The Ice Pilots (21 page)

Among other things,
the formation of Richardson’s Western Canada Airways helped bring new aircraft into the Canadian fold. The company soon placed an order for twelve Fokker Universals from the United States. The Universal boasted radial, air-cooled engines designed and built by aviation manufacturer Pratt & Whitney. The Universal’s design soon became the industry standard, a position it held until the early 1930s.

It wasn’t long before those little Fokkers were making their mark on life in the bush. In one case, a New York businessman needed financial papers to be signed by a prospector living in the gold fields of remote northern Ontario. The telegram was sent from New York to Hudson, Ontario, the base of Western Canada Airways, where Doc Oaks then flew the telegram to Narrow River and snowshoed to the prospector’s cabin. The two men then hiked back to the plane and flew to Sioux Lookout, where the prospector signed the papers at a local bank. A three-week expedition had been reduced to less than a day.

But the Fokkers were not without their shortcomings, which opened the door for other bush planes to fly through. In 1928, de Havilland Aircraft of Canada began assembling two-seater Gipsy Moths outside of Toronto. The Reid Aircraft Company was established at Montreal that same year; in 1929, the Fairchild Aviation Corporation built a large aircraft manufacturing plant in Montreal.

The creation of Canadian Airways—a merger between Richardson’s Western Canada Airways with the Aviation Corporation of Canada—in November 1930 continued the development of new planes. In 1931, Canadian Airways introduced the Junkers Ju 52 (“Iron Annie”), at that point the largest single-engine aircraft ever to grace Canadian skies. From the Yukon Territory to Quebec, the Ju 52 made a name for itself by the incredible amounts of freight it could carry.

Soon thereafter, the Fairchild Super 71 was introduced, the first aircraft ever designed in Canada for bush operations. It was followed by the Fairchild 82. In mid-1935, the first plane ever completely designed and built in Canada—the Noorduyn Norseman—rolled off the assembly line at the Noorduyn plant in Montreal. The Norseman was the quintessential Canadian bush plane. Fast, roomy, comfortable, and economical, it could operate on wheels, skis, or floats, and carried up to ten people. And as I would go on to learn late in the summer of 2011, the Norseman was such a good plane that it still flies today.

While the Norseman may have been the first bush plane built on Canadian soil, it is certainly not the only one to make its mark on the country’s bush flying history. From the mid-1940s to early 1950s, de Havilland Canada developed and built a pair of planes that would become as important in plying the skies of the remote Canadian wilderness as any other: the DHC-2 Beaver and the DHC-3 Otter. The Beaver was characterized by a host of refinements that allowed it to operate in cold climates, including extremely short takeoff and landing capabilities. The Otter capitalized on the successful design of the Beaver, but made it significantly bigger. Both planes were so popular that they were further modified, into the Turbo Beaver (a turboprop-driven version of the Beaver) and the DHC-6 Twin Otter (an expanded, twin-engine version of the Otter). The Beaver played such a huge role in Canadian aviation history that in 1987 the Canadian Engineering Centennial Board named it one of the most significant Canadian engineering achievements of the twentieth century.

Bush flying changed the way people thought about travel in Canada and the accessibility of the North. The North once stood as the last great untamed wilderness on Earth, and one that required superhuman effort and will (not to mention years) to conquer, but by the 1930s you could charter a plane and fly almost anywhere, anytime. With the establishment of fuel caches in long-forgotten places and the operation of planes on floats or skis, the northland’s utter isolation had become a thing of the past. Whether you were a geologist or trapper, missionary or entrepreneur, the North was open to you.

As long as you had a good engineer on hand, that is.

For as long
as planes have been in the skies, pilots have received most, if not all, of the glory associated with flying. The movie
Catch Me If You Can
portrayed the commercial pilot as nothing short of a rock star, with hordes of giggling flight attendants in tow. Early bush flying was nothing like that, and relied heavily on the behind-the-scenes guys who kept the planes functional: the engineers.

Back then, flight engineers were mechanics, and their responsibilities were myriad. Imagine a 1920s-era plane floating on a mosquito-infested lake in the Northwest Territories, or worse yet, in the darkness and –40 temperatures of mid-winter. The engine won’t start, your supply of food is limited, and you have no way of communicating with the outside world. You had two choices: start swimming, or make the plane airworthy again. The latter was the engineer’s responsibility. Bush pilots relied heavily on their engineers to keep the planes in the air.

Not surprisingly, engineers were also charged with keeping their planes in good working order to make sure mishaps didn’t happen in the first place, especially in winter, when the risk of mechanical failure increased substantially. So when a long day of flying drew to a close, the engineer’s day was just beginning. He had to drain the oil from the engine and carry it to the nearest shelter, where it would be kept warm overnight to prevent freezing. The next morning, he would pour the warmed oil back into the engine, which was also being thawed out, usually from a fire pot placed underneath. If the engine refused to start, the oil was re-drained out and the process started anew.

Hardships such as these helped early aviators to discover that planes built for more hospitable climates were not perfectly suited for the rugged conditions of Canadian wilderness and winters. Ideally, a plane needed several characteristics to be bush-worthy. Most importantly, it needed to be able to take off and land in small spaces. The wings of a typical bush plane were on top of its fuselage, which helped prevent contact with any overgrowth in the landing area.

Bush planes also embraced what’s called a tail-dragger wheel configuration, where two main wheels sit forward of the plane’s centre of gravity and a smaller wheel supports the tail, leaving the plane sitting in a decidedly “uphill” slant. The tail-dragger configuration is more suited to the rough landing areas of the Canadian bush, because it increases the upward angle of the plane upon takeoff, landing, and taxi, which affords the propeller more clearance from the ground (and rocks, logs, bushes, and other things that might wreak havoc on it).

Bush flying in Canada
has certainly changed since those days. The country’s northern reaches remain remote and inhospitable, though access has greatly increased. There are more gravel airstrips than ever before, so the need to land on water or the tundra is not quite as acute as it once was. As a result, the smaller, more mobile, and more versatile bush planes of the past—although still ubiquitous—are not as vital as they once were. With more developed airstrips, larger planes such as the DC-3 have become more common.

Given that change, one might assume that the number of bush pilots is dwindling too. And that may be true. I couldn’t help but think that when it came to the classic Yellowknife bush pilot, well, there ain’t that many around. Then I met Carl Clouter.

Truth be told, I had never heard of Carl Clouter until I went to Yellowknife. He is not one of those famous bush pilots whose names are spoken in hushed, reverential tones, like some of his contemporaries. But if ever there were a human being who embodied the essence of what a bush pilot dreams to be, it’s Carl Clouter.

I was driving along Yellowknife’s still-hard-packed and deadly slick roads on an unseasonably warm April day when I decided to look Carl up. Though we had never met, he invited me over right away. Carl’s voice sings of bush piloting. There’s an ease to it, a relaxed, hell-I-know-I-can-handle-just-about-anything-thrown-at-me quality that makes you feel comfortable right away.

“You just drive down to Weaver and Devore,” he said, referencing the hardware, clothing, and trading company that is an Old Town Yellowknife institution, “make a right, drive out onto the ice and look for the yellow plane in front of my place.”

Sure, no problem. Just make a right at Weaver and Devore, turn right, drive out onto the... onto the... We are
so
not in Kansas anymore.

Carl, it seems, counts himself among a vibrant population of Yellowknifers that prefers the waters of Great Slave Lake’s Back Bay to the city streets. In other words, Carl is a houseboater, who lives off the grid in a small floating trailer that affords a waterfront view in every direction. When the lake is ice-free (as it is for a frightening few months a year), Carl’s trailer bobs in the waters a few hundred metres from shore and is only accessible by boat. When the lake is frozen, though, getting to Carl’s place is as simple as driving across the ice—which I do, albeit a little disconcertedly.

No matter how much experience you have doing it, driving on ice—solid ice, with nothing underneath but water—is an unsettling experience. I drove slowly... really slowly... even though the packed layer of snow sitting on top offered a modicum of traction.

In addition to thoughts of my vehicle sinking to the bottom of Great Slave Lake, the other thing that rattled my cage ever so slightly was the fact that there were no signs or lanes or lines on the road to guide me to my destination. Let’s face it, driving is a structured undertaking. You drive on the right-hand side of the road, stay in your lane, obey the signs and traffic lights. But once I drove down what seemed to be the boat launch beside Weaver and Devore and out on to the open ice, structure went out the window. It was just me and the wide open spaces.

In all honesty, the freedom was a little frightening. Carl’s house—frozen firmly in the metre-thick ice of Back Bay—was visible in the distance, the canary-yellow plane an obvious landmark, but I didn’t know which way to go. Do I check right and left for passing dog teams? Will a snowmobiler give me the finger if I don’t offer the right of way? Luckily, my fear was unfounded, if only for the simple fact that nobody else was driving on the road. So I did what came naturally: I drove straight for Carl’s houseboat.

Engaging and quick to smile, and with a full mop of long, tousled grey hair that nearly covered his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows, Carl was at the door waiting when I pulled up, my shiny rental car a dead giveaway in a place where most vehicles boast that hardened look that speaks more to function than form—up here, vehicles bear the scrapes and bruises of driving on roads carved out of permafrost, where encounters with salt, rocks, and animals occur more commonly than Yellowknifers would like to think.

Before long, we were sitting inside Carl’s cozy, wood-heated home. Canada has always had a distinct odour for me: the rich, earthy, and rustic smell of burning wood. I first noticed it while working as a volunteer in northern Ontario, and the smell was present in almost every small Canadian community I’ve lived in, except on Baffin Island, where trees are non-existent. Yet from Batchawana Bay to Fort McPherson, all I needed to do was walk down the street on a spring, fall, or winter day, and invariably I would smell woodsmoke. Say what you want about the environmental effects of burning wood, the scent is glorious.

Carl lit his pipe and the warm living room air thickened as the sweet smell of pipe smoke mingled with the scent of burning wood. I sat back in the couch and enveloped myself in the scene, as Carl, whose thick moustache quivered delightfully every time he spoke, began to weave tales of a life as a bush pilot, philosopher, miner, prospector, and entrepreneur.

A Gander, Newfoundland, native, Carl was already experienced in the left seat when he moved to Yellowknife in 1973 on a three-month contract to help out Jimmy McAvoy, who needed a new chief pilot for McAvoy Air Service. “Jimmy made it well worth my while to stay with him rather than go back to water bombing, so I stayed with him for twenty-three years,” Carl said in his heavy Newfoundland accent.

By 1990, Carl had started his own company, Edzo Air, which primarily flew members of the Dogrib nation on charters between the hamlets in the area. At any time of the year, Carl and his Cessna 206 could be seen flying between Rae-Edzo, a pair of sister communities just north of Yellowknife, and Whatì (then called Lac La Martre), Gameti (Rae Lakes), and Wekweti (Snare Lakes), a trio of hamlets about 200 kilometres (125 miles) northwest of Yellowknife.

Like Buffalo Joe, sixty-eight-year-old Carl strikes me as one of those people who has managed to carve out a professional life for himself doing exactly what he was put on Earth to do: fly. “It’s not a job,” he said with a wry smile, “it’s the greatest profession in the world.”

Where Carl and Joe diverge, though, is in what they do when they’re up in the air. While Joe seems to use flying as a way to cleanse his mind of his myriad responsibilities, Carl is always looking down from the air—at geological formations on the ground, that is. Carl is not only a pilot, but a prospector as well, two vocations that go hand in hand.