The Ice Pilots (17 page)

It was later determined that both of those crashes were caused by something called a “whirl mode,” which happens when a faulty engine creates a harmonic vibration so powerful that it rips a wing off a plane. Those structural problems have since been overcome, but the Electra’s days were numbered before they really even started.

The Electra was
also doomed by circumstance. Given its initial problems, the plane was sent back to the drawing board to have its engine mount fixed. In the meantime, Boeing introduced the Boeing 707, one of the first—and most successful—of the early commercial jets. Most of the world’s major airlines passed over the Electra for the 707.

/1P-3 Orion, has become one of the most successful planes ever built by Lockheed.

For Buffalo, the Electra is a perfect fit: it’s older and less expensive than modern-day aircraft, but just as capable at moving tons of cargo from origin to destination. Rod McBryan agrees: it flies well, functions wells in the extreme arctic weather, and it’s versatile. And perhaps most importantly, it burns jet fuel. Joe, the piston-engine diehard, struggled at first with the idea of the Electra, but he has since come to recognize the value the plane adds to Buffalo’s business model.

For Justin, the Electra is a touch more complicated than the other planes. “An airplane is an airplane,” he said through his cigarette smoke as we drove through Yellowknife in his hard-living Jeep Wrangler. “Ultimately they’re all the same. But I would say the Electra is our most complicated airplane. Therefore, everything from its actual systems to what we’ve put together for a training syllabus is more complicated.”

I can understand what they’re both saying. Other than the Electra, Buffalo flies piston-pounding internal combustion engines. The company’s expertise and skill is nested there, not with gas turbine engines. And while you may be thinking “an engine’s an engine,” nothing could be further from the truth. Asking a DC-3 mechanic to work on the Electra without the proper training is like asking a heart surgeon to operate on your brain. Couple that difference with the Electra’s hyper-complicated electrical system, and you can see why Joe has to go out of his way to bring in Electra engineers to work almost exclusively on that plane.

“The Electra is a bit of a stretch for us,” Mikey told me, “but we brought it in because we can’t get avgas fuel in the High Arctic.”

Complications notwithstanding, the Electra fits Buffalo’s needs. It is an absolute beast when it comes to payload. The plane can hold as much as 15,000 kilograms (33,000 pounds) of cargo, good news for the people of the outlying communities who depend on Buffalo to keep them fed, clothed, and warm. And while all this cargo loading and delivery may mean big dollars for Buffalo, it translates to big stress for the woman who keeps the proverbial ship afloat when it comes to organizing, managing, and distributing the company’s wares: cargo manager Kelly Jurasevich.

Thankless job? Perhaps. But Kelly handles her professional responsibilities kindly and efficiently. She gets the job done, and somehow manages to keep people as happy as possible at times when humour seems in short supply.

Kelly is primarily responsible for sending food and hard goods to Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope. Without Kelly, the stores in those towns (each has two stores, typically a Northern store and a Co-Op) would have bare shelves. On a typical shipping day, Kelly organizes and prioritizes about 40,000 kilograms (88,000 pounds) of goods, a phenomenon that occurs at least twice every week. The flight plan she concocts decides which store gets what, and when.

“You can’t give everything to everyone at the same time,” she told me in the Buffalo offices one day. “So I know who to not piss off, who I can bump, and who I can’t. If I don’t get those potato chips to Seymour at Great Bear Co-Op, is he ever pissed!”

Add the weather vagaries, and you can see how stress is Kelly’s constant companion. “In the summer you gotta make sure the frozen stuff doesn’t thaw, and in the winter you gotta make sure the perishables don’t freeze. It can be really draining.”

Kelly may be drained
by her professional responsibilities, but she’s the kind of person who always reserves a lot for the people in her life. The instant I met her, I knew she had one of those rare personalities that draws people to them. Kelly’s smile lights up her face, the hearts of those around her, the rooms she walks into. Like so many who have been lucky enough to meet this woman, I immediately felt like she was my friend.

To listen to Kelly’s life story is also an unbelievable experience. She smokes like a chimney and swears like a trucker. At the same time, she is the most lovable, mothering person you could ever hope to meet. And how she came to live in Yellowknife with her husband, Juan Trescher, is a tale that the finest fiction writers could not imagine.

With a case of Molson Canadian, Kelly and Juan’s favourite beer, sitting on the counter, we dove into a couple of Caesars one late afternoon, the sun filtering through the windows of the mobile home she and Juan share. Drinking, I came to realize, is as much a fact of life in Yellowknife as swearing. Luckily, I’m okay with both.

Kelly was born the youngest of four children in Innisfail, a central Alberta town of around seven thousand people just south of Red Deer. When she was only seven years old, her mother succumbed to cancer; seven years later, her father died from alcoholism-related complications, sending Kelly on a journey that saw her enter foster care, live in a home full of bikers, marry a man who tried to kill her several times, move to Oregon for a second marriage, and then move to rural Vancouver Island, where she “hooked up” with Juan, to whom she’s been married for thirteen years.

Kelly’s road to the North started when Juan found himself out of work on Vancouver Island and received word of a possible opportunity: Buffalo Airways, a unique airline operating out of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, needed a flight engineer on the Electra. Juan, who happened to be an Electra flight engineer, jumped at the job. Kelly had little interest in moving to a place she considered the end of the Earth. She wasn’t counting on being sucked into the Buffalo vortex.

One day Rod McBryan asked Juan what kind of work Kelly did. “So I go in and they drag me into cargo,” she recalls. “And all of a sudden they’re showing me around like I have this job. I don’t know an airport code from a hole in the wall. All of a sudden they’re like, ‘Oh, you got the job, Kelly.’
What
job?”

To make matters worse, Kelly’s boss quit two weeks later, leaving Kelly to figure out Buffalo’s cargo system on her own. Luckily, a few other Buffalo staff pitched in during the transition, though that didn’t prevent Kelly from getting well acquainted with a bedfellow she has had ever since: stress. “I didn’t sleep for about six fucking months,” she says. “I cried myself to sleep every night.”

Things didn’t go particularly smoothly for Juan either. Like most employees, he had his predictable run-ins with Joe’s temper. But Juan was not one to stand idly by when he felt wrongly attacked. So one day he told Joe what was on his mind, and quit. Juan is now a flight engineer for neighbouring First Air, working on the biggest cargo plane in the North: the L382G Hercules.

Kelly is still at Buffalo and has since mastered the nuances of her job, though that doesn’t mean she loves it. Yet as much as she bitches and moans about her life in Yellowknife and dreams about living on a farm in Alberta, Kelly is quick to change her tune when she starts talking about the people she works with. From the rampies who seek her out for some motherly advice, to the store managers living in small communities along the Mackenzie River, Kelly lives for people.

“In our world today, everyone takes everything for granted. Nobody gives two shits about other people. And I was taught to do unto others as you want done unto you. My dad died in my arms when I was fourteen. And I had a hard fucking life. But I love what he instilled in me, and I will do that until the day I die. And I don’t care if I ever get anything back, but I know I want to help people.”

That’s why when someone at Buffalo has a problem, Kelly gets the call. She knows when the rampies have been hurt by yet another scathing attack from Joe or someone else above them in the Buffalo food chain. That’s when she calls them into her office and gives them a hug, a drink, or just a safe place to break down and cry.

“I will never push them aside because I’m too busy,” she says. “It’s what you have to do. Life is way too goddamn short.” For Kelly, life is not about trips, toys, or material distractions. That outlook likely came at the hands of her great-grandmother Annie, with whom Kelly had an inseparable bond as a young girl. Annie taught her that life was a simple undertaking: focus on kindness and caring, and the rest will come. For Kelly, Annie’s life had a wholesomeness about it that is difficult to match in today’s world.

“That woman taught me everything I know,” she recalls with a fondness that’s palpable even through the blue haze of cigarette smoke hanging in the air between us and an ever-growing mountain of empty Canadians. “How to can, and how to cook. She taught me about the purity and simplicity of life.”

Of the myriad stories Kelly goes on to tell me about Annie through the deepening—and ever drunker—night, there is one I’ll never forget. Annie’s husband Jacques was a hangman in Scotland who wanted to make a better life for himself in North America. So Jacques decided to take a boat ride across the Atlantic on a ship called the
Titanic.
With a few hours to go before the ship departed, Jacques decided to visit a local pub to help pass the time. “He got so fuckin’ drunk he missed the boat!” Kelly said in a roar of laughter.

With that, we bid farewell to one another. The night had turned dark and cold, the hour was late, and Kelly had to be up in fewer hours than I cared to admit. As I settled into the cab, my arms full of Kelly’s home-canned pickles, beets, and heirloom tomatoes, I fell asleep knowing that Buffalo’s Yellowknife-based cargo operation was in good hands.

· Capacity: Five crew (three flight deck) and 98 passengers

· production: 170

· Length: 31.85 metres (104 feet, 6 inches)

· Wingspan: 30.18 metres (99 feet)

· Height: 10 metres (32 feet 10 inches)

· Maximum speed: 721 km/h (448 mph) at 3,660 metres (12,000 feet)

· Cruise speed: 600 km/h (373 mph)

· Range: 3,540 kilometres (2,200 miles) with maximum payload 4,455 kilometres (2,770 miles) with 7,938 kilograms (17,500 pounds) payload

· Empty weight: 26,036 kilograms (57,400 pounds)

· Maximum takeoff weight: 51,256 kilograms (113,000 pounds)

No matter
where you are in the North—from the glacier-scoured hills of Baffin Island to the spruce forests of the Mackenzie River Valley—spring is a glorious time. Yellowknife is no different. The long, dark, cold, and lonely days of winter slowly start to ease their vise-like grip on the land—and on your heart. The black of darkness gives way to grey. Then, with a sudden rush, the golden glow of sunshine charges across the land, and light dominates the days and nights. Believe it or not, warmth soon follows.