The Ice Pilots (11 page)

Jimmy is well aware
of the rampie routine. Each van represents a different route in the Buffalo Air Express chain, which Joe began in 1983 to provide the company with a consistent revenue stream. Goods are trucked to Hay River and then flown to Yellowknife, where they continue their distribution. From there, the packages continue their journey. Many are hand-delivered by the rampies to various residences and businesses across Yellowknife. Those bound for the Mackenzie River Valley communities of Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope are delivered on the Buffalo planes that also carry groceries to those towns throughout the year. Packages destined for communities not on Buffalo’s regularly scheduled routes are handed off to Buffalo’s partners, which finish the delivery.

The details of this intricate distribution web were lost on me, though, as I fumbled with package after package, desperately trying to remember which van serves which part of Yellowknife.

“Kingland Ford?” I cried out as captain A.J. Decoste tossed me a bumper.

“That’s ours!” said Larry as I struggled to find space in the quickly filling cube van that Larry drives every morning through the streets of Yellowknife.

The scene was one of organized chaos: boxes and packages flying in every direction, the air filled with the smokescreen of localized ice fog, and bleary-eyed rampies calling to one another. The cold, it would seem, affects nobody. Nobody but me, that is. It’s hardest on the feet.

“Uh,” I mumbled to Larry. “I’m just gonna step inside the hangar for a minute. I, uh, have to interview Mikey.”

He eyed me suspiciously, but nodded his assent. Clearly I don’t have the rampie work ethic. But I don’t want to be a pilot, either, so I’m okay with it.

Rampies who join the Buffalo team are the subject of an informal pool. Other staff members size up the new recruits, then place bets on how long it will take before they quit, the rigours of the job too much for their sorry asses to take. In the rampie odds-making world, I’m a long shot.

My time on the ramp was not intended only to give the boys a helping hand. I was also hoping to impress Joe, show him that I’m not just a pencil-pusher with what the boys up here call “bankers’ hands.” I’m pretty sure he saw me when he emerged from the cockpit, but just to make sure, I went out of my way to cross paths with him in the hangar. “Morning, Joe!” I exclaimed as cheerfully as possible.

“Morning,” he mumbled, giving me as little regard as possible.

“I’m just working out on the ramp if you need me!” I called after him, but it was too late. He disappeared around a corner, and I knew enough not to run after him.

After my too-brief hypothermia-prevention visit to the hangar, I was back on the ramp, finishing the unloading of the “3.” Larry and I jumped inside the van (which had warmed up sufficiently to keep my feet from turning blue) and made our first stop at the Buffalo Air Express office, located just around the block from Buffalo’s hangar at the Yellowknife airport. After picking up a few more packages, we were off in earnest. Between stops, Larry offered me a rare glimpse into the life and culture of a Buffalo rampie.

Like most rampies who have crossed the tarmac outside Joe’s hangar, Larry is in his early twenties and just beginning his career as a pilot. Short, dark, trim, and sporting a thick mop of black hair that seems to have a mind of its own, Larry went to a vocational college in Chicoutimi, Quebec, a small town about 160 kilometres (100 miles) north of Quebec City. Larry had been fortunate enough to be accepted to Cégep de Chicoutimi, one of a number of flight schools in Canada funded by provincial governments. The Canadian flight school experience varies widely. Some people, like Larry, spend two to four years getting a college or university degree that includes a pilot’s licence. For those who have the financial resources to attend private flight school, the route to the cockpit can be as short as a year.

Either way, Larry knows he’s lucky. Most pilots graduate from flight school with debt that can total as much as sixty thousand dollars. Larry wasn’t saddled with the same baggage, so instead of looking for a job—
any
job—that would help pay off his debt, Larry went north because he knew it would offer him something a southern Canadian airline couldn’t: adventure.

“I wanted to get as far north as I could to get the best experience and become the best pilot that I can be,” he told me over the roar of the van’s heater fan. “I want to fly with the best.” The way Larry sees it, there’s no comparison between flying a piece of living history and cruising in a modern aircraft on autopilot.

Larry has the wisdom of someone far older than his twenty years. “Because when you’re gonna be forty and sitting in your Airbus 320, you at least want to be thinking that you pushed yourself at some point in your life,” he said, talking as if forty is just a step or two away from the grave. I resisted the urge to throttle him. “When your captain asks you what you did before you came to Air Canada, you’d be proud to tell him you flew for Buffalo.”

Understandably so. Pilots who survive the Buffalo Airways grist mill and make it to the cockpit are widely respected throughout the aviation world. “If you actually become a captain of one of our planes,” Mikey has told me, “you’re probably one of the most highly regarded pilots anywhere.” Buffalo alumni are now flying for some of the world’s most prestigious airlines, in all corners of the globe. “As my dad says, after Buffalo, they never really have to fly again. The plane flies them.”

Although the ramp is a fact of life for many flight-school graduates, it’s not the only route to the captain’s seat, a spot known reverently in the aviation world as the “left seat” (the co-pilot sits in the right seat). After spending a small fortune to get through flight school, some graduates will then shell out an extra eight to ten thousand dollars to get their instructor’s licence. Once they are certified instructors, pilots can begin to accrue the holy grail of a pilot’s life: hours.

The more hours a pilot has flown, the more proficient he or she is deemed to be. The major North American airlines won’t even look at pilots until they have at least a thousand hours under their belt. Novice pilots can accrue precious hours by becoming instructors and taking other would-be flyboys through the air.

Before being handed control of a huge jet, however, most Canadian pilots pay their dues at one of hundreds of small charter airlines dotted across North America. Here they ply their craft on in-between planes like the Beechcraft King Air, Piper PA-31 Navajo, or the de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter. Some might jump from there onto a major airline’s regional service, where planes such as the Dash 8 are ubiquitous.

For the rest, though, the ramp is the first step to the cockpit. And at Buffalo, the ramp means insanely long work hours in brutal weather conditions. Larry and his compatriots work seven days a week. Their only break comes during the lull between late Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon, because the Hay River–Yellowknife sked doesn’t fly Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings. As we talked about his work schedule, Larry waxed melancholic about the rampies at neighbouring Air Tindi—another Yellowknife company that provides scheduled and charter air services throughout the north—who get four days off for every four days they work.

When I asked Larry to ballpark how many hours he works each week, his eyes glazed over. “I’ve never figured it out,” he said, which I assume is an act of self-preservation. “If I did, I’d probably get Buffalo in trouble.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math, though. By my estimates, these boys are putting in anywhere from sixty to seventy-five hours a week. The million-dollar question, of course, is “Why?”

The answer is surprisingly simple: Larry figures he has to put in his ramp time somewhere, so why not do it at a place where you get to experience flying a piece of living history? “The fact that I’m young makes it easy,” he said, thankfully refraining from yet another being-forty-is-just-like-being-dead comment. “I have some responsibilities, but not many. And I don’t really mind the hours, because I don’t really have a choice. There’s no other operator of DC-3s like Buffalo. I had other opportunities. I had a job in Manitoba and one in Quebec and said no to all of them. Because I want to be here.”

I want to be here.
If there’s one anthem that rings consistently from every rampie I meet at Buffalo, it’s that.
I want to be here.
And if you don’t want to be here, well, you figure it out pretty damn quickly. As Mikey says, the rampies are part of a self-policing wolf pack that answers to its own code of ethics and makes its own rules.

“We rarely have to fire or lay off rampies,” Mikey told me one day. “The other guys get rid of them. Because if one guy is slacking, it means the other ones have to work harder. And if they have to work harder, it means they’re probably gonna fall behind and get in shit. Because ultimately, we don’t give a shit how the job gets done... just get it done.” When everyone pulls his own weight, the system works. Make life difficult for the other rampies and it’s just a matter of time before you’re out the door.

Mikey has spent enough time with rampies and is savvy enough to know how important they are to Buffalo’s success. “The heart and soul of Buffalo?” he said. “It isn’t me, it isn’t Joe, it isn’t Rod, and it isn’t the pilots. It’s the rampies. They’re underpaid, they’re overworked, and without them, the whole thing collapses.

“I get to hang out in the hangar, answer emails, talk to people,” he continued. “But the real guys are out there right now, in minus thirty-five degrees, hauling boxes around town, actually making money for the company.” The way Mikey sees it, rampie life is an internship that weeds out the weak from the strong.

The result is what Mikey calls the best pilots in the world. For Joe, it makes perfect sense to demand so much from the rampies. “When you’re twenty-five years old, you don’t get exhausted,” Joe said in a rare moment where he actually made time to talk to me. “You’re fireproof and bulletproof and waterproof and inexhaustible.”

Good thing, since the rampie internship at Buffalo is anything but easy. Rampies start their careers at Buffalo’s operation in Hay River, doing the same work they would in Yellowknife: preparing planes before and after they fly, loading and unloading cargo, and making deliveries and pick-ups around town. Yet in the Buffalo world, Hay River is the minor leagues. If you’re ever going to get behind the controls of an airplane, you have to make the jump to the bigs: Yellowknife.

Some rampies will wallow away in Hay River indefinitely, thanks to a personality clash with Joe, poor attitude, less-than-ferocious work ethic, bad luck, or some combination thereof. Though he has since been laid off, I can’t help but think of the case of a rampie from northern British Columbia who for me is the poster boy for how
not
to get ahead at Buffalo.

Like most Buffalo pilot wannabes, Jordan (not his real name) started in Hay River as a junior rampie. Huge and ponderous, Jordan seemed to have the perfect physical attributes for the heavy lifting his new job demanded. But something about him never seemed quite right. He grumbled about his job—a lot. And as Mikey is quick to point out, a quiet rampie is a happy rampie is a rewarded rampie. At Buffalo, the squeaky wheel does not get the grease. Jordan was a squeaky wheel.

Still, Jordan did have opportunities to advance. When the rampie ahead of him was promoted to Yellowknife, he moved to the top of the Hay River food chain; Yellowknife seemed a short step away. Yet the only way he was going to get out of Hay River was to find a suitable replacement to assume his responsibilities. He found one, but when that fell through his attitude worsened. He became dour and mopey. Eventually, Jordan did get to move to Yellowknife to take a flight attending course.