The Ice Pilots (16 page)

Clearly, the solution does not come as easily as placing a Help Wanted ad in a newspaper. “We’d get people answering the ad, but they’d have no experience,” Mikey says. “You can teach a pilot to fly a DC-3 in ten hours. But in ten hours you know
nothing
about the mechanics of a DC-3.” Luckily, Buffalo has built enough of a reputation in a small enough industry that skilled mechanics often find them.

Explanation #3: They have a hell of a lot of experience working on vintage planes.

Don’t ask Mikey McBryan if maintaining a vintage plane is any easier than maintaining a twenty-first-century jet. He’ll tell you the question is out of context, and context is everything.

“It’s easier for Buffalo, because we know what we’re doing. If you sent a DC-3 to WestJet and asked them to fix it, it would take up all their time. Put a 737 in here and it would take all our time. It’s not like new airplanes don’t have problems, but you can go to the Walmart of schools and learn how to fix it. Plug it into a computer and the computer fixes it. But with a DC-3, DC-4, or C-46, you’re working on something that you can’t go to school for. You’ve gotta work on it to learn.”

Explanation #4: They know where to get the planes.

“Airplanes are easy,” Mikey says. “Just go to an airport and you’ll find an airplane.”

Although not quite as simple as that, the airline industry is a tightly knit one, which allows for a fair bit of shared information. As Mikey tells me, more often than not, the planes find Buffalo, not vice versa. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t had to invoke his own ingenuity to track down Buffalo’s latest purchase. In one well-known
Ice Pilots
episode, Mikey finds a CL-215 water bomber using Google Earth and travels to remote Venezuela to finish the deal. More recently, he bought one in North Carolina—through eBay.

It was around midnight
when I stumbled out of Surly Bob’s and made my way back to Mikey’s place, hoping not to become one of those grim northern legends: a drunk who falls asleep in a snowbank in the middle of a Yellowknife winter night, never to wake up again. For his part, Mikey hooked up with a few friends at Surly’s and made his way to Harley’s, excited that it was Monday, the day they introduce the new stripper for the week. He didn’t get home until around three in the morning, but when Tuesday rolled around, it was me who slept in and then nursed the dull ache of a hangover, while Mikey was at the hangar at 7:30 AM as always, making ready to meet his dad when the sked rolled down the runway.

Alone at the house, I had the opportunity to explore Mikey’s crib. Actually, from what I can gather, it’s not Mikey’s crib at all. Not exclusively, that is.

“You can crash at my place if you want,” Justin said to me one day.

“Thanks, but I’m good. I’m staying at Mikey’s place.”

“You mean
Joe’s
place.”

Whatever. I’d venture to guess that Joe actually owns the place, but it’s where Mikey hangs his hat during those rare moments he’s not at the hangar, so for me it’s Mikey’s Place. Joe stays there too, but only on weekends between the Saturday morning sked from Hay River and the one returning there late Sunday afternoon. That’s when I get the hell out.

Either way, the place is a stereotypical bachelor pad. It sits on McAvoy Road, a narrow, winding gravel pathway that hugs outcrops of grey rock as it makes its way along Back Bay, a protected arm of Great Slave Lake. Ironically enough, McAvoy Road is named for a well-known Yellowknife family of bush pilots and diamond drillers, the very family that gave the world Chuck McAvoy, one of the most influential personalities in young Joe McBryan’s life. Mikey’s house—a place he likes to call the “Den of Solitude,” given his penchant for avoiding visitors (even trick-or-treaters)—sits directly beside his brother Rod’s and forms the foundation of Buffalo’s Yellowknife float-plane base.

Surrounding the two houses—Rod and his wife Sasha’s tidy grey mobile home and Mikey’s rambling two-storey house—is nothing but gravel. It’s not the most natural environment, but it’s low maintenance. You won’t find any garden gnomes here. In fact, with the amount of machinery and equipment scattered around the place, it feels like we haven’t really left the hangar at all.

Luckily, that ambience stops at Mikey’s door, where the decor changes from workyard to bachelor reno chic. The front door opens to a den of sorts, though Mikey uses it mostly for storage. A pair of couches lie partially buried under assorted books, clothes, boxes, and rarely used exercise equipment. A hallway at the far end of the room leads to a series of small bedrooms. Upstairs is the main living area, where an open kitchen, dining room, and living room all seem to face Mikey’s flat-screen TV. All around are signs of work in progress: a wall cut open here, a bathroom being rebuilt there. Mikey’s bedroom is on the top floor.

The fridge is as empty as you might guess, except for a few condiments and some beer. Neither Mikey nor Joe (when he’s there) is big on cooking, it would seem.

“What does your dad eat?” I asked Mikey one afternoon in the hangar, hoping perhaps to score some brownie points by showing up that night with Joe’s favourite meal.

“He’s the ultimate scrounger,” he replied. “He picks at this and that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him cook. He’s got a couple restaurants in town that cook for him. That’s about it.” Mikey’s response should come as no surprise. The way I see Joe, he’s too old-fashioned to cook for himself, and too busy to take the time, anyway.

Change, it seems,
is
inevitable. Though I was proud of the magazines I produced as editor of
Up Here,
my time at the magazine was tumultuous. The corporate culture of the place seemed built around adrenaline, and my laid-back style was clearly a square-peg-in-a-round-hole scenario.

While I was there, I commissioned a writer to put together a piece about the perils and pitfalls of performing one’s daily constitutionals, so to speak, in the wilds of northern Canada, an undertaking rife with such unexpected challenges as mosquitoes, flesh-freezing cold, and predatory mammals. I was planning on calling it “The Process of Elimination.” To me, it was sheer brilliance; my bosses thought differently and I ended up leaving the magazine soon after that.

It would be months before Marty, Dawson, and I left Yellowknife for the mountain town of Canmore, Alberta, but the time was not without its milestones. As I began to navigate the murky waters of freelance writing and editing, we received news that baby Teya (named after Mary Teya, a highly respected elder from Fort McPherson) would soon be joining her brother Dawson as part of our family.

Despite its adherence
to times past, Buffalo Airways is not immune to the forces of change, either. And of all the changes the company has had to make over the years, perhaps the most significant is how it gets fuel.

Buffalo’s old piston pounders use a type of fuel called “avgas,” short for aviation gasoline. Mikey figures Buffalo may be the biggest consumer of the stuff in North America, maybe the world. One of the issues with avgas is that it uses a toxic substance called tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) to improve its combustion stability. Although there are environmental concerns about the use of leaded avgas, it is still used widely around the world and is relatively easy to find. Everywhere except in remote northern outposts, that is. So while Mikey has no problem getting enough fuel to power his planes on the way out of Yellowknife, getting them home from remote communities that no longer stock avgas is another story.

“It’s a political issue with avgas too, because it’s leaded fuel,” Mikey says. “A politician could say ‘Hey, I’m gonna be the guy who took leaded gas away.’ To an uninformed person, that seems great: no more leaded fuel. But we’re talking about a half percent of all the aviation fuel burned on Earth. Meanwhile, the jet that flies that guy around during his campaign is blowing
way
more hydrocarbons in the air than a DC-3 ever will. A 747 flying over here on its way to Tokyo is going to burn more fuel than a DC-3 will burn in a
month.
It’s insane.”

From what I can figure, a 747 burns 2,500 to 3,500 pounds of fuel every hour. Depending on the model, the plane carries from about 50,000 to 60,000 gallons, most of which it will use on an intercontinental flight. Ouch.

“So the real environmental issue is not in the name, but the quantity used.” While I can see Mikey’s point, I think he may be oversimplifying the issue, since studies conducted in the 1970s demonstrated the harmful effects of leaded gas combustion on people, especially children.

Either way, Buffalo’s planes no longer have the luxury of flying from Point A to Point B, refuelling, and flying back home to Yellowknife, Mikey has started to find ways to maximize Buffalo Airways’ efficiency. He now schedules planes according to how far they can travel without having to carry extra fuel on board for the trip home. The DC-3 is most efficient for trips of about 400 kilometres (250 miles), maximum, compared with 900 kilometres (560 miles) for the C-46 and 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) for the DC-4. Back in the day, Buffalo planes would haul anything anywhere, because they didn’t have to worry about how they would get back home. That’s no longer the case.

“The reason we can’t get leaded avgas fuel in the Arctic is supply and demand, simple Economics 101,” Mikey says. “Nobody else uses it, so why would they bring it in?”

“Every time I book a charter now,” he continues, “fuel is my biggest problem. Not pilots, not if the airplane is serviceable or not, and not which airplane to use. It’s where am I going to get fuel?”

Although the bigger airports in the north still stock avgas, most of the smaller Arctic settlements stock ample supply of kerosene- or naphtha-based jet fuel, which is designed for use in aircraft powered by gas-turbine engines. That leaves out most of Mikey’s fleet. Most, but not all. Enter the Electra.

The Lockheed l-188 Electra
is like nothing else in the Buffalo fleet, for a number of reasons. To this casual observer, it seems harsher, more insensitive, colder. I know that sounds a bit crazy. After all, we’re talking about machines. But the other planes in the Buffalo fleet all have a stately, almost regal air about them that you feel as soon as you are in their presence. There’s a melancholy steeped into their very materials that whispers secret songs of lonely flights over mountain passes, lives lost far too young, and dreams dawning with the new day.

The Electra doesn’t share that melancholy. To the extent that inanimate objects can be gendered, the Electra is all man. His props are hard, square, and harsh. His fuselage is sleek, businesslike. If planes could talk, the Electra would say “Let’s get to work, I have shit to do,” then glare at you if you offered it a cup of coffee.

When it was built, the Electra was the Hummer of the aircraft world. Its most macho characteristic was brute strength. The plane was powered by four high-performance turboprop engines that could help the plane take off and land on very short runways, meaning it had STOL (short takeoff and landing) capabilities. The engines use a gas turbine—the same kind of turbine that creates propulsion in jet engines—to drive their propellers, each generating 3,750 horsepower.

The plane was introduced in 1957 to a huge amount of fanfare as the first turboprop plane ever produced in the United States. The hullabaloo was short-lived. Not long after its introduction, the Electra was involved in three famous crashes in the fourteen months between February 1959 and March 1960. Order cancellations followed, bringing production to a halt.

With good reason. In two of the crashes, the Electra broke up in flight, which disturbed airlines about to spend millions of dollars on the aircraft. On September 29, 1959, Braniff Flight 542 crashed in Buffalo, Texas, en route to Dallas. All twenty-nine passengers and five crew members died. Less than six months later—on March 17, 1960—Northwest Orient Flight 710 broke apart in flight between Chicago and Miami, killing all sixty-three people on board.