team, which was playing in the World Cup that evening.

  Later, fall-down drunk—he earns his stripes by guzzling a yard of ale (about 4.5 pints) without coming up for air—the youngest McBryan has forged a relationship with the seller that Joe could never manage. In some ways, that episode speaks again to the symbiosis between father and son: Joe makes sure the planes are fit enough to join the Buffalo fleet; Mikey cements ties to the client with the mortar of hops and barley.

  As it did in England, Mikey’s celebrity status often comes in handy on the work front. There are times, however, when being one of the focal points of a hit TV show pays social dividends as well: over the course of Ice Pilots, Mikey has made loads of friends, both the Facebook kind and the real kind. Of these, perhaps none mean more to Mikey than Bobby Hanson and Serge Pharand, two very successful Ottawa entrepreneurs Mikey befriended at the EAA AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a few years back.

  When November 27, 2010—Mikey’s twenty-eighth birthday—rolled around and Mikey found himself with no plans for the big day, he called Bobby and Serge. Within minutes, the plans were set: he and his best friend Austin were on their way to Ottawa. Other than for university, it was the first time Mikey had been out of the north without doing something related to aviation.

  “We land in Ottawa, and Serge shows up driving a fully decaled Buffalo Airways Chevy HHR,” Mikey told me, an ever-widening grin on his face. “They take us out for this big, fancy meal and people are recognizing me left and right. It was crazy.”

  The visit also took Mikey and Austin to Ottawa-area air and space museums, where they were treated like royalty. “They were basically throwing the keys at me, said I could be in whatever plane I wanted to be in.” Mikey took advantage of the offer on several occasions, though the highlight was his chance to sit in a plane he’s admired since he was a boy: the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, a single-seat fighter plane used extensively during World War II.

  “Then they took us to an Ottawa Senators game,” Mikey continues. “We had rinkside seats: leather seats, the whole nine yards. Afterwards we got to meet Mike Fisher; I got my jersey signed by him after the game.”

  As if this wasn’t enough for someone as hockey-crazed as Mikey, the trip was only going to get better. For if there’s one thing that Mikey McBryan likes as much as hockey—perhaps even better—it’s establishments that combine beer with scantily clad women. “Serge and Bobby dropped us off in Hull, Quebec, at the most magnificent strip club I’ve ever seen!”

  The next morning it was off to Serge and Bobby’s private hangar, where Mikey found an astonishing array of aircraft “They open the doors and say, ‘Whatever you want... it’s yours to fly,’ ” he said, still only half-believing the event really happened.

  “I had always wanted to fly in a fighter jet, and they had two Russian L-39 MiG training jets. While we waited for the pilot to show up, we went in a Pitts Special [a two-seat open-cockpit plane designed for aerobatics]. Now I’m completely fucking hungover from the strip club the night before, and here I am in the back of this plane doing full loops and cart rolls.” The going didn’t get any easier for Mikey when he eventually got in the cockpit of the fighter jet and found himself again doing loops, only this time at speeds in excess of 563 kilometres (350 miles) per hour.

  Yet as much as he enjoys experiences born of his celebrity, Mikey still struggles to understand why people are so fascinated with him and his little world. In fact, it seems Mikey and his fellow stars can’t go anywhere outside of Yellowknife without being recognized. In one instance, Mikey and a friend were in Vancouver, where they decided to take in Conan O’Brien’s Legally Prohibited show. When the pair started walking up the aisle from their second-row seats to get more beer, Mikey was floored when audience members started screaming his name. “Here I am, star-struck because I’m seeing Conan O’Brien,” he said, “and people are stopping me for pictures! That’s when I really realized things had changed.”

  On that same trip, Mikey and his friend were sharing a few beers on the patio of a local pub, when Mikey’s iPhone alerted him of an incoming message. “I have Google alerts set to
search the Internet for my name,” he said. Turned out a woman at the next table was Twittering to all the world that Mikey McBryan was having a beer right beside her.

  Mikey’s insight into the evolution of celebrity may be the one thing that keeps him from losing control. For as much as he loves it, he also knows that there is a dark side—a real dark side—to fame. “As hard as it is, you can’t allow yourself to be changed by fame,” he said one night as we stumbled home after yet another session at Surly’s. “Otherwise it starts to wear at you, and you get to the point where you’re at a restaurant screaming at the waiter because he doesn’t recognize you. It’s very insidious to who you are. You can see how people get caught up in it.”

  It certainly helps that Mikey and crew are in Yellowknife, perhaps one of the most down-to-earth places on the planet. “You get the odd snide remark,” Mikey said, “but luckily I hang out with a bunch of tough rampies who can take care of people who make snide remarks.”

  But for the time being, Mikey is happy to roll with the benefits of stardom, whether it be flying in a Russian fighter jet or having women pay more attention to him—way more attention—than they otherwise would. And the show has even made it easier for Mikey to handle the daily grind of life at Buffalo Airways.

  Situations that used to upset him are now seen in a whole new light. “When you’re not used to seeing it on a sixty-two-inch HD television, you sometimes think that things are not going to work out and there’s going to be a real disaster,” he said. “Ice Pilots has shown me that things do work out, and there are triumphs.”