The Ice Pilots (4 page)

“Actually, this book is not really going to be a technical manual, but more of a story about—”

“You go in that office of mine, and every book on the shelf is an aviation book,” he continued over me. “I read a lot of books to see how accurate they are and how they spread the credit and the blame around. And every one of them is a piece of shit. I buy the books only for time, places, and data.”

Mikey must have seen the beads of sweating forming on my brow, because he finally ended his phone conversation and turned back to throw me a life preserver. Joe took no notice.

“I’m very busy right now,” he continued, “and there aren’t a lot of people helping me. They’re finding me a lot of problems to solve because they can’t handle them themselves. So I’m not really in the best mood to be writing a book.”

Mikey joined me in mumbling and fumbling, trying to explain things to Joe. “It’s really about timing,” Mikey said. Joe had turned on his heels and was heading for the far side of the hangar. Clearly, he’d had enough of our conversation. “Just think about it!” Mikey called after him.

An uneasy silence hung between us as we watched Joe march away. “That went well,” Mikey said. “Better than I thought, actually.”

Given its English name by the British explorer Samuel Hearne, who first crossed the lake in 1771 and named it for the Slavey people native to the area, Great Slave Lake is the fifth-largest lake in Canada and the ninth-largest in the world (27,200 square kilometres or 16,901 square miles). The lake is 615 metres (2,000 feet) deep in some places, making it the deepest in North America. It’s icy cold and frozen for eight months of the year.

There are seven communities peppered around the lake: Yellow-knife, Fort Resolution, Hay River, Behchoko (formerly Rae-Edzo), Lutselk’e (formerly Snowdrift), Dettah and N’Dilo (both located just outside Yellowknife).

Having temporarily removed
Joe from my list of potential interview candidates, I was faced with more free time than I had originally bargained for, but at least it gave me an opportunity to explore the inner sanctum of Buffalo Airways.

I’d never been inside an airplane hangar before, and the sheer volume of the place bordered on overwhelming. The hangar itself stretches 45 metres by 45 metres (150 feet by 150 feet), enough to house half a football field. The roof soars more than fifteen metres (fifty feet) overhead, curving slightly higher from its east and west walls to the highest point directly in the middle. On either end of the hangar are adjoining buildings that house Buffalo’s offices, various parts and storage rooms, the passenger waiting room, and the small but wildly successful shop that sells Buffalo merchandise.

Huge though the place may be, one thing becomes immediately apparent: Joe McBryan runs a tight ship. The hangar is the picture of efficiency, a testimony to a near-obsession for Buffalo Joe: safety. An assortment of racks and stands peppers the hangar, each neatly festooned with a variety of airplane parts. Everywhere I looked, men were perched on rolling stands, elbows deep into the guts of an airplane. The walls were dripping with racks of belts, parts, and papers, all organized into tidy little rows for easy identification.

Two enormous steel doors, each twenty-one metres (seventy feet) wide and fifteen metres (fifty feet) high, guard the entrance to the hangar. A series of windows near the top of each door flooded the room with natural sunlight. The place was abuzz with activity: bright, lively, and full of purposeful energy. Everybody, it seemed, had a job to do, knew what it was, and got to it without hesitation or question.

As if trying to absorb the variety of strange and wonderful sights bombarding my eyes was not enough, I couldn’t help but notice that my olfactory system was also doing jumping jacks. The smell is not
bad
by any stretch of the imagination. But it is distinctive. It’s a smell of oil and rubber, of sweat and grease, and of hard-working men in coveralls manipulating pieces of metal to do what they were designed to do: to fly.

To fly. Humankind
has long dreamed of defying gravity and taking to the skies. The Chinese are said to have discovered that kites could fly, as early as 400 BC, a discovery that jump-started humans into thinking that we could fly too. Around that same time, a Greek philosopher, scientist, and statesman named Archytas is said to have created what is widely credited with being the first self-powered flying machine: his bird-shaped, steam-powered model, the Pigeon, reputedly flew over 200 metres (650 feet). In 559 AD, Yuan Huangtou, the son of Chinese Emperor Yuan Lang, became the first person to fly on a large kite when he was forced to jump from the Tower of Ye by Gao Yang, who had usurped power from Yuan Lang. He survived the flight, but was later executed. Europeans began building and flying their own gliders around the ninth century AD.

Most of the work done on human flight in the hundreds of years between the Renaissance and the explosion of aviation research in the eighteenth century took place on paper, with great minds like Leonardo da Vinci dedicating their efforts to a variety of designs. Da Vinci made the first real studies of flight, with more than a hundred drawings illustrating his theories. Da Vinci’s best-known aviation-related sketch—the ornithopter flying machine—was never actually built but is the basis for the modern-day helicopter.

The modern era of aviation began in earnest in the late 1700s, as a series of French scientists brought ballooning to the forefront of the public’s consciousness. In late November 1783, brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier launched the first hot air balloon with human passengers. King Louis XVI had originally decreed that the flight would be manned by condemned criminals, but a couple of men successfully petitioned for the honour. Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the marquis François d’Arlandes drifted gently in the wood fire-powered craft before coming to a landing in a field some eight kilometres (five miles) away.

With the successful flight of hot-air balloons, work on a steerable “airship” continued throughout the 1800s. These airships were extremely fragile and their existences short-lived, so focus again turned to defying gravity with a craft that was heavier than air, particularly in Europe, where innumerable prototypical airplanes were tested, re-tested, and re-tested yet again.

British aristocrat George Cayley was the first scientist to identify the four aerodynamic forces of flight—weight, lift, drag, and thrust—and their relationship to one another. In 1853, Cayley built a three-winged glider that carried his coachman 275 metres (900 feet) across Brompton Dale in northern England before crashing. It was the first recorded aircraft flight by an adult (Cayley reported having a ten-year-old boy fly one of his planes several years earlier). Frenchman Félix du Temple’s
Monoplane
is credited with lifting off of a ski jump run under its own power in 1874, after which it glided for a short time before returning to the ground.

The breakthrough moment our species had been waiting for took place on December 17, 1903. On a humble airstrip near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew the
Wright Flyer
—which was powered by an internal combustion engine—for twelve seconds over a span of 37 metres (120 feet). Various museums and aeronautical associations around the world consider it the first heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled and sustained flight with a pilot aboard. Later that day, Orville’s brother, Wilbur, flew the
Wright Flyer
260 metres (850 feet) in fifty-nine seconds.

Yet the Wright brothers didn’t happen upon their discovery serendipitously. These were dedicated, methodical scientists who took their responsibilities seriously, having designed, built, and tested a series of kite and glider designs earlier in the century before turning their attentions to powered aircraft. They even built a wind tunnel to test their various designs, a step that advanced the science of aeronautical engineering tremendously.

Yet not everyone accepts that the Wrights were the pioneers of modern aviation. On September 13, 1906, in Paris, France, a Brazilian inventor named Alberto Santos-Dumont made a public flight in an airplane he called the 14-bis. Though few people question that the Wrights were first in the air, debate continues about which craft—the
Wright Flyer
or the 14-bis—had the more practical design, and therefore the first “true” airplane. More recently, evidence has been uncovered that suggests an American named A.M. Herring may have made the first powered flight, in Michigan in 1898 or 1899. Dozens of other inventors also claimed to have taken short flights between 1900 and 1910.

Regardless of who actually made the first documented flight, the aviation world changed forever after the turn of the twentieth century. Planes were almost immediately incorporated into military service. Italy sent planes on bombing missions during the Italian-Turkish war in 1911–12. Bulgaria followed, using its planes to attack Ottoman positions during the First Balkan War (1912–13). World War I saw both sides of the conflict use planes extensively, both for bombing and reconnaissance.

With the end of World War I, the planet was poised for another step in the evolutionary chain of manned flight. Enter the Golden Age of aviation, a twenty-year period between 1918 and 1939 that saw a host of rapid advancements in aircraft technology. Gone were underpowered biplanes made of wood and fabric, replaced by high-powered, single-wing aircraft made primarily of aluminum.

War has a way of spurring technological advances, and the aircraft industry was no different. World War II caused a huge surge in the development and production of airplanes, with virtually every country involved in the conflict dedicating a significant portion of its resources to developing and building flight-based weapon-delivery systems. The first functional jet plane was flown in World War II (the Heinkel He 178), followed shortly by the world’s first fighter jet (the Messerschmitt Me 262), and the world’s first jet-powered bomber (the Arado Ar 234). Yet if there’s one plane that made its presence felt in the second great conflict, it was a twin-engine piston-pounder whose speed and range changed the airline industry forever. And it was looming right in front of me: the Douglas DC-3.

Nobody in the
Buffalo Airways hangar seemed bothered by my presence, so I took the opportunity to wander over to the great metallic beast. Like most modern-day travellers, I have fairly extensive experience with aircraft, but exclusively from an end-user’s standpoint. Usher me down the Jetway and I’m quite comfortable finding my seat inside the plastic-and-metal tube that will hurtle me to my destination at a cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. I know how to fold my jacket neatly and stow it in the overhead baggage compartment and can even eat an inflight meal (should I be lucky enough to be
served
an inflight meal) without dribbling half of it on my jeans. And if push came to shove, I could probably even place an oxygen mask on my face without accidentally hanging myself on the rubber tube. But this was different.