The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  Alone at the house, I had the opportunity to explore Mikey’s crib. Actually, from what I can gather, it’s not Mikey’s crib at all. Not exclusively, that is.

  “You can crash at my place if you want,” Justin said to me one day.

  “Thanks, but I’m good. I’m staying at Mikey’s place.”

  “You mean Joe’s place.”

  Whatever. I’d venture to guess that Joe actually owns the place, but it’s where Mikey hangs his hat during those rare moments he’s not at the hangar, so for me it’s Mikey’s Place. Joe stays there too, but only on weekends between the Saturday morning sked from Hay River and the one returning there late Sunday afternoon. That’s when I get the hell out.

  Either way, the place is a stereotypical bachelor pad. It sits on McAvoy Road, a narrow, winding gravel pathway that hugs outcrops of grey rock as it makes its way along Back Bay, a protected arm of Great Slave Lake. Ironically enough, McAvoy Road is named for a well-known Yellowknife family of bush pilots and diamond drillers, the very family that gave the world Chuck McAvoy, one of the most influential personalities in young Joe McBryan’s life. Mikey’s house—a place he likes to call the “Den of Solitude,” given his penchant for avoiding visitors (even trick-or-treaters)—sits directly beside his brother Rod’s and forms the foundation of Buffalo’s Yellowknife float-plane base.

  Surrounding the two houses—Rod and his wife Sasha’s tidy grey mobile home and Mikey’s rambling two-storey house—is nothing but gravel. It’s not the most natural environment, but it’s low maintenance. You won’t find any garden gnomes here. In fact, with the amount of machinery and equipment scattered around the place, it feels like we haven’t really left the hangar at all.

  Luckily, that ambience stops at Mikey’s door, where the decor changes from workyard to bachelor reno chic. The front door opens to a den of sorts, though Mikey uses it mostly for storage. A pair of couches lie partially buried under assorted books, clothes, boxes, and rarely used exercise equipment. A hallway at the far end of the room leads to a series of small bedrooms. Upstairs is the main living area, where an open kitchen, dining room, and living room all seem to face Mikey’s flat-screen TV. All around are signs of work in progress: a wall cut open here, a bathroom being rebuilt there. Mikey’s bedroom is on the top floor.

  The fridge is as empty as you might guess, except for a few condiments and some beer. Neither Mikey nor Joe (when he’s there) is big on cooking, it would seem.

  “What does your dad eat?” I asked Mikey one afternoon in the hangar, hoping perhaps to score some brownie points by showing up that night with Joe’s favourite meal.

  “He’s the ultimate scrounger,” he replied. “He picks at this and that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him cook. He’s got a couple restaurants in town that cook for him. That’s about it.” Mikey’s response should come as no surprise. The way I see Joe, he’s too old-fashioned to cook for himself, and too busy to take the time, anyway.

  Old and older. The Electra in the foreground seems positively modern compared to the DC-4 in the background. The DC-4 is the only plane in the Buffalo fleet powered by four engines.

  Change, it seems, is inevitable. Though I was proud of the magazines I produced as editor of Up Here, my time at the magazine was tumultuous. The corporate culture of the place seemed built around adrenaline, and my laid-back style was clearly a square-peg-in-a-round-hole scenario.

  While I was there, I commissioned a writer to put together a piece about the perils and pitfalls of performing one’s daily constitutionals, so to speak, in the wilds of northern Canada, an undertaking rife with such unexpected challenges as mosquitoes, flesh-freezing cold, and predatory mammals. I was planning on calling it “The Process of Elimination.” To me, it was sheer brilliance; my bosses thought differently and I ended up leaving the magazine soon after that.

  It would be months before Marty, Dawson, and I left Yellowknife for the mountain town of Canmore, Alberta, but the time was not without its milestones. As I began to navigate the murky waters of freelance writing and editing, we received news that baby Teya (named after Mary Teya, a highly respected elder from Fort McPherson) would soon be joining her brother Dawson as part of our family.

  Despite its adherence to times past, Buffalo Airways is not immune to the forces of change, either. And of all the changes the company has had to make over the years, perhaps the most significant is how it gets fuel.

  Buffalo’s old piston pounders use a type of fuel called “avgas,” short for aviation gasoline. Mikey figures Buffalo may be the biggest consumer of the stuff in North America, maybe the world. One of the issues with avgas is that it uses a toxic substance called tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) to improve its combustion stability. Although there are environmental concerns about the use of leaded avgas, it is still used widely around the world and is relatively easy to find. Everywhere except in remote northern outposts, that is. So while Mikey has no problem getting enough fuel to power his planes on the way out of Yellowknife, getting them home from remote communities that no longer stock avgas is another story.

  “It’s a political issue with avgas too, because it’s leaded fuel,” Mikey says. “A politician could say ‘Hey, I’m gonna be the guy who took leaded gas away.’ To an uninformed person, that seems great: no more leaded fuel. But we’re talking about a half percent of all the aviation fuel burned on Earth. Meanwhile, the jet that flies that guy around during his campaign is blowing way more hydrocarbons in the air than a DC-3 ever will. A 747 flying over here on its way to Tokyo is going to burn more fuel than a DC-3 will burn in a month. It’s insane.”

  From what I can figure, a 747 burns 2,500 to 3,500 pounds of fuel every hour. Depending on the model, the plane carries from about 50,000 to 60,000 gallons, most of which it will use on an intercontinental flight. Ouch.

  “So the real environmental issue is not in the name, but the quantity used.” While I can see Mikey’s point, I think he may be oversimplifying the issue, since studies conducted in the 1970s demonstrated the harmful effects of leaded gas combustion on people, especially children.

  Either way, Buffalo’s planes no longer have the luxury of flying from Point A to Point B, refuelling, and flying back home to Yellowknife, Mikey has started to find ways to maximize Buffalo Airways’ efficiency. He now schedules planes according to how far they can travel without having to carry extra fuel on board for the trip home. The DC-3 is most efficient for trips of about 400 kilometres (250 miles), maximum, compared with 900 kilometres (560 miles) for the C-46 and 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) for the DC-4. Back in the day, Buffalo planes would haul anything anywhere, because they didn’t have to worry about how they would get back home. That’s no longer the case.

  “The reason we can’t get leaded avgas fuel in the Arctic is supply and demand, simple Economics 101,” Mikey says. “Nobody else uses it, so why would they bring it in?”

  “Every time I book a charter now,” he continues, “fuel is my biggest problem. Not pilots, not if the airplane is serviceable or not, and not which airplane to use. It’s where am I going to get fuel?”

  Although the bigger airports in the north still stock avgas, most of the smaller Arctic settlements stock ample supply of kerosene- or naphtha-based jet fuel, which is designed for use in aircraft powered by gas-turbine engines. That leaves out most of Mikey’s fleet. Most, but not all. Enter the Electra.

  The Lockheed l-188 Electrais like nothing else in the Buffalo fleet, for a number of reasons. To this casual observer, it seems harsher, more insensitive, colder. I know that sounds a bit crazy. After all, we’re talking about machines. But the other planes in the Buffalo fleet all have a stately, almost regal air about them that you feel as soon as you are in their presence. There’s a melancholy steeped into their very materials that whispers secret songs of lonely flights over mountain passes, lives lost far too young, and dreams dawning with the new day.


  The Electra doesn’t share that melancholy. To the extent that inanimate objects can be gendered, the Electra is all man. His props are hard, square, and harsh. His fuselage is sleek, businesslike. If planes could talk, the Electra would say “Let’s get to work, I have shit to do,” then glare at you if you offered it a cup of coffee.

  When it was built, the Electra was the Hummer of the aircraft world. Its most macho characteristic was brute strength. The plane was powered by four high-performance turboprop engines that could help the plane take off and land on very short runways, meaning it had STOL (short takeoff and landing) capabilities. The engines use a gas turbine—the same kind of turbine that creates propulsion in jet engines—to drive their propellers, each generating 3,750 horsepower.

  The plane was introduced in 1957 to a huge amount of fanfare as the first turboprop plane ever produced in the United States. The hullabaloo was short-lived. Not long after its introduction, the Electra was involved in three famous crashes in the fourteen months between February 1959 and March 1960. Order cancellations followed, bringing production to a halt.

  With good reason. In two of the crashes, the Electra broke up in flight, which disturbed airlines about to spend millions of dollars on the aircraft. On September 29, 1959, Braniff Flight 542 crashed in Buffalo, Texas, en route to Dallas. All twenty-nine passengers and five crew members died. Less than six months later—on March 17, 1960—Northwest Orient Flight 710 broke apart in flight between Chicago and Miami, killing all sixty-three people on board.

  It was later determined that both of those crashes were caused by something called a “whirl mode,” which happens when a faulty engine creates a harmonic vibration so powerful that it rips a wing off a plane. Those structural problems have since been overcome, but the Electra’s days were numbered before they really even started.

  The Electra was also doomed by circumstance. Given its initial problems, the plane was sent back to the drawing board to have its engine mount fixed. In the meantime, Boeing introduced the Boeing 707, one of the first—and most successful—of the early commercial jets. Most of the world’s major airlines passed over the Electra for the 707.

  /1P-3 Orion, has become one of the most successful planes ever built by Lockheed.

  For Buffalo, the Electra is a perfect fit: it’s older and less expensive than modern-day aircraft, but just as capable at moving tons of cargo from origin to destination. Rod McBryan agrees: it flies well, functions wells in the extreme arctic weather, and it’s versatile. And perhaps most importantly, it burns jet fuel. Joe, the piston-engine diehard, struggled at first with the idea of the Electra, but he has since come to recognize the value the plane adds to Buffalo’s business model.

  For Justin, the Electra is a touch more complicated than the other planes. “An airplane is an airplane,” he said through his cigarette smoke as we drove through Yellowknife in his hard-living Jeep Wrangler. “Ultimately they’re all the same. But I would say the Electra is our most complicated airplane. Therefore, everything from its actual systems to what we’ve put together for a training syllabus is more complicated.”

  I can understand what they’re both saying. Other than the Electra, Buffalo flies piston-pounding internal combustion engines. The company’s expertise and skill is nested there, not with gas turbine engines. And while you may be thinking “an engine’s an engine,” nothing could be further from the truth. Asking a DC-3 mechanic to work on the Electra without the proper training is like asking a heart surgeon to operate on your brain. Couple that difference with the Electra’s hyper-complicated electrical system, and you can see why Joe has to go out of his way to bring in Electra engineers to work almost exclusively on that plane.

  “The Electra is a bit of a stretch for us,” Mikey told me, “but we brought it in because we can’t get avgas fuel in the High Arctic.”

  Complications notwithstanding, the Electra fits Buffalo’s needs. It is an absolute beast when it comes to payload. The plane can hold as much as 15,000 kilograms (33,000 pounds) of cargo, good news for the people of the outlying communities who depend on Buffalo to keep them fed, clothed, and warm. And while all this cargo loading and delivery may mean big dollars for Buffalo, it translates to big stress for the woman who keeps the proverbial ship afloat when it comes to organizing, managing, and distributing the company’s wares: cargo manager Kelly Jurasevich.

  Thankless job? Perhaps. But Kelly handles her professional responsibilities kindly and efficiently. She gets the job done, and somehow manages to keep people as happy as possible at times when humour seems in short supply.

  Kelly is primarily responsible for sending food and hard goods to Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope. Without Kelly, the stores in those towns (each has two stores, typically a Northern store and a Co-Op) would have bare shelves. On a typical shipping day, Kelly organizes and prioritizes about 40,000 kilograms (88,000 pounds) of goods, a phenomenon that occurs at least twice every week. The flight plan she concocts decides which store gets what, and when.

  “You can’t give everything to everyone at the same time,” she told me in the Buffalo offices one day. “So I know who to not piss off, who I can bump, and who I can’t. If I don’t get those potato chips to Seymour at Great Bear Co-Op, is he ever pissed!”

  Add the weather vagaries, and you can see how stress is Kelly’s constant companion. “In the summer you gotta make sure the frozen stuff doesn’t thaw, and in the winter you gotta make sure the perishables don’t freeze. It can be really draining.”

  Kelly may be drained by her professional responsibilities, but she’s the kind of person who always reserves a lot for the people in her life. The instant I met her, I knew she had one of those rare personalities that draws people to them. Kelly’s smile lights up her face, the hearts of those around her, the rooms she walks into. Like so many who have been lucky enough to meet this woman, I immediately felt like she was my friend.

  To listen to Kelly’s life story is also an unbelievable experience. She smokes like a chimney and swears like a trucker. At the same time, she is the most lovable, mothering person you could ever hope to meet. And how she came to live in Yellowknife with her husband, Juan Trescher, is a tale that the finest fiction writers could not imagine.

  With a case of Molson Canadian, Kelly and Juan’s favourite beer, sitting on the counter, we dove into a couple of Caesars one late afternoon, the sun filtering through the windows of the mobile home she and Juan share. Drinking, I came to realize, is as much a fact of life in Yellowknife as swearing. Luckily, I’m okay with both.

  Kelly was born the youngest of four children in Innisfail, a central Alberta town of around seven thousand people just south of Red Deer. When she was only seven years old, her mother succumbed to cancer; seven years later, her father died from alcoholism-related complications, sending Kelly on a journey that saw her enter foster care, live in a home full of bikers, marry a man who tried to kill her several times, move to Oregon for a second marriage, and then move to rural Vancouver Island, where she “hooked up” with Juan, to whom she’s been married for thirteen years.

  Kelly’s road to the North started when Juan found himself out of work on Vancouver Island and received word of a possible opportunity: Buffalo Airways, a unique airline operating out of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, needed a flight engineer on the Electra. Juan, who happened to be an Electra flight engineer, jumped at the job. Kelly had little interest in moving to a place she considered the end of the Earth. She wasn’t counting on being sucked into the Buffalo vortex.

  One day Rod McBryan asked Juan what kind of work Kelly did. “So I go in and they drag me into cargo,” she recalls. “And all of a sudden they’re showing me around like I have this job. I don’t know an airport code from a hole in the wall. All of a sudden they’re like, ‘Oh, you got the job, Kelly.’ What job?”

  To make matters worse, Kelly’s b
oss quit two weeks later, leaving Kelly to figure out Buffalo’s cargo system on her own. Luckily, a few other Buffalo staff pitched in during the transition, though that didn’t prevent Kelly from getting well acquainted with a bedfellow she has had ever since: stress. “I didn’t sleep for about six fucking months,” she says. “I cried myself to sleep every night.”

  Things didn’t go particularly smoothly for Juan either. Like most employees, he had his predictable run-ins with Joe’s temper. But Juan was not one to stand idly by when he felt wrongly attacked. So one day he told Joe what was on his mind, and quit. Juan is now a flight engineer for neighbouring First Air, working on the biggest cargo plane in the North: the L382G Hercules.

  Kelly is still at Buffalo and has since mastered the nuances of her job, though that doesn’t mean she loves it. Yet as much as she bitches and moans about her life in Yellowknife and dreams about living on a farm in Alberta, Kelly is quick to change her tune when she starts talking about the people she works with. From the rampies who seek her out for some motherly advice, to the store managers living in small communities along the Mackenzie River, Kelly lives for people.

  “In our world today, everyone takes everything for granted. Nobody gives two shits about other people. And I was taught to do unto others as you want done unto you. My dad died in my arms when I was fourteen. And I had a hard fucking life. But I love what he instilled in me, and I will do that until the day I die. And I don’t care if I ever get anything back, but I know I want to help people.”

  That’s why when someone at Buffalo has a problem, Kelly gets the call. She knows when the rampies have been hurt by yet another scathing attack from Joe or someone else above them in the Buffalo food chain. That’s when she calls them into her office and gives them a hug, a drink, or just a safe place to break down and cry.