The Ice Pilots (14 page)

As stressful as the flight was for Justin, the 215s made it to the tiny airstrip on Santa Maria without incident. That night, the crew celebrated its success with a night on the town in Vila do Porto, population 5,500. “It was sure nice to put that big chunk of ocean behind you,” he adds.

With the most dangerous leg of the journey over, the crew looked forward to the second over-ocean portion of their trip, the 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) between Santa Maria and Cascais on mainland Portugal, a six-hour flight. Given their ease of passage between St. John’s and Santa Maria, everyone decided to leave the survival suits in the back of the plane for the second leg.

Perhaps the decision was made a bit too hastily. Only an hour out of Santa Maria, the 215 piloted by George and Dave experienced a dangerous phenomenon known as an “engine overspeed” on its left engine. When an overspeed occurs, the engine and propeller turn far faster than they are designed to do, either by pilot error or by mechanical malfunction. The pilots lost complete control of the left engine, forcing them to turn back to Santa Maria and make an emergency landing.

As Justin tells it, the overspeed was no laughing matter: “An engine failure in a CL-215 at that weight and those cold temperatures is a serious deal.” Indeed. With only one engine working, a 215 cannot stay airborne for long, and the stress on the hobbled engine is incredible. Imagine driving your car as fast as it can go and then slamming it into first gear. The worst-case scenario with an engine overspeed? The propeller sheds its blades, which then rip through the plane’s fuselage.

In the meantime, Justin and Arnie were safe in Cascais, waiting for their counterparts to arrive. When it became obvious that the second water bomber would be delayed in Santa Maria awaiting replacement parts, Arnie and Justin made their way to Ankara, Turkey, via Spain and Malta. It was only half the agreed-upon delivery, but their clients were thrilled to have even one 215 on home soil. The second plane arrived a few days later, to the delight of the Turks.

Though the CL-215 odyssey
would rank as one of the most unusual missions Arnie Schreder flew in thirty years of contract flying with Buffalo, comprising almost forty thousand hours, nothing could have prepared Arnie for his last revenue flight (a flight the pilot gets paid for, as opposed to a training or mechanical checkup flight) with Buffalo. Enter
Dambusters.

To many people, the term “dambusters” has a historical context, thanks to one of the most daring and immortalized raids carried out during World War II. On May 16, 1943, nineteen British Lancaster bombers took off from a little-known airfield in Lincolnshire, en route to three heavily defended reservoirs in Germany. Their mission: destroy three dams deep in Germany’s industrial heartland, thereby crippling the German army. To do so they used a 4,175-kilogram (9,200-pound) bomb designed specifically to bounce off the water and explode once it impacted the dam. Two dams were destroyed, the third badly damaged.

Since that day, the feat has been attempted only once, as a U.S. military experiment in 1946 that went horribly wrong when the bomb bounced too high off the water and destroyed the plane that had just dropped it. Until Arnie, that is.

After six months of work by one of the world’s foremost authorities on spinning objects—not to mention the fifty-odd other people who helped bring it all together—a British production team called on Arnie to drop the newly designed bomb (designed
not
to explode) from a Buffalo DC-4 to see if the raid could be replicated for a made-for-TV special called
Dambusters.
The stakes were unbelievably high: despite lots of practice runs, Arnie would only have one shot at the real thing. One mistake—which could see the bomb bounce high off the water and tear the DC-4 to shreds—could mean his death.

“Nothing went right,” Mikey said. “In fact, the
only
thing that went right was the last moment, when Arnie dropped the bomb and it skipped over the water—right into the dam! Those were probably the best four seconds of my life. There’s not very many things in life you work that hard on for four seconds of reward.”

Arnie wasn’t the only one putting himself at risk that day. According to Mikey, it’s the most dangerous thing he’s ever done too. “We had people all over the place, and that bomb could have gone anywhere. But Arnie just comes in and tick, tick—bang! Dead centre. If he had a hundred more tries, I don’t know if he could do it as perfectly.”

It was the last revenue flight the legendary Arnie has ever flown for Buffalo.

“What a way to go out,” said Mikey.

Experiences such as these
may be par for the course for a Buffalo flyboy who reaches the exalted status of chief pilot, but they are anything but normal for the greenhorn, as Justin was when he first arrived on the Buffalo scene back in 2001. And yet, something about Justin seems, well, special. It’s almost as if he’s meant to be where he is.

You might have even guessed that back on Justin’s twenty-first birthday. There he was, his first day at Buffalo, and on the sked down to Hay River that evening, Joe let him take control of the DC-3. “That was my birthday present,” he told me.

Yet just like the young men he works with today, Justin had to put in his time on the ramp before he could graduate to the upper echelon of the Buffalo hierarchy. He was checked out on the DC-3 on April 7, 2002. I’m not sure if it speaks to deep-rooted psychological scarring from spending so much time with Joe, but Justin can remember, almost to the minute, how much time he spent beside Joe on the DC-3. “I flew with Joe for thirteen months, one week, and three days,” he tells me. “And then they checked me out on the DC-4 on my twenty-third birthday, May 29, 2003.”

In classic Buffalo fashion, Justin did whatever was necessary to keep the company running, even after he’d reached the exalted status of pilot. He told me about his early days in Yellowknife, when Buffalo was having difficulty finding long-haul truck drivers to courier goods between Hay River and Edmonton.

“I’d fly the sked across the lake in the morning, from Hay to Yellowknife, then sleep the afternoon in Yellowknife, from noon until around 3 PM,” he said. “When I woke up, I’d get the sked ready, fly back to Hay River and unload it. Then I’d get in the long-haul truck, drive halfway down to Edmonton, and meet the guy driving north from Edmonton in Dixonville, Alberta. We’d run across the road and switch trucks:

“ ‘How’s it running?’

“ ‘Good!’

“ ‘How’s it running?’

“ ‘Good!’ ”

Justin would hop in the truck and finish the twelve-hour drive back to Hay River, where he would load his truckful of goods back on to the sked, fly it to Yellowknife, and get a few hours of sleep before starting the entire process over again.

This type of ridiculous work ethic is a simple fact of life at Buffalo. At first blush, it may seem harsh, even draconian. But to the people who make their living here, there are benefits as well. “All the people who work here are really close,” Justin says. “You’re working pretty hard and you spend a lot of time with the people you work with. So they become like your friends; you hang out with them after work too.”

If anything, the conditions at Buffalo mean your co-workers are generally good people. As Justin explains it, prima donnas don’t last very long in Yellowknife. “It’s a tough place to make a living; it’s not for everybody. The benefit is that you don’t get assholes here. Because everyone has gotta work hard and work together, eh?”

Though the benefits of such an arrangement are obvious, it comes at a price too: as Scott Blue described to me one evening in a Yellowknife restaurant, having a social life outside of Buffalo is nearly impossible. “The thing that really gets to me at Buffalo is that I’ve become sick and tired of turning down weekends in Calgary or back home in Toronto, or not being able to have time off when I want it.” Scott’s life is one where being on call is a constant bedfellow, his plans are subject to change at a moment’s notice.

Such conditions don’t make it easy to have a relationship. “I tried dating girls when I first got here, but I never knew when I would be shipped off somewhere or gone. So they all got bored and found someone else.”

As troublesome as they may be, these sacrifices are worth it to Scotty, who—like most of his Buffalo comrades—has seen and done things most pilots will never experience. “It’s really a crazy place,” he says with a conspiratorial smile. “I remember my first summer flying to Sawmill Bay [on Great Bear Lake, some 400 kilometres or 250 miles northwest of Yellowknife] and landing a DC-3 on a strip that had hardly seen a plane in years. The year before, they had taken a DC-3 in there, and the props were ripping through trees when they landed.” Scott spent part of the day exploring the camp—which has seen varied uses over the decades, including timber sawmill, loading dock, and air force airfield—along with the machinery, vehicles, and buildings left behind when it was abandoned in 1987.

Experiences like that may not be routine, but they’re commonplace enough to keep a guy like Scott content to call Buffalo home for the foreseeable future. “I could go somewhere else,” he says, hinting that some of Canada’s major airlines have already made overtures to him. “But where else could I fly a C-46 to Eureka?”

Good point. Even for those of us fortunate enough to have spent time in the North, Eureka is the remotest of the remote. A small research base set on southern Ellesmere Island in the far northern reaches of Nunavut (79°59
'
N latitude), Eureka is the second-northernmost permanent research station in the world. Only Alert—perched on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island—is farther north.

“Back in the day, it was routine to get piston-pounding airplanes that far north. But now they just don’t go up there anymore. So it may be one of the last—if not the last—times a C-46 goes that far north. I’ll never forget doing that; it was unbelievable.”

So for all the heartache that comes along with being part of the Buffalo family, it also offers its pilots adventures of the most far-flung kind. Today,
Ice Pilots
has helped give young pilots a glimpse into the kinds of adventures awaiting them north of 60. Like Scotty, though, Justin didn’t have the luxury of knowing before he arrived what the company was like. So when Justin first showed up at Buffalo’s door, he had no idea what was awaiting him on the other side.

As with most
Buffalo pilots, Justin’s route to Yellowknife was anything but straightforward, though he was long fascinated with the idea of flying. Justin was born just outside of Langley, British Columbia, but it wasn’t long before his parents started dragging him all over the world as different business opportunities presented themselves.

“We spent some time in Saudi Arabia,” he told me over lunch one day at the Gold Range Diner, a Yellowknife institution and one of Justin’s favourite lunch-hour dining spots. The Gold Range Diner epitomizes the dichotomy of modern-day Yellowknife. From the outside, it’s rundown, maybe even a little grotty. The bright yellow building has seen better days. The paint is peeling, the wooden steps worn. The interior—with its brick-coloured linoleum floor and Asian decor—feels and smells like a building past its prime. Sit down for a while, though, and you see what really makes the place tick. Here are people from all walks of Yellowknife life—blue collar and white collar, Native and non-Native—enjoying surprisingly good food in a friendly and welcoming atmosphere. The first time Justin and I sat down in the diner, I was shocked to enjoy one of the best chicken curries I’d had in a long time.

“We also lived in Oman,” he continued. “When I was five we moved to Dubai, and we lived there for two years.” The rest of Justin’s childhood reads like pages from the Canadian atlas: six months in Rossland, British Columbia; four years in Vancouver; three years in Ottawa; four years in Winnipeg; six months in Castlegar, British Columbia; and eighteen months in Edmonton.

The idea of flying always fascinated Justin, so when he was fifteen—and didn’t yet have a driver’s licence—his mother began diligently driving him to the airport for lessons. He soon got his private pilot’s licence, and then spent two years at Mount Royal College (now Mount Royal University) in Calgary. With a crisp new commercial pilot’s licence in his hand and a fresh outlook on life, Justin took the road north to Yellowknife for the same reason that hundreds of other young, eager Buffalo pilots have: there were no jobs anywhere else.

“About thirty-five people graduated from my class in flight school,” he explained. “And from that class, maybe ten of us are working now. So if you wanted a job, you had to do what it took.”

That’s exactly what Justin did. “I threw all my worldly possessions in the back of my Mustang—one suitcase, a sleeping bag, and a box of assorted shit—and started driving north,” he told me.