The Ice Pilots (5 page)

Seeing a plane, especially a craft as legendary as the one before me, from this vantage point is a unique experience. Up close and personal, the Douglas DC-3 may well be the most beautiful and enigmatic piece of machinery I’ve ever seen. Its gleaming aluminum alloy fuselage stretched gracefully toward the front of the hangar, curving gently outward to its widest point, after which it gradually narrowed again as it neared the cockpit. The horizontal stabilizers jutted out abruptly from the back of the craft, filling the foreground. I could make out the dramatic sweep of the main wings off in the distance, the hint of a propeller peeking over the top of each one on this twin-engine beauty.

Yet the plane was not about to reveal all her secrets to me from a distance. I got closer, walking her length and running my hands along her smooth yet dimpled surface, 500,000 rivets bouncing under my fingertips. This plane—like each plane in the Buffalo fleet—is no museum piece, no matter how old it may be. No, this is a working plane, a hardscrabble, down and dirty, bare-bones machine that is the backbone of Buffalo’s business.

The “3,” as she is affectionately known, shared the same smell that permeated the hangar, though the primary bouquet was that of grease and oil. As I walked toward the front, the plane began to rise overhead and I could actually fit my six-foot-four frame under the fuselage. No museum piece, indeed! A fine layer of shiny black oil coated the underbelly of the craft. Sheet-metal patches large and small interrupted the otherwise predictable pattern of her frame. Each is a testimony to the rich history of this venerable old bird, whether it be hiding a bullethole from World War II or a dent caused by an impromptu meeting with a spruce tree limb on some long-forgotten northern airstrip.

The Douglas DC-3
is credited with revolutionizing the world of air transportation in the 1930s and 1940s and to this day is considered one of the most significant transport aircraft ever made. The plane was born of a rivalry between two of the most powerful airlines on earth in the 1930s: United Airlines and TWA.

As the Great Depression was tightening its grip on the American economy, both United and TWA were looking to beef up their fleets with Boeing’s new flagship 247 aircraft. United managed to lock down an order of five dozen 247s, leaving TWA high and dry until the entire order had been filled, a process that could take years. Not willing to give in quite so easily, TWA turned to pioneering aircraft designer Donald Douglas, founder of the Douglas Aircraft Company, to design and build a plane that would compete with the 247. Douglas’s resulting design was 1933’s twelve-passenger DC-1, of which only one prototype was built.

TWA asked for a few modifications to the DC-1 (primarily increasing its seating capacity and adding more powerful engines), which led to 1934’s more robust DC-2, a fourteen-seat, twin-engine airliner; TWA ordered twenty of the new planes. The DC-2 was so popular that a host of European airlines placed orders as well. They all wanted a piece of the plane that proved modern passenger air travel could be safe, comfortable, and reliable. And while the DC-2 was a fine machine, it still had room to improve. Enter American Airlines CFO Cyrus Smith.

Smith was looking for a “sleeper” plane—one in which passengers could stretch out and sleep on long-distance journeys—to replace American’s aging fleet of Curtiss Condor II biplanes, so he convinced Douglas to modify the DC-2, using a pre-order of twenty planes as bait. The new plane was engineered over the next two years, and on December 17, 1935—the thirty-second anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk—the prototype fourteen-berth DST (Douglas Sleeper Transport) took to the air, followed soon after by its sister dayship, the twenty-one-seat DC-3. American Airlines introduced DC-3 passenger service on June 26, 1936.

With the advent of the DC-3, air travel changed forever. The plane needed to refuel only three times during transcontinental trips, meaning people could fly from one side of North America to the other in as little as fifteen hours. The plane boasted amenities previously unheard of in air travel; passengers enjoyed such luxuries as on-board bathrooms and hot meals. For the first time, passengers could stand up and walk around the plane while airborne.

Thanks to a comfort and convenience previously unknown in passenger air travel, more people took to the skies than ever, and rail travel faced serious competition for the first time. Some airlines realized they could make more money from passenger travel than from shipping mail and other cargo, so it didn’t take long before American Airlines’ competitors jumped on the bandwagon: over four hundred DC-3 orders were placed almost immediately.

War changed the landscape once again, and the DC-3 was the world’s plane of choice to move troops and cargo. During World War II, some ten thousand U.S. military versions of the DC-3 were built, though under different names: the C-47 Skytrain, the C-53 Skytrooper, the R4D Skytrain, and the Dakota. These planes boasted reinforced metal floors, larger access doors, and a towing cleat for pulling gliders. The plane could carry twenty-eight fully equipped paratroopers or as much as six thousand pounds of cargo, which might include a jeep and trailer, or even an anti-tank gun. Yet the Americans were not alone in their love of the DC-3. The armed forces of many countries involved in the war also used the DC-3 to move troops and cargo.

In one famous incident in China, a DC-3 earned the nickname “Whistling Willie, the Flying Sieve” after it was riddled with bullets from Japanese machine-gun strafers. After Chinese labourers patched more than a thousand holes with pieces of canvas, the “3” was deemed airworthy enough to carry sixty-one refugees—far more than its intended payload—to India. The plane encountered a tropical storm en route, ripping the canvas patches to shreds. With nothing to cover its myriad holes, the plane whistled through the air like a screaming banshee for two hours through hostile skies. When it finally landed, an Army major approached the weary pilot and growled: “Why did you bother to radio ahead? We could hear you fifty miles away!”

Production of the DC-3 came to a halt in 1942, but that didn’t prevent commercial airlines from adding the planes to their fleets in the years to come. When the war ended in 1945, militaries around the world—particularly the U.S. military—found themselves sitting on more DC-3s than they could ever hope to use. The solution was to convert them back for civilian use and sell them to commercial airlines. This almost unending supply of cheap and easily maintained airplanes helped usher in the postwar air transport industry. In total, 16,079 DC-3s had been built, the majority in California.

Of the thousands
of DC-3s built more than seventy years ago, approximately four hundred are believed to be still flying, primarily as cargo aircraft, though they are also used in aerial spraying, military transport, sightseeing and skydiving, and as passenger airlines. The fact that it is still in daily use makes the “3” unique among prewar aircraft. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that the plane is used in some of the harshest working conditions on the planet. It has an uncanny ability to land on improvised runways of grass, dirt, and ice (its landing gear can be outfitted with skis), making it popular in remote locations and developing countries, where runways are not always paved. From deserts to jungles to the High Arctic, the DC-3 has been there—and is still there.

Buffalo Joe is among those who stand on the front lines of DC-3 dedication, never wavering from his firm belief that when it comes to reliability and efficiency, little else compares to this aging warbird. The company currently owns thirteen of the aircraft—six of which it keeps running at any one time—spread among its various hangars in Yellowknife, Hay River, and Penhold (Red Deer), Alberta. The DC-3 comprises the largest percentage (27 percent) of Buffalo’s current fleet.

Joe will tell you it’s one of the most reliable and trouble-free airplanes ever built. That’s no surprise, really. One of the most important features of the “3”—a design specification ordered by none other than pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was a TWA director at the time—is that the plane should always be able to fly on one engine.

Perhaps that’s why pilots and mechanics alike are so dedicated to this creaky old bird, a pilot’s aircraft if ever there was one. There’s a common saying among those who know the plane best: “The only replacement for a DC-3 is another DC-3.” Buffalo Joe sees it much the same way, though he adds his unique flair when describing the merits of the plane: “If you really want to experience flight in this life, you have to strap a DC-3 to your ass,” he says.

He’s right. Though I’ll likely never know what it feels like to fly a DC-3, in the months to come I would have ample opportunity to sit in the cockpit of that great groaning beast as she made her way across northern skies. And like Joe says, there is nothing—
nothing
—that compares to soaring above the world’s last great wilderness in a plane that once flew clandestine missions during World War II.

Having a DC-3 strapped to his ass is where Joe is in his element. The metamorphosis that occurs in his personality at every Sunday–Friday afternoon is remarkable. Here is a man who carries the weight of running an airline on his shoulders for most of his waking hours. He worries about the safety of his aircraft and the people he calls upon to fly them. He worries about the employees who depend upon Buffalo Airways to pay their mortgages and put food on their tables. He worries about remote northern communities that would be stuck without essential food, products, and services if his planes missed their deliveries. But at his core, Joe McBryan is a pilot, and he is never more comfortable than when he sits down early every morning and late every afternoon (except Saturday) in the cockpit of C-GPNR, C-GWIR, or C-GWZS, the three DC-3s that ply the skies between Yellowknife on the north-central coast of Great Slave Lake and Hay River on its southwestern shore. “It’s like night and day,” Mikey says, “a complete change of personality. He’ll yell and scream all day, and once he gets that over with and gets on that plane, he’s happy.”

It doesn’t take long for even the newest arrival to the Buffalo family to see it. By day, Joe is a hardened businessman, one with exceptionally high demands for the people around him, no matter what position they hold in the business’s hierarchy. He rarely cracks a smile, and he prowls around the hangar and adjoining offices like a lion on the hunt. If there’s something going on in the business, Joe knows about it, is likely worried about it, and will probably find something about it that needs to be improved. Walk across the tarmac of the Yellowknife or Hay River airports to the stairs of the DC-3, however, and there’s a different person waiting for you. Sure, he
looks
like the Joe McBryan you’ve been scared to bump into in the hangar, but
this
Joe McBryan is busy greeting passengers as they board the plane. He chats with old friends, welcomes them aboard, laughs and smiles as they offer their stories of the day. He is, in a word,
charming.

And the more I came to know this man, the more I realized that he
needs
to do this. He needs to fly, needs to be behind the controls of the aging World War II beauties to which his name is so closely linked. But he also needs this kind of relaxed, gentle human interaction that he seems to find so difficult at other times during the day. Because while he is loath to show it to the outside world, Joe McBryan is really an ol’ softie at heart.

You certainly couldn’t tell by his work ethic, though. Buffalo has been offering its scheduled Yellowknife–Hay River service continuously since 1982. Joe flies each one-hour (200-kilometre) leg across the belly of the great lake, leaving Hay River at 7:30 every morning and returning home at 5:00 every evening. That’s twelve flights each week, or 624 flights a year. So between 1982 and 2010—give or take the odd missed flight for weather—Buffalo Airways’ daily DC-3 airline passenger service flew 17,472 times. Joe McBryan was at the helm for almost all of them.

It makes me wonder if he ever looks forward to a day off or (God forbid!) a vacation. “Why would I go on holiday?” he snapped at me when I asked him when he’d last taken a break for a little R & R. “So I could sit on my ass?”

Buffalo Airways is the proud owner of fifty-two aircraft, forty-nine of which are registered to the airline and three to the Buffalo School of Aviation, which hasn’t run courses in several years.

1 Aeronca Champion: C-FNPJ

2 Beechcraft Baron: C-FULX, C-GBAU

3 Beechcraft King Air: C-FCGE, C-FCGH, C-FCGI

3 Beechcraft Travel Air: C-GIWJ, C-GWCB, C-GYFM

7 Canadair CL-215: C-FAYN, C-GBPD, C-GBYU, C-GCSX, C-GDHN, C-GDKW, C-GNCS

1 Cessna 185: C-FUPT

2 Consolidated Vultee (Canso): C-FNJE, C-FPQM