Flying On Instinct (12 page)

T
he hunt for McAvoy lasted for months. Local pilots and the RCAF flew round the clock, but nothing was found. It was as if the land or the network of lakes had swallowed him. For almost 40 years, his fate was one of Canada's aviation mysteries. It was even the subject of the 1973 “Ballad of Chuck McAvoy,” written by Frank Ferguson and sung by Ted Wesley:

N
ow they tell you that Chuck McAvoy still flies his ghostly
plane,

Lookin' for a place to set her down.

When the fog is thick and misty in this cold and barren land,

You can hear his engine searchin' for the ground.

On August 3, 2003, a helicopter pilot flying for a mining company found wreckage, human remains and McAvoy's identification at a crash site near Lupin Lake on the Northwest Territories–Nunavut border. He
was flying a crew of geologists back to a nearby camp when he thought he saw something in a jumble of rocks. Circling back and passing 200 feet (60 metres) directly above, he saw plane wreckage. Landing nearby to get a better look, the pilot saw that the downed plane was largely intact, and he speculated that McAvoy might have been attempting to land when he caught a skid and rolled. “It's camouflaged in the rocks pretty well,” he said. “You've got to be close and if you're off a bit, you can't see it there. You'd just think it was rocks, it's blended in so well.” McAvoy and his two passengers are believed to have died on impact.

Thirteen years before Chuck McAvoy vanished, the disappearance of bush pilot Johnny Bourassa had also launched an intensive search. After serving as an RCAF pilot during the Second World War, Bourassa returned home and delivered mail between Peace River and Fort Vermilion by horse and buggy in summer and dogsled in
winter. In 1950, he was hired to fly a charter service from Yellowknife to Bathurst Inlet in a de Havilland Beaver. On May 18, 1951, Bourassa lifted off from open water heading northeast to the Salmita Mine gold find. He refuelled there and switched from floats to skis since his destination in the high Arctic was still frozen. At Bathurst Inlet, his supervisor told him to put in only the amount of fuel needed to return to the Salmita Mine fuel cache. It was expensive to restock northern caches, so pilots were instructed not to carry extra fuel back south. Bourassa did not want to stop at Salmita so he filled up and departed directly to Yellowknife. When the supervisor stopped at Salmita the next day, he saw Bourassa's Beaver floats and assumed he had crashed en route. He retraced the route to Bathurst but found nothing. There he learned Bourassa had fully fuelled his plane; the search area had just grown exponentially.

With full fuel tanks, the Beaver could fly from Bathurst to northern Saskatchewan or Alberta or into the Mackenzie Mountains. In the time before locator transmitters, searching for a missing aircraft by sight in the North was a long and often futile process. The search expanded to a few hundred miles on each side of the intended route from Bathurst to Yellowknife. Nothing was spotted, so the search was halted. Four months later, Bourassa's plane was located on Wholdaia Lake, 350 miles (565 kilometres) southeast of Yellowknife near the Northwest Territories–Saskatchewan border. It was on shore and intact except for a broken ski.
Inside was a note from Bourassa. He said he had mistaken Aylmer Lake for Lac de Gras, which put him east of Fort Reliance, after which he flew west until the treeline, believing he was then east of Snowbird or Ennadai Lake. Running out of fuel, he was forced to land on the soft ice of Wholdaia Lake which was weak and disintegrating or “rotten.” He was going to walk south around the lake then on to Fort Reliance. He estimated it would take him three weeks to cover the 250 miles (400 kilometres).

If only he had made a different choice. Maps on board the Beaver showed it was about 125 miles (200 kilometres) to Fort Fond du Lac on Lake Athabasca and only 62 miles (100 kilometres) to Stony Rapids. If he had gone around the south end of the lake as the note said, he would have seen the Native portage trail, as wide as a wagon track, to Selwyn Lake and on to either Fond du Lac or Stony Rapids.

An aerial search would not locate one lone man on the vast landscape, so ground searchers were called in. The largest search ever undertaken by the Canadian Rangers, No. 7 Company, Yellowknife, began with the help of trappers from as far away as Edmonton. The bush between Wholdaia Lake and Fort Reliance was searched and searched again. No trace was found. No campsite. Nothing. Searchers concluded that Bourassa took a shortcut across the lake, counting the rotten ice would still hold. But the lake is dotted with small islands (aits) and underwater rocks that retain daytime heat and thaw the ice. It was a
treacherous situation that could drown a man, and it could have taken the life of Johnny Bourassa.

When writer Farley Mowat was researching his book
People of the Deer
, Bourassa had flown him to remote Inuit locations. The 2003 Canadian adventure movie
The Snow Walker
is based on the Mowat short story
Walk Well, My Brother
, which tells of a bush pilot who is on his way to Yellowknife when his engine cuts out. He is forced to land on a frozen lake and then walk out. The sad tale of Johnny Bourassa could have been Mowat's inspiration.

CHAPTER

11

BUSH PILOTS LIVE ON THE EDGE
, but despite the risks, they love their bird's-eye view of the world. They are there for each other in good times and bad, and experienced pilots can quickly assess the skills of their peers and know who they want to fly with. Nothing can replace hours logged in the air, but successful bush pilots also need many other talents: advanced outdoor survival and first-aid skills; the ability to repair an airplane using little more than duct tape and wire; and knowledge of how their airplane performs in changing conditions over boreal forest, tundra, mountains and Arctic seas. They must also be well-versed in navigation, cockpit instrumentation and Canadian Aviation Regulations. Tom Lamb, Keith Olson, Walter “Babe” Woollett and Art Schade
all proved they had the right stuff when they took to the skies over the unforgiving Canadian wilderness.

“Do not ask us where we fly, tell us where you want to go” was the motto of Tom Lamb and his six pilot sons, collectively known as the Flying Lambs. He started Lamb Airways Ltd. (later Lambair) in 1935 with one Stinson-Reliant SR8, a five-passenger plane with lots of cargo room that could be outfitted with floats, skis or wheels. He operated out of The Pas, 450 miles (725 kilometres) north of Winnipeg, which was a jumping-off point for the North. His first flights brought supplies into Moose Lake, where his father was a successful trading-post grocer.

Being a naturalist as well as a pilot, Lamb noticed that while he and the Cree lived in the midst of marshes with a large beaver and muskrat population, the animals themselves had few available passageways of any depth in which to swim and build their lodges. He undertook to dredge out parts of the marshland, re-establishing the original canals and waterways, dams and dykes. The irrigation ditches were inspected by foot in summer and on skates in winter, but patrols also could be done from the air by just looking down.

Lamb took out an ad in the local newspaper promoting his air services. Rivers had long been used as highways in the region, but flying was a means of avoiding dangerous rapids. He also turned his inventive mind to making bush flying easier. He developed special axles, so skis could be jacked up to keep them from freezing into the ground; a
rubber bag that fit inside the cargo space, so freshly killed fish and animals would not drip blood in the plane; and heat vents in the walls instead of the floor, so perishable cargo would not spoil. Many Lamb flights carried doctors and medical staff from the National Health and Welfare Department, sent to vaccinate northern residents, set broken bones and fly out the most severely ill to hospital.

In 1946, Lamb flew internationally with beavers, but not in a Beaver aircraft. He babysat 10 pairs of Manitoba beavers en route to Montreal, then Miami and on to Buenos Aires, where they transferred to a Canso flying boat provided by the government of Argentina and then flown to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, the world's most southerly town. There they were released to build new lodges in a marshy lake east of the Andes.

Tom Lamb died in 1969, and in 1970 the Manitoba government honoured his dedication to the northern wilderness and its wildlife by designating a 772-square-mile (2,000-square-kilometre) tract of land near The Pas as the Tom Lamb Wildlife Management Area. Lamb was inducted into Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame in 2009 for his exploration and development of northern Manitoba and the Arctic, mercy missions to aid First Nation peoples and his commitment to conservation.

While some pilots get hooked on the adrenaline and adventure of bush flying and never leave, others use it as a way to log the air time required for a commercial airline job. Keith Olson worked for six years as a bush pilot for
Tom Lamb, from 1959 to 1965 and tells many stories of his adventures during that time. Olson earned his private pilot's licence in Calgary in 1955, then an aeronautical engineering diploma, his commercial pilot's licence and, just for good measure, his mechanic's licence. Then he had to find a job. He applied to the Lambs in Manitoba and was hired after a 15-minute aerial demonstration in a Cessna 180 on skis. At first Olson flew short hauls to Moose Lake, then moved on to longer runs to Snow Lake and Thompson. Olson was sent out on his own for three months to work with an Indian agent “up north,” soliciting new business flying cargo and customers wherever they wanted to go. One of the Lambs dropped in occasionally to pick up the roll of bills Olson accumulated in cash payments.

Every day presented Olson with new challenges. One rule of thumb was that people always had more stuff than the plane had room. Often the Cessna's doors had to be removed to load in a sleigh, supplies, dogs and a couple of trappers before flying a short distance. “A lot of work for almost nothing, but that's what you did,” Olson recalled in an interview with writer Shirlee Matheson. “We called them ‘trapper trips' and charged a 12-mile minimum.” Sometimes Olson flew Native families to their traplines or picked up Native children from remote settlements to fly them to boarding school at Chesterfield Inlet and Churchill. Once he was contracted to fly mineral-staking prospectors to Gods Lake in northeastern Manitoba. It was spring and
the lake's surface snow was melting. As soon as he touched down, Olson he knew he was in trouble. He cut the engine, and as soon as the plane stopped, his passengers jumped out wearing snowshoes. The plane had sunk so much they could rest their elbows on the wing tip. They spent the entire day tramping down the wet snow into a makeshift runway and digging out the skis before they could take off.

In 1961, Olson was assigned to a 14-month contract with International Nickel Company of Canada Limited (INCO) to supply their drilling camps around Thompson. Then he flew an army survey expedition that was correcting northern maps and transported Geological Survey of Canada employees who were trekking across the North as far as the Arctic Circle. “All that time we lived in fly-infested tents,” Olson recalls, “or paddled a canoe while swatting mosquitos. The bugs just about drove us nuts. We sometimes had to wear head nets.”

Olson graduated from flying the Cessna to an Otter and a Norseman; he liked them both: “The Norseman was a challenge to fly but it's a genuine bush plane. I also loved the single Otter. It would do what the Norseman would do but a lot better . . . The Otter could get off and land slower and in shorter distances. On floats it was able to carry a bit more than the Norseman, and it had good range.”

Olson became more adept at flying on floats than on skis because there was more business in summer. “But you can get into a lot of trouble on floats because you can't just stop the airplane. You have to pick your water and estimate
the wind and the current to know where you should be able to stop,” he explained.

Olson spent his last four years with the Lambs flying out of Churchill, where the ocean was his landing and takeoff strip. He had to handle waves, tides, weather and reefs and also locate a secure place to tie up so his plane would not be carried out to sea. “Down south you have trees around the lakes and you can get into the sheltered side,” he explained, “but there is no shelter up there because there are no trees—and no spare parts if the aircraft gets damaged.” August was considered to have the best flying conditions, but even then large chunks of sea ice bobbing in the water near remote settlements like Igloolik on the Melville Peninsula threatened to smash the floats to pieces.

To make emergency repairs, Olson carried epoxy plastic body-filler similar to that used on cars. In cold weather, he had to use a blow pot to warm the engine and encourage it to start. “We carried brooms to brush snow off the wings then we'd prop them up in front of the engine to hold the tarp from going right against the cowling and put weights around the edges to keep the heat in. The gas fumes inside were suffocating. Maybe that's why pilots age fast!”

Nor was fashion a concern. To keep warm, Olson bought a quality parka with a fur-lined hood, quilted nylon air-force wind pants and air-force war-surplus flying boots inside of which he wore two pairs of socks and leather slippers. On top of all this he added industrial one-piece coveralls and a
down-filled jacket. With this attire he was ready to fly and keep warm should his plane be forced down. He never had a co-pilot, but sometimes he hired a similarly dressed “helper” who lived in The Pas. “In winter we had to dig out our gas drums from caches in a snowdrift and roll them out. It involved a lot of physical work using shovels or whatever we could find.” And performing toilet functions when overnighting at a remote winter location presented major logistical problems. “In those days you hardly ever had to go, because you never drank anything. You didn't want to have go to the bathroom,” Olson recalls. “You had to remove the one-piece coveralls if you were going to do any serious necessaries.”