The Ice Pilots (26 page)

All of it speaks to that elusive, soft side of Joe McBryan I had been so longing to find. Just when I was beginning to think that Joe might never open up to me, here I was sharing time and space with some of his most prized possessions. The door of the silver Fox Moth that was Joe’s playhouse as a child is also here, the words “
Mcavoy Diamond Drilling and Development Company, Ltd. Yellowknife, NWT
” still clearly visible in red block lettering.

Among all this, the thousands of bits and pieces that collectively form the backdrop of Joe McBryan’s life, there is one object that says more about Joe than any other. It’s a small, yellowing, canvas-covered case, whose leather corners and leather handle are drying with age. Locked to its handle is an old silver pocket watch, and attached to the pocket watch chain is a nondescript plastic sleeve. Inside that sleeve is a carefully preserved bit of fabric only 10 centimetres long by 2.5 centimetres wide (4 inches by 1 inch). The canvas is the exact same shade of green as the planes in the Buffalo fleet. “Buffalo green,” they call it in Yellowknife.

Joe, it seems, was not the first one to use the colour on an aircraft. The fabric is a piece of canvas from Chuck McAvoy’s Fairchild 82 bush plane, which disappeared in 1964. Joe would spend the next thirty-nine years searching for his mentor.

While Joe was growing up
at the Gordon Lake Mining Camp in the 1950s, Chuck McAvoy was developing his reputation as a living legend, a fearless bush pilot who thought nothing of braving the toughest conditions the North could throw at him to shuttle prospectors, adventurers, and loners to the far-flung reaches of the Arctic. Chuck was everything young Joe wanted to be: strong, brave, independent, and very capable in the pilot’s seat.

Chuck took Joe under his wing and treated him like a little brother. On slow days at Gordon Lake, Chuck threw Joe in his single-engine Cessna and taught him the care and control of an aircraft. Under Chuck’s tutelage, Joe learned the fine art of bush flying: how to assess the weather, land on a frozen lake, read the subtle clues offered by the land, and find your way out to the middle of nowhere—and back home again. To Joe, Chuck was larger than life itself. So when Chuck told Joe that he was going to make a hell of a bush pilot one day, Joe took it to heart.

In Chuck, Joe found a mentor worthy of emulation. In his years of bush flying, McAvoy had developed a reputation as the bad boy of northern skies, a standing he rightly deserved. He would regularly take off and land in the dark, a practice verboten by Transport Canada. He was as renowned for his daring aerial stunts as for slugging it out in the Gold Range bar.

Chuck was much more than a rebel. He participated in almost every search-and-rescue operation mounted in the North and had an uncanny knack for bringing home lost souls well before anyone else—even the air force. In May 1960, Chuck came back with two survivors who had spent almost three weeks stranded in a remote section of the Northwest Territories’ Nahanni Valley. Nobody else had been able to find them.

Given Chuck’s prowess in the cockpit, you can understand Joe’s shock when—on a warm spring day in 1964 with a brand new commercial pilot’s licence in hand—Joe was told that Chuck’s plane had disappeared. Joe had just returned to his home in Hay River, and his first job was going to be flying Chuck’s Fairchild 82. “But when I got to town, they said ‘Chuck’s missing,’ ” Joe recalls.

It was June 9, 1964, the day thirty-one-year old Chuck was supposed to have taken two American geologists—Albert Kunes and Doug Torp—to a remote lake some 600 kilometres (370 miles) northeast of Yellowknife in the canvas-skinned single-engine float plane. They never arrived.

Their disappearance sparked a full-scale search for much of the next two months. In addition to a host of private pilots—all of whom were acquainted with the dynamic personality of Chuck McAvoy—the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) offered search-and-rescue crews from Winnipeg, Vancouver, Nanaimo, and Cold Lake, Alberta, to aid in the hunt. In total, they flew almost 1,300 hours over some 600,000 square kilometres (231,500 square miles) of lonely Barrenlands searching for the downed plane, to no avail.

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.

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.

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.