The Ice Pilots (27 page)

Summer is the time
in the North when all the promises of spring—those little teasers that begin with ever-increasing sunshine and end when the last piece of ice melts off the last lake—come true. People who have spent the past couple of months slowly becoming accustomed to the idea of warmth and light rush out of their homes in droves. Like the flowers that burst into bloom on the lands around the city, the residents of Yellowknife explode outdoors, eager to take in all that this glorious season has to offer before it fades into yet another grey winter.

People move more slowly now too. In winter, Yellowknifers hurry from place to place and task to task, hunched over and bundled up against the bite of winter. Now, the pace is decidedly more relaxed. People walk as though they’ve got nowhere else to be but
this
place at
this
time. Even the cars move slowly, cruising down Franklin Avenue, downtown Yellowknife’s main drag, as if every day was cause enough for a Sunday drive.

In some ways, the summer version of Yellowknife—particularly Old Town—is reminiscent of a seaside village. Great Slave Lake seems more like an inland sea than a lake. The wide water is a constant backdrop; boats come and go from docks peppered along the shorelines; houseboats bob gently in the sheltered waters of Back Bay; float planes roar to life with a splash. There are even fishermen hawking the day’s catch from the backs of their pickup trucks.

Away from the water, colour has returned to the landscape. The white and grey of winter and spring have given way to glorious green. Most people walk around in shorts, although I am always surprised at the number of people who opt for jeans and jackets, even when the temperature pushes into the twenties (seventies Fahrenheit). Maybe on some level they don’t trust the sun, having been deceived by it one too many times.

Life at Buffalo Airways takes on a decidedly different groove in summer too. Though there is still a buzz of activity in the hangar—nobody whose last name is McBryan ever really goes on holiday—the place seems more relaxed, friendlier. People smile more, bark less, and seem to have more time to enjoy themselves. Maybe that’s why the Omni TV crew chooses this time of year to pack up its gear for a few months before returning in September: happy, contented people do not make for intriguing television programming.

“It’s better TV in the winter,” Mikey said one sunny afternoon. “Plus summer is boring, because it’s actually nice. Everyone loves coming to work; it’s like summer camp.”

The nature of business at Buffalo Airways changes too. Sure, Mikey and friends are still running charters to all corners of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but the jobs are fewer and farther between. The Mackenzie Valley run, one of the cornerstones of Buffalo’s winter business, grinds to a halt, as barges use the Mackenzie River to carry hundreds of thousands of pounds of food and other goods to the communities of Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope.

Planes that have stood long dormant jump to life. The change is particularly acute for the CL-215 water bombers, which are enlisted into firefighting service by various provincial and territorial governments as soon as the snow is off the ground. Every pilot capable of flying one of those strange, amphibious aircraft is scrambled to wherever the whims of nature take him. I traded text messages with Scott Blue as he headed down to Fort McMurray, Alberta; Justin Simle was in Fort Simpson.

In fact, firefighting is a huge part of Buffalo Airways’ business, accounting for approximately half of its entire annual revenue. I suspect there are a couple of reasons why this critical element of the Buffalo puzzle fails to make it to the television screen with any regularity. First of all, the television crew is simply not around during much of the firefighting season. Perhaps more importantly, Buffalo’s firefighting contracts are all with provincial or territorial governments, which are not particularly keen on having the things they pay for immortalized on video, presumably for insurance and liability reasons.

It’s too bad, really, since from what I can tell, firefighting is some of the most exciting flying a pilot can do, period. There is nothing commonplace about flying a DC-3, DC-4, or C-46, but for adrenaline junkies, fighting fires is the way to go.

Rick Sinotte is one of those guys. Small, spry, and boasting a weathered face that you can’t help but like, Rick is a gun for hire, a pilot who works for Buffalo on a contract-by-contract basis as the situation dictates. Rick flies one of Buffalo’s two Beechcraft Barons, which serve a very important role during firefighting operations. They’re the “bird dogs.”

In the world of aerial firefighting, the bird dog is the spotter, the plane that safely leads water bombers into and out of the action over a fire. Though a variety of aircraft are used as bird dogs around the world, their task is primarily the same. “In conjunction with the air-attack officer, we do the reconnaissance over the fire and assess what resources are needed there to contain that fire,” he told me one warm summer afternoon in the Pilots’ Lounge.

The air-attack officer then directs the land and air firefighting operation. “We call in the water bombers, then show them what we want them to do and where we want them to drop,” Rick said. “The air-attack officer watches the drop to make sure it goes where we wanted it to go.”

Rick has been flying for forty-five years, but he still gets excited when talking about the thrill of flying a small plane through clouds of smoke some twenty metres (sixty-five feet) above the burning treetops. “It’s fun flying,” he said with a wry smile. Yet despite the apparent risk of his work, Rick is quick to set the record straight. “It’s like anything else,” he told me. “There’s a real safe way to do it. And that’s what we do.”

Firefighting is old hat
for a guy like Rick. Over the five decades he’s been a bush pilot, he’s seen and done just about everything there is to see and do behind the controls of a plane. Then there’s Scotty Blue, who sits squarely on the other side of the spectrum. Sure, Scotty has been flying for several years now, but the summer of 2011 is his first in the right seat of the CL-215 water bomber (luckily, he fits!), a position that completely changes his view on life at Buffalo Airways.

“Honestly, I was wondering what my future at Buffalo would be like,” a hungover Scott confided in me one afternoon as we chowed on a delicious Sunday brunch at Thornton’s Wine & Tapas Room (located right beside the Yellowknife Shooting Club). “But you fly the Duck [CL-215] for a day and you’re like, ‘Holy crap, I may have been thinking about beelining to the airlines, but I don’t have to do that anymore. I might be quite content doing this.’ Honestly, I don’t think there’s too much flying out there that is more fun than water bombing. It’s the most exciting type of flying I’ve ever done. It’s a big reason why I’ve worked at Buffalo as long as I have: I always wanted to get into the water bombers.”

To hear Scotty tell it, to see the gleam in his eyes, his long arms gesticulating wildly, his voice getting louder with each sentence, is to realize that water bombing is testosterone flying at its best. “You’re on standby, so you’re sitting around the tanker base doing nothing all day long. Then the alarm goes off and you run out to the plane—you don’t even know where you’re going. You start the plane and let the oil warm up, and that’s when they give you the coordinates of your destination.”

Once in the air, Scotty and his pilot—in conjunction with the bird dog and the air-attack officer—find the closest suitable lake and make the first of what can be dozens of round trips between the fire and the lake in a single day. And when the lake is just a few minutes from the fire, the plane can drop fifteen to twenty loads of water every hour. “It can be repetitive like anything, but the rush of it is hard to describe. You look ahead and there’s a whole bunch of planes around, and there’s fire and smoke everywhere.”

“Sounds scary,” I said.

“There was a moment earlier this summer where we were flying through some smoke over Slave Lake and it got really dark and I was a little scared. I’ve heard stories of embers coming in through the ventilation system and stuff like that. So you’ve gotta be on your toes.”

Indeed. Water bombing is among the most technically challenging flying there is. The plane scoops up about 5,445 kilograms (12,000 pounds) of water in seconds, and dumps it even more quickly. With such significant weight changes occurring every few minutes, pilots have to be aware of what’s happening around them at all times, and ready to adapt at a second’s notice.

One of the most demanding moments comes when the plane skims the water with its probes extended (the probes allow the water to enter the plane’s belly tanks). The resistance at that moment is so great that some have equated it with hitting a brick wall. “You have to go to total take-off power as soon as you hit the water,” Scott said. “Ten seconds later you pull the probes up, the plane starts accelerating, and you take off.”

The same thing happens in reverse when the water is dumped. “As soon as you drop, the plane instantaneously wants to climb, because you’ve just dropped twelve thousand pounds of water,” he said.

Ultimately, while water bombing may be the adrenaline rush a guy like Scott needs to stay happy and engaged, it’s not the most predictable employment. Water bomber pilots operate at the whim of Mother Nature. If the fires burn, you fly. If not, you sit. And as the summer of 2011 began to wane, Scott had seen only thirty-two hours in the cockpit of the Duck. It would keep him sufficiently interested and engaged to stay in the Buffalo fold—for the time being. Still, as we sat there pondering Scott’s place in the aviation world, I couldn’t help but wonder if his days in Yellowknife were numbered.

The general ease
of warm temperatures and long days does not mean the essence of Buffalo will change anytime soon. As long as Joe McBryan is steering the proverbial ship, there will always be more work to do. Mikey related to me a conversation he has with Joe about this time every year:

Mikey: “I want to go on vacation this month.”

Joe: “Don’t take it this month. This may be the month where we get Electra work.”

Mikey: “Okay, well, how about March?”

Joe: “March? Well, you never know, we always do fuel hauls in March.”

Mikey: “Okay, I want to take it in June.”

Joe: “June? No way, that’s firefighting season.”

Mikey: “Okay, what about September?”

Joe: “Well, you can’t then, because that’s after fire season and everyone else is on vacation.”

“Every month is the wrong month.” Mikey griped to me. “It’s always two or three more months down the road.”

Mikey says there’s no seasonal rhyme or reason to life at Buffalo. “It’s not really by month or season,” he says. “You can have a really slow week followed by the craziest, busiest week you’ve ever imagined.”

This lack of predictability seems to have been a huge factor in shaping Mikey’s personality. He is as dedicated a worker as anyone I have ever met, but he seems to have no plans for the future, for either himself or the business. Mikey is living in the moment in every respect, and will deal with change if and when it’s thrown at him. The result is a sense of liberation few people ever know.

“None of this is planned,” he said as we relaxed over a cold one on his deck overlooking Back Bay. “If you drive from New York to L.A., you don’t plan every rest stop along the way. It’s the journey, right? And you can never guess what’s around the next corner.”

I find Mikey’s take on things refreshing, albeit a bit uncomfortable when he starts talking matter-of-factly about the end of Buffalo Airways. Like so many people, I have come to love this quirky, renegade airline. We want it to exist, because we need to know that there is more to this world than the homogeneous, fast food, cookie-cutter crap most of us choose to ensconce ourselves in. Mikey is not bound by the same shackles.