Into the Abyss (6 page)

“Great, isn’t it?” the instructor asked. “Think you can keep her level?”

Erik’s hands tightened nervously on the controls, and then remembering, he eased his grip. He nodded. As the plane hummed toward the Pacific Ocean, Erik found himself grinning.

He was flying.

In the following weeks, his instructor taught him straight-and-level flight, climbs and descents, and turns and slips. Then Erik was on to bigger challenges: takeoffs and landings and recovery from stalls and spins. Each session was a revelation. From the second he climbed into the small cockpit, Erik was in another world, one of magic and possibility.

His first solo flight came unexpectedly. It was the morning of a clear fall day and Erik had spent forty-five minutes flying circuits around the Langley airfield with his instructor in the right-hand seat. At the end of each circuit Erik would do a touch-and-go—landing the plane, then immediately taking off again while the plane’s wheels were still rolling.

His instructor had been hard on him, putting him through the paces without giving him pause to think, only react. Finally, Erik landed the plane and brought it to a full stop. Instead of telling him to taxi to the terminal, his instructor opened the door and climbed out.

“Don’t dive at the runway when you’re bringing her in,” he said, reaching back into the cockpit to re-clip his safety belt. “And if you’re in doubt about landing, just go around again.”

The instructor leaned forward and adjusted the elevator-trim control to compensate for his missing weight. With a nod, he closed the cockpit door.

Erik felt a momentary panic, his mind suddenly devoid of all he had learned. Then, with the ringing
whap
of the instructor’s palm against the thin metal fuselage, it came rushing back. Erik throttled forward, turned and taxied back to the end of the runway. He radioed for clearance and when he got it, released the brakes and opened up the throttle to full power. Without the weight of his instructor in the tandem seat, the plane surged forward as if it
wanted
to take flight.

Erik’s hands were light on the controls, his pulse quickening as he picked up speed. He pulled gently back on the controls to raise the
nose. He was in the air. As he climbed steadily skyward he felt his heart leap as if freed from his chest. The clean lines of the land grew fuzzy and the vibrations of the engine rang through his bones. To the north, the Coast Mountains rose with their craggy peaks, and westward he saw the blue-grey ocean, its surface frosted with tiny whitecaps.

Erik felt a rush of pure elation. For the first time, he was absolutely certain that it was his destiny to fly.

But destiny had a caveat. When Erik graduated from Trinity Western College, local flying jobs were non-existent. Though he had a commercial multi-engine pilot’s licence and 250 hours in the cockpit, he was still on the bottom rung of the ladder when it came to a professional flying career. To achieve his dream of becoming an airline jet pilot, Erik needed to build flying hours, and lots of them.

In Canada, rookie pilots must log 1,500 hours before they can apply for an Airline Transport Pilot Licence. An ATPL allows pilots to captain large multi-crew airplanes the world over. The highest level of certification, it is also the minimum requirement for pilots hoping to land a coveted job with a major commercial airline.

Determined to build the flight time he needed to make it to the majors, Erik headed north in search of work. With his parents’ help, he purchased a one-way ticket to Yellowknife, the gateway to one of the continent’s last true frontiers: the Canadian north. He was twenty years old.

Winter still clung to the land when Erik arrived in early May 1980. From above, Yellowknife appeared like an ancient outpost of pale, low-slung buildings dwarfed by the massive expanse of Great Slave Lake and limitless treed and rocky plains. The land looked bruised, and long stretches of tarnished snow mottled the earth. Situated on
the 62nd parallel, Yellowknife was the last major population centre before the end of the treeline and the beginning of the Barren Lands, a vast sub-Arctic prairie also known as the tundra. Though the city of 9,000 seemed small and desolate to Erik, it was home to almost one-tenth of the entire population of northern Canada—a vast and rugged landscape covering almost 4 million square kilometres.
The North
, as Canadians colloquially call it, comprises almost 40 percent of the country’s land area and stretches from the 60th parallel all the way to the North Pole. It is a land of harsh temperatures and hardy inhabitants, fewer than 3 per 100 square kilometres. Erik was excited to be among them, making his living as a pilot. He felt that his life was finally beginning.

Erik had learned from a former college buddy that a small northern cargo carrier by the name of La Ronge Aviation was looking for co-pilots.
Just come
, his friend had urged. The day after his arrival, Erik paid a visit to the airline, confident that with his aviation college training and recently acquired IFR rating, he’d be a shoo-in for a job. To his disappointment, the owner informed him that the company wouldn’t be hiring until after Victoria Day, three weeks away. Erik must have looked stricken, as the man then suggested that he try The Range.

“They looking for co-pilots?” Erik asked hopefully.

“Nope,” he told Erik. “Waiters.”

The tavern at The Gold Range Hotel was exactly the kind of drinking establishment you might expect to find in a northern mining town. It was dim and the stench of beer and cigarette smoke was steeped into its walls and threadbare carpet. A hefty bar ran its length and behind it were shelves stocked with an assortment of whiskey, rum and other spirits. The tabletops were worn smooth by the elbows and
forearms of big-boned miners and oil patch workers who made The Range their second home, and the carpet was pocked black with cigarette burns.

Erik had worked at the Scottsdale Pub back in his hometown of Surrey where many of the male waiters did double duty as bouncers. He assumed the same code applied in a tough northern mining town. He was wrong. In Yellowknife waiting tables was women’s work, but after a good word from the folks at La Ronge, Erik became the first male server ever hired at The Range.

He took the ribbing that accompanied his new job in stride. The way he saw it, he had no choice but to stick it out until La Ronge was hiring again at the end of May. A few days into the job, Erik served a group of young men who rattled his resolve. They were clean-cut and self-assured, different from the regular crowd. One man, wearing a white shirt and sporting a close-cropped haircut, remarked on The
Strange’s
new waiter. He asked Erik his name and then took to derisively calling him
Enrico
for the night. Erik soon discovered that the men were pilots who had also come north to build flying time. Two more weeks as a barmaid suddenly seemed far too long.

The next day, Erik dropped in on Ptarmigan Airways, one of the larger carriers providing scheduled passenger service out of Yellowknife.

“Enrico,” a voice yelled as he entered the office. It was the pilot who’d ribbed Erik the night before. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for a flying job,” Erik said.

The pilot looked sheepish and introduced himself as Duncan Bell. When Erik asked about a job with Ptarmigan, Bell shook his head. The airline had no jobs, he said, but reassured him that La Ronge always needed co-pilots for their summer season.

“Just don’t expect too much,” Bell had warned him.

A few days into his new job, Erik understood what Bell had meant. Being hired at La Ronge as a “co-pilot” was little better than being a rampie—a heavy labourer who loaded, unloaded and fuelled planes. Erik began his shifts hauling drills, drill rods and other cargo bound for remote oil camps, as well as 450-pound fuel barrels to power the return flights. Then he’d climb aboard for the ride. Because there were no runways where the planes were bound, aircraft were equipped with oversized tires—called tundra tires—for landing on rough terrain or with floats to land on water. When the pilot reached his destination, the co-pilot would unload the cargo and manually refuel the aircraft using a hand pump—a tedious, arm-numbing task. It didn’t take Erik long to realize that he’d been hired more for his size than for his flying skills. Where the other new hires were referred to as grunts, Erik was called Supergrunt. All were licenced pilots looking to build flying time, but in contrast to the pilots at La Ronge, who earned $8,000 a month, co-pilots earned $1,000.

Erik’s first flight took place on May 21 and lasted seven-and-a-half hours—a far cry from the one-hour training circuits of his college days. Vast distances separated the remote camps and Erik soon found himself at the controls across hundreds of kilometres of tundra. Summer days north of the 60th parallel—the “land of the midnight sun”—were almost endless. With the pilot and co-pilot taking turns at the helm, La Ronge’s planes could literally fly around the clock. Typically, the pilot handled takeoffs and landings, and flew until he was tired. Then he would clamber into the back of the plane to sleep and Erik would take over, waking the pilot when it was time to land. The problem was that Erik couldn’t claim any of his flying hours until La Ronge gave him a Pilot Proficiency Check or PPC—an evaluation by an approved check pilot certifying Erik as competent to fly a particular aircraft. Though Erik and the other co-pilots reminded their bosses about the required PPC, they didn’t do so vociferously. Young
eager pilots willing to take their places were plentiful and flying time, even if not officially sanctioned, was better than no time at all. Still, without a PPC, Erik was little more than a phantom flyer, taking the controls during the deep crease of still-light night when the world slept, and sliding back into his rampie role when morning or civilization arrived.

The long summer days steamrolled into fall and the promised check ride never came. Winter freeze-up edged closer and at the end of September 1980, the company relocated its planes to its northern Saskatchewan headquarters to switch their landing gear from floats to skis for the winter. Erik caught a ride, expecting that he’d be first in line for a pilot’s job. But when he landed in the town of La Ronge, he joined a long line of equally experienced co-pilots hoping for the same break. Erik took stock. With more men than machines and a logbook filled with 700 hours he couldn’t claim, he decided to head home.

He wasn’t back in BC long before the North came calling in the form of Len Robinson, a former La Ronge pilot with whom Erik had frequently teamed up during the summer.

“I’ve got a real co-pilot’s job for you,” he said. The airline was called Shirley Air and based out of Edmonton. “It’s short term,” Robinson cautioned, “but you’d be flying a Twin Otter.” Twin Otters are the Cadillacs of small commuter planes—turboprops that carry up to nineteen passengers.

“What do I have to do to get the job?” Erik asked.

“Get yourself to Edmonton.”

When Erik thanked Robinson, he shrugged it off. “After last summer,” he said, “let’s just call it even.”

Less than a week later, Erik was in Edmonton. The city of half a million people had long been the jumping off point for bush pilots
ferrying workers and supplies to the North. Erik’s contract lasted little more than six weeks, but it gave him enough logbook hours to land him a co-pilot’s job at Ptarmigan Airways back in Yellowknife. Duncan Bell was still with the carrier when Erik returned in late May 1981.

“Hey, Enrico!” Bell greeted him warmly. “I’m looking forward to finally flying together.”

The two men never got the chance. Soon after joining Ptarmigan, Erik learned that a company called Simpson Air based in the trading post of Fort Simpson several hundred kilometres west was looking for pilots. Erik didn’t think twice about leaving Ptarmigan and seizing the opportunity to finally fly in the captain’s seat.

Paul Jones, one of the airline’s co-owners, picked Erik up in Yellowknife.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Jones told him, “
if you survived a summer at La Ronge, then you must be okay.”

Erik’s second stint in the North was an entirely different experience from his first. He was pilot-in-command and the hours in his logbook grew steadily. The flying was breathtaking and he loved being alone in the cockpit and watching the rugged beauty of the land stretch out beneath him. The Canadian Shield, a massive expanse of low-lying rock, lay across much of the North’s southern reaches. In winter it was an unending white wasteland, but in summer it was pocked and aglitter with rivers and thousands of lakes. Patches of muskeg—swampy basins of moss-covered water and decaying vegetation—were cradled between jagged outcrops of limestone and shale. In the east, the low-lying glaciated plain gave rise to mountains that reached heights of nearly 10,000 feet. Glaciers hugged the cols of these white giants and sheer, spectacular cliffs plummeted into deep fjords.

Though seemingly barren, the North was alive with wildlife ranging from bears and wolves to caribou and countless bird species. On one flight Erik spotted a lone grizzly bear running, its powerful
muscles undulating under a rich coat of fur. On another he came upon a herd of caribou. Erik was 1,000 feet up when the landscape suddenly transformed into a moving mass with no beginning or end in sight. As far as his eyes could see forward, back, and to either side, there was only an ocean of caribou, their antlers bobbing like a briar of nude branches and their mottled beige bodies spread like a dappled fleece over the land.