The Ice Pilots (10 page)

Bubble or not, being away from the daily grind in Hay River and Yellowknife afforded Mikey an opportunity to focus on his business education, though the demographics of his school sometimes made it hard to stay focused. “We Hay River guys, we’re not the best-looking guys and all. But Red Deer College had four girls for every guy, because it was all nursing and business students. So we all had the hottest girlfriends!”

One afternoon during his third year there, Mikey was sitting in a marketing class when he received a call from David Gullason, an executive producer at Vancouver-based Omni Film Productions. After introducing himself, David explained that he had recently read an article about Mikey and Buffalo Airways in
The
Globe and Mail.

“David asked me if I wanted to be on television,” Mikey said. “I said ‘Yeah!’ ”

“I had read about British tourists—they call them ‘propheads’—going to Yellowknife to see these old planes,” Gullason told me over the phone one day. “We were looking for an in-the-moment show that had elements of history and science, and this had both. And obviously there was this huge, great unfolding story. What could be better? The planes, the Arctic, and the people who fly them.”

Imagine yourself working
at Buffalo Airways in spring 2008. You’re trucking along, doing your job every day in blissful anonymity, trying to survive the unpredictable rigours of the cold, the dark, and Joe’s temper. You think you’ve got it all worked out. Sure, you’re working your ass off and sometimes Joe tears you a new rectum, but the place feels like home, the characters like family. Life reaches a comfortable stasis.

Then, without warning, a couple of strangers show up, one of whom is carrying a serious-looking video camera. You’re told that your work life is now going to be immortalized on film and broadcast to millions of people in Canada and around the world. And (this is a big
and
) every move you make, every word you say, every screw-up you commit—large or small—is going to be documented, logged, and potentially made the focus of a TV show episode. How would you feel?

If you answered “really friggin’ uncomfortable,” you’re not alone. And chances are, you probably would have made your discomfort known to the strangers now skulking around the hangar, sticking a camera in your face at the most inopportune moments and asking you pointed questions about your life and your work.

That is where I found myself in January 2011, when I walked into the alien world of Buffalo Airways, immersed myself in its daily rhythms, and shared the triumph and defeats of the people who work there. Sure, I had faith in my abilities. I had always managed to make people comfortable enough to share the most intimate aspects of their lives with me. But I knew that gaining people’s confidence, trust, and friendship would not come right away.

In those early days, I hung around—a lot. People looked at me suspiciously, wondering what the hell I was doing in their lives. Either they wouldn’t talk to me, or they simply offered blunt, unemotional responses. Sometimes (though thankfully rarely) they were downright hostile. I felt like an outsider because, frankly, I
was
an outsider. Sure, I had Mikey to act as my buffer, but I still felt the stares, heard the questions. As Joe so bluntly put it at our first meeting: “Book—what book?”

Eventually, I managed to make progress with even the most leery Buffalo employees, but Joe was staunchly resistant to the idea that I even existed. Usually when I asked him a question he grumbled something as he hurried to another part of the hangar. Sometimes his responses were accompanied by a glare that would melt Yellowknife permafrost.

One time I gauged Joe incorrectly, fooling myself into thinking he was in a talkative mood, and asked him about the airline’s genesis, hoping for some historical context. “You gotta know this shit,” he scowled. “All you gotta do is go on the computer, Google it, and then you get all that information and write that shit up.”

“I just think the book could use a bit of historical context, so I was wonderi—”

“Well, if you’re writing an article on
Ice Pilots,
I’d be very careful about getting into too much detail. Number one, I ain’t gonna do an autobiography. And number two, I ain’t gonna do a history of Buffalo Airways.”

It helped my ego to know that the TV crew had found itself in the same boat just a couple of years earlier; ever suspicious, Joe wanted nothing to do with them. He would say things like “I don’t know why you guys are following me around—this is Mikey’s movie.”

Joe’s ire over the show—and the intrusion into his personal and business life—only grew when he heard the name proposed by the TV production company. “Honestly,” Mikey told me conspiratorially, “we all hate the name
Ice Pilots.
It’s the worst name ever.”

But Mikey understands the logic behind the moniker. As he tells it, the producers wanted the name to max out at eighteen letters, so the entire title could fit on a satellite TV guide. It couldn’t be called Buffalo Airways, for fear it would be confused with the city in New York. “As much as we hate it,
Ice Pilots
NWT
is a grammatically perfect name,” Mikey explained. The word “
Ice”
not only connotes the frigid environment well enough, it also taps into the success of another successful Yellowknife-based reality TV show,
Ice Road Truckers.
“
Pilots”
is self-explanatory enough, while “
NWT”
hints at the remote geography of the place.

The logic was lost on Joe, however. “When my father heard
Ice Pilots,
he wanted nothing to do with the show.” The reason Joe hated it, strangely enough, all hinged on the word “
Pilots.”
He is an ardent believer that his company’s success is about everyone who works for Buffalo, not just the pilots. From the rampies who deliver courier packages in –40° temperatures to the mechanics who dig elbow-deep in oil and muck every day, Joe knows that every piece of the Buffalo puzzle is as vital as the next. “It really hurt him that they named the show
Ice Pilots,
” Rod McBryan explained. “Because only about a third of our employees are pilots. What about everyone else?”

Joe was likely also reluctant to reveal insider secrets in one of the most highly regulated industries in the world. But two and a half years later, the
Ice Pilots
and Buffalo Airways crews are one big happy family. The crew now melt into the background of the day-to-day operations of the airline, and they boast strong friendships with the pilots, mechanics, and other staff members who call Buffalo home. I couldn’t help but look on with envy as I sometimes crossed paths with Joe and a director or cameraman engaged in friendly conversation

I
t is said
that there are two kinds of people living in the North: those who are running from something and those who can’t fit in with the rest of society. After coming to experience life at Buffalo Airways, I would add one more group to that: people who want to become pilots—a.k.a. the “rampies.”

Of all the unique, exciting, and somewhat bizarre things I learned during my time with the Buffalo family, nothing would resonate with me quite as much as the rampies. For the uninitiated, rampies are aspiring pilots—usually, but not exclusively, men—who start their flying careers by working on the “ramp,” that amorphous area on the tarmac just outside the hangar or terminal where planes are loaded and unloaded at all hours of the day or night, regardless of weather, temperature, or working conditions. Those curmudgeons who hold steadfastly to the notion that “kids today” don’t know how to work or are only interested in video games and other narcissistic pursuits haven’t been to The Ramp.

And while paying one’s dues as a rampie is a fact of life for aspiring pilots the world over, nowhere is it quite so demanding as in the world of Buffalo Airways. I know, because I was one.

Okay, saying
I was a rampie is a
bit
of a stretch, since my time as a member of the Brotherhood of the Ramp comprises, well, not a hell of a lot. But it didn’t take long for me to see that the old-school work ethic that so many people yearn for in today’s youth is alive and well.

It was –25°C (–13°F) the first morning I showed up to the ramp, and the wind was screaming across the darkened runway of the Yellowknife airport. I wasn’t sure what the day would hold, so I was woefully unprepared for the work to come. I left my snow pants in the warm confines of my new home away from home, Birches B & B, the same place I left my Canadian Army arctic survival boots. And even thought I had my down parka, heavy mitts, and rabbit-fur trapper’s hat, the icy fingers of the wind managed to pick their way through every microscopic nook and cranny my clothing offered—
every
nook and cranny.

It was 8:00 AM, and we rampies were anxiously awaiting the arrival of a freighter DC-3 from Hay River. The Hay River–Yellowknife route is just one of many cargo routes that Buffalo flies, but it’s a critical one. Every night, a Buffalo Air Express transport truck drives from Edmonton to Hay River, about one thousand kilometres (620 miles) to the north, loaded with goods and documents bound for various communities across the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

On some days there’s not much cargo to be hauled, and it fits on the sked that Joe flies up from Hay River every morning. Other mornings see heavier loads, and an empty DC-3 or DC-4 needs to be flown down to Hay River at six in the morning to pick up the goods and bring them back to Yellowknife. My guide for this day was Laurent Dussault, a French Canadian from Montreal who goes by the nickname “French Larry.”

Once the plane taxied to the hangar, the work began in earnest. A half dozen Buffalo Airways vans lined up near the plane’s cargo doors, engines running in the bitter cold of early morning. (Running engines are a fact of life in a Yellowknife winter. On –40° days, so many cars are kept running in the city that the streets are filled with ice fog from vehicle exhaust.) Soon the load was being unstrapped from the plane’s interior, and the work hit a breakneck pace. As the various boxes, crates, and envelopes made their way out, their destination was shouted and the package moved to the appropriate van. Despite the commotion, I couldn’t help noticing a man I hadn’t met before, one who intrigued me with his dark and heavily creased face, and the gap-toothed smile that never seemed to stop flashing.

Jimmy Essery—a.k.a. “the Indian”—is one of those guys who rarely gets any
Ice Pilots
screen time but is an integral part of Buffalo. An on-and-off presence at the Yellowknife hangar since 1986, Jimmy epitomizes what the North and the airline are all about: he works hard—and lives harder.

Ask Jimmy what he does, and the answer comes quickly: “I do everything. Whatever it takes to make Buffalo work.” Doesn’t matter if it’s servicing the aircraft, mopping hangar floors, or building an ice strip in the middle of nowhere, Jimmy has been there. Maybe that’s why I could always count on finding Jimmy in the hangar, whether it was four in the morning or ten at night.

Originally from outside Hearst, Ontario, Jimmy arrived in Yellowknife on April Fool’s Day, 1970, just a few weeks before Joe started Buffalo Airways in Hay River. It didn’t take long for Jimmy to settle into his favourite Yellowknife haunts. “I wasn’t old enough to go to the bar, but I still did.”

From what other people tell me, Jimmy’s relationship with Buffalo is a strange on-again, off-again phenomenon. When he’s there, he’s
there.
Then he’ll just disappear for a while. “I make up my own hours. If I feel like I’m doggin’ it and not producing, I just wander off and come when it’s busy.”

You get the feeling, though, that sometimes his disappear-ances come as a surprise to those who sign his paycheque. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been fired at Buffalo,” he said with a huge wheezing laugh and a smile so big it actually closes his eyes. “I’ve been fired one afternoon and Joe will have everyone looking in every bar in town for me the next morning.”