The Ice Pilots (20 page)

Though Merlyn certainly played a role in young Joe McBryan’s life, it paled in comparison to the influence that Chuck and Jim McAvoy had on the budding bush pilot. In some ways, Jim McAvoy was everything his brother Chuck was not. Chuck was gregarious and loud, Jim quiet and reserved. Yet there was one thing that had Jim and Chuck joined together: they were both incredible pilots who made their mark on the early years of northern bush flying.

Both also had an uncanny knack for finding lost souls in the remote northern wilderness, regardless of what the authorities told them. In one famous incident in 1957, a plane with three people aboard was forced to land in the Gameti (then called Rae Lakes) area, about 240 kilometres (150 miles) northwest of Yellowknife. Authorities ordered McAvoy not to fly—it was too late in the season for float planes and too early for ski planes—but Jimmy went anyway, eventually rescuing the trio. That heroic effort saw him grounded for thirty days. McAvoy died on November 21, 2009, in Thorsby, Alberta, at the age of seventy-nine.

Nevertheless, Joe did learn things at flight school that his childhood heroes hadn’t taught him: radio usage, flight planning, paperwork, and log books.

But the bureaucracy was not finished with Joe. What started then as an aggravating relationship has continued to this day. Don’t expect Joe to be singing the praises of Transport Canada. His song has a slightly different refrain, one learned in those days of his youth. As he explained:

“I go get a student’s pilot permit, but the permit says you can fly but not haul people. Well, I didn’t want to haul people anyway, so that’s good enough. But then Transport gets all over my ass and now I have to go off and get a private pilot’s licence.

“Now I go get this private licence down in Edmonton. And I get back and I’m flying again, and they say ‘No, your private licence is only good for 4,300 pounds gross takeoff weight, why are you flying this Norseman [7,000-pound gross takeoff weight]. So now I have to get a special endorsement on my private licence to fly the damn Norseman.”

As far as Joe and his cronies were concerned, though, the piece of paper did not make someone a pilot. “You never carried it with you, anyway,” he laughed, “because you could either fly or you couldn’t. And if you couldn’t fly, then get the hell outta here. And if you can fly, then the paper doesn’t have any significance anyway.”

By the time Joe was nineteen years old, he had to get a commercial pilot’s licence, yet another stop in a seemingly endless bureaucratic chain of events. “Chuck said if I wanted to fly on his Fairchild 82, I had to get a commercial licence. So he hands me this little twenty-five-cent book he had and told me to learn everything in there and take the exam.

“So I roar off to Edmonton to get a commercial licence. Well, I blew that right off the bat. That little book was obsolete as shit.” Undaunted, Joe took the exam again, this time with the proper study materials. He eventually returned north with a commercial pilot’s licence in his pocket. That was June 4, 1961. Less than ten years later, Joe would be at the head of a fledgling airline struggling to make its presence felt in one of the world’s last great frontiers. He couldn’t have imagined then that he would be the focal point of books, TV shows, and websites.

But that’s certainly no shortcoming on Joe’s part, just a function of who—and what—he is. For at his heart, Joe is a bush pilot, and a damn good one at that. And bush pilots are a special breed. In some ways, they embody everything that Joe is, was, and may yet be. They’re stubborn, pig-headed, entrepreneurial, rebellious, story-telling pioneers who live for the freedom of soaring above the clouds, unencumbered by worldly woes.

When I first visited Buffalo in January 2011, Joe visited nightly with his mother, Bertha, and father, Wilson Roderick (a.k.a. “Red”), both in their nineties. Red McBryan—the first mayor of Hay River—died on June 30, 2011, at the age of ninety-two.

Named for the colour of his hair, Red was born on April 26, 1919, and as a youth dreamed of moving to Aklavik, a small community in the Mackenzie River delta. Those dreams came true in his teen years, when he worked as a deckhand on a trading ship in the area. From there he moved to Yellowknife, where he worked at the Giant Mine and met Bertha. They moved to Hay River in 1949, where Red became actively involved in local politics. He became the town’s first mayor in 1963 and served as a town councillor for forty-nine consecutive years between 1952 and 2000.

Joe was one of the people who spoke at his dad’s funeral.

“We could not say goodbye to Red McBryan, or who we called Dad,” he said, “because to say goodbye is to say goodbye to ourselves. So we will not say goodbye, we will instead say thank you.”

Willy Laserich fought Arctic weather and remoteness for decades, but his toughest battle came in the courtroom in the 1970s, after federal regulators began playing a more heavy-handed role in northern bush flying. Willy tried to play by the rules, applying for an operator’s licence to run a charter air service out of Cambridge Bay, but he was repeatedly turned down. That didn’t stop Willy: he continued flying.

In 1977, Willy was charged with 205 citations for breaking aviation laws, a process that kick-started one of the longest and most expensive aviation trials in Canadian history. In the end, Willy was cleared of all but one charge, which carried a $250 fine. But the legal fees left him bankrupt. Rather than give up, his family banded together and formed Adlair Aviation, with offices in Cambridge Bay and Yellowknife. Willie died on November 12, 2007. He was seventy-five.

To be a
bush pilot is to be an icon, a living mystery, an individual whose essence speaks of the tough, ready, creative, and self-sufficient stuff we all wish we were made of. In a country like Canada, the national identity is still strongly linked to wilderness, and bush pilots have played an important role in settling those far-flung northern regions that most people will never get to see.

Although the terms “bush flying” and “bush pilots” have become inextricably linked with northern Canada and Alaska, the term likely originates from southern Africa, where the word “bush” was used to describe the land there. Since then, its meaning has expanded to include any remote wilderness area; hence its attachment to two of the wildest places left on the planet. Bush flying is still widely practised in Australia as well.

“Bush flying” refers to flying aircraft in these sometimes-inhospitable regions. Conditions such as extreme and unpredictable weather, distance from civilization, and the roughness of the terrain all combine to make bush flying one of the most demanding—and dangerous—endeavours on the planet. In many instances, bush pilots do not have the luxury of landing their craft on prepared landing strips, let alone runways. That’s why many of today’s bush planes still ply northern skies equipped with floats, skis, or unusually large tires, sometimes called “tundra tires.”

Bush flying was first used in eastern Canada as a way of exploring and developing otherwise unreachable parts of the country. By the end of World War I, most of southern Canada—that thread of land that lies close to the border with the United States—had been linked by railways. The North, however, remained as remote, wild, and inhospitable as it had ever been.

In late 1918, a Canadian forester named Ellwood Wilson had the idea of using aircraft to spot forest fires and map forested areas. A year later he managed to get his hands on a couple of Curtiss HS-2L flying boats, biplanes whose fuselages were shaped and sealed like the hull of a boat, allowing them to take off, land, and float on water. Soon thereafter, pilot Stuart Graham and engineer Walter Kahre were selected to fly the planes. On June 4, 1919, Graham and Kahre began a 1,038-kilometre (645-mile) journey to Lac-à-la-Tortue, Quebec, then the longest cross-country flight ever flown in Canada.

That summer, Graham (whom many consider to be Canada’s first bush pilot) and Kahre performed aerial reconnaissance to spot forest fires in Quebec’s St. Maurice River valley. Meanwhile, the Southern Labrador Pulp and Lumber Company of Boston hired pilots to perform extensive aerial surveys of lands the company leased in Labrador.

By the mid-1920s, bush flying had conquered the eastern Canadian winter as well, as a pilot named Doc Oaks, who flew supplies for a local mining company, developed methods to heat and maintain engines in Canada’s brutal winter conditions. A pair of brothers from Sioux Lookout, Ontario, developed special skis that would land on snow or ice. Much of the flying during this era—as today—was in support of mining operations.

Flying for profit was a questionable undertaking back on the eve of the Great Depression. The early 1920s saw a serious decline in the number of licenced pilots, aircraft, and flying companies registered in Canada. By 1924, there were only eight private airlines left in the country. Yet as their numbers fell, their workloads grew: more than 77,000 pounds of cargo were carried in 1924, a huge increase from the 14,600 pounds carried in 1921.

Things turned around in 1924, when the Canadian Air Force decided to discontinue any flying operation that could instead be performed by a private company; commercial flight was reborn. The Ontario government was so convinced that aircraft would change the landscape of the country that it created the Ontario Provincial Air Service, which ultimately attracted some of the best pilots and engineers from around the country. Though the service’s primary mandate was to fight fires, its pilots themselves performed a variety of jobs, including aerial photography, emergency medical flights, and land surveys.

The story was developing in much the same way in western Canada, where a young man named Wilfrid “Wop” May (he got his nickname from a young cousin who pronounced Wilfrid as “Woppie”) moved to Edmonton after his discharge from the Royal Naval Air Service. A Montreal businessman thankful for his success in Edmonton’s booming real estate market had given the city a Curtiss JN-4 airplane as a token of his appreciation. May quickly asked if he could rent the plane, a request that was granted. Soon afterwards, May Airplanes—the first commercial bush-flying operation in western Canada—was created. One of May’s first jobs was to fly copies of the
Edmonton Journal
to the town of Wetaskiwin, some 70 kilometres (45 miles) to the south.

October 1920 saw what may be Canada’s first commercial bush flight into the untamed wild. A fur buyer walked into the downtown Winnipeg offices of Canadian Aircraft and asked to be flown home to the small town of The Pas, hundreds of kilometres to the north. By 1921, Imperial Oil was using a fleet of aircraft to explore the Northwest Territories, and got within 160 kilometres (100 miles) of the Arctic Circle.

Canada’s airline industry changed forever when, in 1926, a wealthy Winnipeg grain merchant named James A. Richardson—who would go on to be called the father of Canadian aviation—formed Western Canada Airways. The airline served many purposes in those early years of aviation. One of its most astonishing trips involved a prospector named Gilbert LaBine and a pilot named Wilfred Leigh Brintnell. In 1929, LaBine and Brintnell set out from Winnipeg for Great Bear Lake, where LaBine was dropped off in search of precious metals. Brintnell then continued his journey north to Aklavik, across the Richardson Mountains (named for a different Richardson, Sir John) to Whitehorse, west to the northern B.C. town of Prince George, then back to Edmonton and finally to Winnipeg, a journey of some 15,000 kilometres (9,320 miles). The prospector LaBine would go on to strike it rich when he discovered pitchblende, a uranium-rich form of uraninite.