Flying On Instinct (2 page)

A contrast in winter modes of travel by air and land, Matt Berry's aircraft spreads its wings beside Richard Finnie's traditional dogsled and team in Coppermine, Northwest Territories, in 1931.
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In 1942, the US government recognized Berry's expertise in Arctic transportation and hired him to oversee construction of airfields in the Northwest Territories and the CANOL (Canadian Oil) Project, a pipeline and road system to supply fuel for the military during the Second World War. In the
post-war period, he and partner Max Ward developed Yellowknife Airways Ltd., then Berry went on to found Territories Air Services Ltd. at Fort Smith before turning to northern mining ventures. Ill health forced his retirement in 1969; he died the following year in Edmonton.

Wilfred Leigh Brintnell was another First World War flyboy, joining the RFC in 1917 and then becoming an instructor with the RAF the following year. After the war, he looked for other opportunities, but it was not until 1927 that he began working for Western Canada Airways (WCA). Brintnell completed a 9,320-mile (15,000-kilometre) flight in a Fokker tri-motor aircraft inspecting WCA sites from Winnipeg north through the Northwest Territories to Great Slave Lake, then from the Mackenzie River to Fort Norman.
From there, Brintnell flew north to Aklavik on the Arctic Ocean. The next leg of his flight was the first across-the-Rockies flight from Aklavik to Dawson City, Yukon. From there he proceeded to Prince Rupert, on British Columbia's Pacific coast, returning back to Winnipeg via Edmonton. In 1932, Brintnell formed his own company, Mackenzie Air Service Ltd., in Edmonton and began flying passengers on regular schedules and charters across the Northwest Territories and Arctic until his airline was sold and amalgamated into Canadian Pacific (CP) Airlines in 1940.

In 1929 Brintnell made a historic flight that helped fuel the atomic bombs dropped over Japan to end the Second World War in 1945. Mining entrepreneurs Gilbert LaBine and Charles St. Paul were aboard when Brintnell made the first flight completely around Great Bear Lake. During the flight, the excited passengers caught sight of what appeared to be signs of silver and pitchblende, indicating uranium deposits, around the shoreline. Back on land, LaBine rushed to stake a claim, and Eldorado Mines Ltd. was in business. The largest deposit of uranium ore in the world, Eldorado produced radium salts, a market then monopolized by Belgium, for medical rather than military use.

Leigh Brintnell poses with Bellanca 66-70 Air Cruiser CF-AWR of Mackenzie Air Service Ltd. in Edmonton in 1935.
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On March 19, 1935, six years after that first flight with LaBine, Brintnell and co-pilot Stan McMillan took off from the mine in a Bellanca Air Cruiser with the initial shipment of radium concentrates on board. Later, in 1942, the US government ordered some 220 tons of uranium ore from
Great Bear Lake to fuel experiments in the Manhattan Project, so Eldorado ore was used in the first chain-reaction experiments to produce a nuclear bomb. LaBine signed a supply contract after scientists discovered the ore contained high levels of uranium oxide, a nuclear-energy source. But it wouldn't last. The Eldorado mine at Port Radium, Northwest Territories, was secretly expropriated and ownership transferred to the Canadian government in 1944. The company was nationalized as a crown corporation and renamed Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd. Uranium ore
from the mine was used in the secret laboratories of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to fuel the first atomic weapons, named Little Boy and Fat Man, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—all this from a charter flight around a lake in the Northwest Territories.

CHAPTER

2

IN 1919, ELLWOOD WILSON
, a forester with Laurentide Pulp Company in Quebec, came up with the idea of using airplanes to spot forest fires long before they became huge infernos that could destroy large swaths of valuable timberland owned by Laurentide and other pulp and paper companies. Planes also provided the sweeping aerial views that made photographing and mapping timber holdings much easier. But the new flying machines were scarce and very expensive. However, in a post-war gift, Wilson found out that the US Navy was declaring its wartime Curtiss HS-2L coastal patrol flying boats as surplus. The Canadian government was the lucky recipient of 12 of these flying boats. Wilson asked for the loan of two of them, and
hired Captain Stuart Graham, just returned home from the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), along with his engineer, Bill Kahre, to fly the first one up from Halifax-Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to Grand-Mère/Lac-
à-
la-Tortue, Quebec. Graham agreed, but with reservations.

The Curtiss was not a sleek flying machine, but it had a lot of character. It was noisy, and when its Liberty engine overheated, boiling water from the radiator spewed over cabin occupants. Pilots said it resembled a pelican with big biplane wings mounted high over a thick, bathtub-shaped fuselage. In bad weather, it took the muscle power of both the pilot and his engineer to grab the controls and keep their bird aloft. Manoeuvring on water was even more problematic. Often the engineer had to climb out onto the lower wing so his extra weight would force either the right or left wing-tip float into the water to allow the pilot to turn in toward a dock or out onto a lake. It could be capricious—sometimes choosing to start and sometimes not—and sometimes demanding immediate mechanical adjustments either while airborne or while dead in the water amid swirling clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes.

The Curtiss flying boat's wooden hull absorbed water, which added weight and reduced the amount of cargo it could haul. Often bad weather or engine breakdowns forced the HS-2L onto the nearest lake, regardless of the lake's size. Airmen soon discovered that seaplanes need more room to take off than to land, so a pilot had to use ingenuity to
get airborne again. They used several techniques. One such technique was to attach a rope to the plane, tie it around a convenient tree and then rev the engine. When the engine was at full power, the engineer leaned out and cut the rope so the aircraft would slingshot into the air in a shorter distance. Also, because of the plane's unique wide hull, pilots could get up to takeoff speed in one direction, then make a sharp turn at the end of the lake and have enough momentum to clear trees or rocks at the other end of the lake. But then again, sometimes the engineer had to chop down those pesky trees along the line of liftoff. Pilot, engineer and passengers all sat in open cockpits and faced rain, snow and skin-searing cold. Then there was winter ice. The HS-2L was a flying boat, not a skier, and as soon as ice formed over a lake, it was grounded until spring. But in spite of these handicaps, the Curtiss HS-2L was Canada's first bush plane. It was big enough to carry five people or their equivalent weight in cargo and could land on just about any body of water. All it needed was a fearless pilot and an agile engineer to manually manoeuvre it as required and provide ongoing TLC.

Stuart Graham, Canada's first professional bush pilot and a member of Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame, began his civilian career in a Curtiss HS-2L called
La Vigilance
. Graham's wife became the first Canadian woman to help crew a plane when she travelled with him between Nova Scotia and Quebec. After a few days in Halifax familiarizing himself with his awkward airship, Graham took the Curtiss HS-2L
flying boat on her maiden flight back to Quebec. A crew of three—Graham as pilot, his wife, Madge (“Poppy”), as navigator, and Bill Kahre as engineer—flew the aircraft at treetop level from Nova Scotia to Quebec. The HS-2L had only rudimentary instruments: a compass, an air- and wind-speed indicator and a turn-and-bank indicator. The noise from the engine made conversation impossible, so Madge strung up a miniature clothesline to send written messages to and from the occupants. The flight took four days in June and covered 645 miles (1,038 kilometres), the longest cross-country flight in Canada at the time. The crew then returned to Halifax-Dartmouth and delivered the second HS-2L to Quebec.

Everything was set for the first summer of bush flying doing aerial photography and fire patrols along the St. Maurice River valley. Using the two flying boats, patrols were extended from Lake of the Woods (Lac des Bois) in Ontario to James Bay. This continued for two summers, but by 1921, operating costs were so high that the Laurentide Company refused to fund the patrol-only pursuit any longer and reorganized it into Laurentide Air Service Ltd. with Ellwood Wilson as president and barnstormer William R. Maxwell as vice-president.

A handling party launches Curtiss HS-2L flying boat G-CYDS of the Canadian Air Board from the dock at Victoria Beach, Manitoba, in 1921.
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Looking for financial support, Maxwell convinced Quebec shipbuilder Thomas Hall to invest $10,000 to create a commercial arm of the business. In the summer of 1922, Laurentide carried 310 passengers during 688 flying hours
as a bush charter service for prospectors, hunters and lumbermen. Based on this success, Maxwell bought 12 more HS-2Ls sight unseen. Many were still in their factory shipping crates. He hired six pilots who flew mapping expeditions covering 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometres) of forest in Ontario. In 160 flying hours they mapped an area that would have taken ground surveyors five or six years to cover.

The government of Ontario took note and created its own Ontario Provincial Air Service (OPAS), poaching Maxwell and other staff away from Laurentide along with
many of its customers. In one 1926 operation, OPAS planes flew 27 men and 6,420 pounds (2,912 kilograms) of equipment to successfully fight a remote northern forest fire that could not have been extinguished any other way. “No man,” Maxwell said, “approached or left it by ground.” Backed by public funding from the Ontario government, OPAS lived on into the 1940s while Laurentide died in 1925 from the loss of key personnel and business to OPAS. Laurentide missed the Red Lake gold rush by mere months.

In the summer of 1925, Lorne and Ray Howey discovered gold under the roots of an upturned tree at Red Lake in the Canadian Shield. When news of the discovery reached the outside world in March 1926, dogsleds mushed over frozen wilderness and bush planes buzzed overhead in the wildest stampede since the Klondike gold rush of 1897–98. In one hour, a plane could cover an area that would take 12 days to travel by land. More than 3,000 men trekked up the frozen Hudson River for six days and nights in bone-freezing cold to reach the Red Lake base camp. From there, they still had to survive staking and working a claim. In 1934, the price of gold rose from $20 to $35 an ounce, resulting in increased mining activity in Red Lake.

The Red Lake gold rush proved the usefulness of the float planes that would soon dominate northern transportation. Early on, the Red Lake Transport Company had used 60 teams of horses for hauling winter freight, and stern-wheel barges, tugs and freighter canoes in summer to help
get fortune seekers in. Faster modes of transportation were needed to get their gold out to southern buyers. In 1927, Red Lake was the service centre for prospectors, miners and construction crews working at the Howey Gold Mine. Ten years later, Howey Bay in Red Lake was an air hub for planes of all types, on skis or floats, with payloads of people and cargo arriving and departing at 15-minute intervals. At the height of the gold-rush staking period, this bush-plane airport without radios or a control tower was the busiest airport in the world!