by L. D. Cross
FLYING ON INSTINCT
Canada's Bush Pilot Pioneers
L.D. CROSS
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 Up and Away
CHAPTER 2 From War Birds to Wilderness Wings
CHAPTER 3 Winged Workhorses and Flying Canoes
CHAPTER 4 Airborne Exploration
CHAPTER 5 The Flying Knight of the Northland
CHAPTER 6 May, Mercy and a Manhunt
CHAPTER 7 From Bush Life to Corporate Life
CHAPTER 8 Tales from Mountain Valleys
CHAPTER 9 Women Take to the Skies
CHAPTER 10 Risky Rescues and Tragic Losses
CHAPTER 11 A Bird’s-Eye View
EPILOGUE
SOME MUSEUMS WITH BUSH PLANE HOLDINGS
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Prologue
THE PILOT WAS IN SERIOUS TROUBLE. The charter flight had started out well, roaring off into sunny skies en route to a remote northern fishing lodge. As a bush pilot, he had made hundreds of these routine trips carrying prospectors, campers, mail, food, and on one journey, four sled dogs and their musher. But this time his engine had conked out at 5,000 feet (1,524 metres) and would not sputter back to life no matter how much he coaxed and cajoled it. He was losing altitude fast and had to find a place to put down. Where were all those smooth lakes and big rivers when you needed them? Even a sandbar would be welcome. But there was not a clearing or bit of scrubland to be seen—only the endless evergreen forest below. A crash landing was inevitable, but where? His two passengers, who at first had enjoyed the soft, quiet glide after the engine cut out, were now well aware of the danger and too terrified to scream. They sat hunched down in their seats, hoping for the best, which obviously was not going to happen.
Trying to keep his nose up and the plane as level as possible, he spied a grove of young trees that were thinner and less dense than the big spruces growing all around. He aimed for that spot and went in nose first, trying to maintain as much control as possible and pointing the engine between the trees. If the main body of the plane could just slide in and not hit a tree trunk head-on, maybe he and his passengers would survive. The small plane shuddered, and the landing gear ripped off as soon as it hit the treetops. Branches beat against the underside of the fuselage, but at least that slowed them down a bit. The plane dropped but kept moving forward at an alarming speed. All the pilot could see was green coming at him and rapidly flashing past his shoulders. His passengers saw nothing at all because their eyes were clamped shut and their heads were between their knees. The propeller disintegrated into lethal shards that flew back, shattering the windshield and banging into the thin skin of the fuselage like exploding bits of shrapnel. The wings were long gone, sheared off by tree trunks that tore huge chunks out of the frame. Miraculously the cockpit and cabin compartments were still intact, but the fuselage was now a violent projectile careening through the forest.
The occupants were forcefully thrown around inside what remained of their capsule. They had tightened their lap belts and shoulder harnesses on the way down, more as a useless gesture toward convention than in any hope that it would keep them safe. Arms, legs and heads smashed around as the bashed-up box they were riding in turned on its side and skidded to a stop against a tree root in an unrecognizable heap. Even the registration markings were gone. The engine that had caused their wild ride was rammed under the cockpit. Pieces of wing and other debris were strewn in the trees and along the ground for over a kilometre. The air reeked of fuel, but fortunately there was no fire.
The pilot painfully turned around and looked back. One of the passengers was dragging himself out of the open cabin. The other slumped motionless over the side. They were bloodied and bruised with multiple broken bones, but all three were alive. Now all they could do was to wait to be rescued.
CHAPTER
1
Up and Away
BUSH FLYING BEGAN IN CANADA. Almost 8 percent of the country is water, a natural landing site for bush pilots and their float planes in summer. In winter, the frozen surfaces made excellent landing strips for planes equipped with skis. Otherwise planes were set down on snowy tundra or makeshift landing strips in the middle of nowhere.
Bush flying created the gateway to the riches of the North and the means to get there. There was scarcely a place in the country where bush pilots would not go, and every remote region had an independent air operation and service facilities to keep it flying. Forty-five–gallon fuel drums were stashed at trading posts along the way or left at a wilderness cache. It was a different time, and pilots were a different breed. They were the off-roaders of aviation. Yet even today, some small, remote Canadian communities still rely on bush planes and the intrepid pilots who fly them to bring in everyday necessities that residents in the south take for granted.
Before the First World War began in 1914, Canada had few pilots or planes. After the war ended in 1918, one-third of Britain’s Royal Flying Corps (RFC) was composed of Canadian pilots who had volunteered to serve king and empire. Flying had previously been the rare pastime of the rich or reckless, but during the war the RFC was the preferred choice of soldiers wanting lift off into clean, open skies and escape the cold, muck, gas and vermin-infested confines of the trenches. Their getaway vehicle was a flimsy wood-and-cloth airplane.
This trade-off was not always a good one. There were no parachutes, and the fuel tanks were located under the seat. If his aircraft caught fire during an aerial battle, the pilot had three very bad options: ride the plane down and hope to survive the crash; jump out and face inevitable death; or grab his service pistol and shoot himself. The average lifespan of a First World War fighter pilot was 17 flying hours. The RFC was dubbed “the suicide club.”
Some soldiers were encouraged by their superiors to transfer to front-line flying because they were considered problematic misfits. Alan Duncan Bell-Irving of the Gordon Highlanders, for example, was ordered by his company commander to apply for a transfer (which was immediately approved) because a group of generals had seen him standing behind a berm wearing only his shirt and boots. He had removed his kilt to burn off the lice. As a pilot, Bell-Irving went on to earn the Military Cross for gallantry in action and much later to attain the rank of air commodore in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) during the Second World War.
After the signing of the armistice with Germany in 1918, some military pilots returned to Canada looking for opportunities to use their flying expertise in civilian life. Surplus airplanes were readily available. A Curtiss JN-4 Canuck could be had for the equivalent of $1,200, but airfields were scarce, and most aviators were skilled flyers, not mechanics. Maintenance was a problem and crashes were frequent. Governments were disinterested in funding a permanent military air force. After all, hadn’t the First World War been “the war to end all wars”?
One of those returning military pilots was William George “Bill” Barker. Barker was born in a log house near Dauphin, Manitoba, in 1894 and as a teen loved horseback riding and shooting. His sharp eyesight and steady hand made him a crack marksman. In December 1914, in his final year of high school, he enlisted in the First Canadian Mounted Rifles. He was sent to France as a machine gunner, then transferred to the RFC. Returning to France as a fighter pilot, he shot down 50 enemy aircraft in sorties from 1916 to 1918, finally sustaining severe injuries to his legs and also to his left elbow, which essentially made him a one-armed pilot. Awarded many honours, including the French Croix de Guerre and the British Victoria Cross, his luck finally ran out. He crashed his Sopwith 7F.1 Snipe, but while recuperating in London, he met fellow Victoria Cross recipient William Avery “Billy” Bishop.
Back hom
e in Canada by 1919, the pair formed Bishop-Barker Company Limited, one of Canada’s first commercial air services. In a race from Toronto to New York and back, Barker became the first Canadian pilot to carry international airmail, and in 1921, the first to fly commercial cargo between the US and Canada. But like many other flying ventures, the company was ahead of its time; it ceased operations in 1922. Barker went back to the military, joining the new Canadian Air Force (CAF), then resigning in 1926 and taking a series of unsatisfying jobs until becoming vice-president of Fairchild Aircraft Ltd. in Canada. On March 12, 1930, while demonstrating the new Fairchild KR-21 biplane trainer at Rockcliffe air station, he lost control and was killed when his plane struck the ice of the Ottawa River. Obscured by the fame of Bishop, who outlived him by almost three decades, Barker remains Canada’s most decorated war hero and proved there was a non-combat role for larger-than-life flyers employing their military skills in civilian work.
Major W.G. “Bill” Barker, wearing goggles and a flying helmet, pilots Fokker D.VII aircraft No. 50 during the air race between Toronto and New York in 1919. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA C-014058
Arthur Massey “Matt” Berry, a farm boy from just outside Ottawa, was commissioned at the outbreak of the First World War and transported overseas. He was then transferred to the RFC. After the war, he became a civilian flying instructor, eventually getting a commercial pilot’s licence in 1928. Berry got a job at Northern Aerial Mineral Exploration Ltd. and was the first pilot to land at Baker Lake, Northwest Territories. In 1921, he became the first pilot to fly round trip between Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, and Edmonton in the same day. Berry joined Canadian Airways Ltd. as a pilot in 1931 and was instrumental in saving the lives of many people stranded in the Arctic wilderness.
In 1935, Berry located and flew to safety downed CAL pilot Con Farrell and his air engineer F. Hartley, who had been stranded for 11 days on the Barrens after a blizzard forced their plane down. The next year, Berry was again a hero when he rescued RCAF flight lieutenant S. Coleman and leading aircraftsman J. Fortey from north of Great Slave Lake, then led a record-breaking mission with his air engineer, Rex Terpening, to rescue Bishop Falaise and his party, who were stranded by a blizzard at the Roman Catholic mission at Hornaday River above the Arctic Circle. Persevering through darkness and blinding snowstorms, Berry and Terpening located the group and returned to bring them food, only to be grounded themselves for 10 days before flying everyone out safely. Until this exploit, no aircraft had ever flown that far north during the winter.
Air engineers like Terpening sat in the right-hand cockpit seat on daily flight operations. They refuelled the aircraft, fixed any structural damage, repaired the engine and even warmed the oil so the engine could start on cold winter days. And they did it all in remote locations with basic tools, using only their innate innovative abilities and courage to resurrect broken aircraft so they would fly again.
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. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA PA-100602
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. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA PA-015652
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
From War Birds
to Wilderness Wings
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 in
to 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.
