by Carol Shaben
The long summer days steamrolled into fall and the promised check ride never came. Winter freeze-up edged closer and at the end of September 1980, the company relocated its planes to its northern Saskatchewan headquarters to switch their landing gear from floats to skis for the winter. Erik caught a ride, expecting that he’d be first in line for a pilot’s job. But when he landed in the town of La Ronge, he joined a long line of equally experienced co-pilots hoping for the same break. Erik took stock. With more men than machines and a logbook filled with 700 hours he couldn’t claim, he decided to head home.
He wasn’t back in BC long before the North came calling in the form of Len Robinson, a former La Ronge pilot with whom Erik had frequently teamed up during the summer.
“I’ve got a real co-pilot’s job for you,” he said. The airline was called Shirley Air and based out of Edmonton. “It’s short term,” Robinson cautioned, “but you’d be flying a Twin Otter.” Twin Otters are the Cadillacs of small commuter planes—turboprops that carry up to nineteen passengers.
“What do I have to do to get the job?” Erik asked.
“Get yourself to Edmonton.”
When Erik thanked Robinson, he shrugged it off. “After last summer,” he said, “let’s just call it even.”
Less than a week later, Erik was in Edmonton. The city of half a million people had long been the jumping off point for bush pilots ferrying workers and supplies to the North. Erik’s contract lasted little more than six weeks, but it gave him enough logbook hours to land him a co-pilot’s job at Ptarmigan Airways back in Yellowknife. Duncan Bell was still with the carrier when Erik returned in late May 1981.
“Hey, Enrico!” Bell greeted him warmly. “I’m looking forward to finally flying together.”
The two men never got the chance. Soon after joining Ptarmigan, Erik learned that a company called Simpson Air based in the trading post of Fort Simpson several hundred kilometres west was looking for pilots. Erik didn’t think twice about leaving Ptarmigan and seizing the opportunity to finally fly in the captain’s seat.
Paul Jones, one of the airline’s co-owners, picked Erik up in Yellowknife.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Jones told him, “if you survived a summer at La Ronge, then you must be okay.”
Erik’s second stint in the North was an entirely different experience from his first. He was pilot-in-command and the hours in his logbook grew steadily. The flying was breathtaking and he loved being alone in the cockpit and watching the rugged beauty of the land stretch out beneath him. The Canadian Shield, a massive expanse of low-lying rock, lay across much of the North’s southern reaches. In winter it was an unending white wasteland, but in summer it was pocked and aglitter with rivers and thousands of lakes. Patches of muskeg—swampy basins of moss-covered water and decaying vegetation—were cradled between jagged outcrops of limestone and shale. In the east, the low-lying glaciated plain gave rise to mountains that reached heights of nearly 10,000 feet. Glaciers hugged the cols of these white giants and sheer, spectacular cliffs plummeted into deep fjords.
Though seemingly barren, the North was alive with wildlife ranging from bears and wolves to caribou and countless bird species. On one flight Erik spotted a lone grizzly bear running, its powerful muscles undulating under a rich coat of fur. On another he came upon a herd of caribou. Erik was 1,000 feet up when the landscape suddenly transformed into a moving mass with no beginning or end in sight. As far as his eyes could see forward, back, and to either side, there was only an ocean of caribou, their antlers bobbing like a briar of nude branches and their mottled beige bodies spread like a dappled fleece over the land.
That summer Erik flew almost every day as pilot-in-command, progressing from a 300-horsepower Cherokee Six to a Cessna 185, a big-tailed, four-seater—known as a “taildragger” for the small wheel affixed to the underside of the tail. He was twenty-one and literally and figuratively on top of the world. He had manoeuvred his way into the upper echelons of northern bush flying.
Bush flying originated in Canada. One of the first recorded commercial passenger bush flights took place in October 1920 after a fur buyer walked into the Canadian Aircraft Company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and asked to be flown hundreds of miles north to his home in the settlement of The Pas. By land, the journey across bush, muskeg and bountiful lakes would typically have taken the man several weeks. He arrived in a day. Within a year bush planes were exploring the North to within a hundred miles of the Arctic Circle, opening up isolated areas of the continent.
Early northern bush pilots battled bitter temperatures, blinding snowstorms and the unknown perils of uncharted terrain. They were larger-than-life men with names like Wop May, Punch Dickens and Doc Oaks, and their exploits became the stuff of legends.
Wilfred Reid “Wop” May, one of the most famous, was credited with helping bring down the Red Baron during World War I. May was only eighteen and on his first patrol of the western front when the feared fighter pilot, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, suddenly dropped in on him. May’s guns jammed and the German strafed his wings with machine gun fire, yet the young pilot managed to elude the Red Baron. So intent was the German ace on finishing the fight that he broke his own rule and followed May’s plane across Allied lines where another countryman, Roy Brown, helped bring the Baron down.
Like many veterans who wanted to continue flying after the war, May gravitated to the North where pilots faced different, but no less formidable foes. In January 1929, May was asked to deliver serum to a remote community battling a diphtheria outbreak. He flew for two straight days in the open cockpit of an Avro Avian biplane, the serum wrapped in a blanket at his feet with a charcoal heater. He arrived with his hands virtually frozen to the controls.
Today’s bush pilots maintain their vaulted position as courageous, self-reliant adventurers, providing a crucial lifeline to many isolated communities in the Canadian and Alaskan wilderness. While the planes may have changed, the pilots who fly them haven’t. Far from help if anything goes awry, they must often fend for themselves in inhospitable environments where the penalty for a mistake can be death. Bush pilots have the highest mortality rate of any commercial pilots and bush flying consistently ranks in the top three of the world’s most dangerous professions, after commercial fishermen and loggers.
Erik soon came to understand that the special cachet bush pilots carried still existed among the remote, tight-knit communities of the North. Pilots were like freewheeling saviours buzzing in from afar to deliver precious supplies or to transport the ill to hospital. Part of a handful of high-status outsiders—including RCMP officers, doctors, nurses and teachers—pilots in the North were akin to dignitaries. Erik enjoyed his newfound stature, and by the end of his second northern summer felt like he was finally building the experience and confidence needed to face the challenges of winter bush flying.
During freeze-up in late October 1981, while Simpson Air switched its planes’ landing gear from floats to skis, Erik flew south to visit his family. His trip to Surrey coincided with a special occasion—his father’s fiftieth birthday celebration. The night of the party, relatives and friends gathered at the Vogel home where the festivities carried on past midnight. It was not until the early hours of the morning, when the hosts were bidding their last guests goodbye, that events took a terrible turn. A family friend noticed that her convertible sports car was no longer parked in the driveway. Mortified, the Vogels had immediately contacted the police to report the car missing and called a cab to take her home.
Early the next morning someone banged on the door. Erik answered it to find a young police officer standing on the porch.
“Are you here about the stolen car?” Erik asked. The cop didn’t answer immediately and Erik recalls being taken aback by his expression. “He had a terrible look on his face.”
Erik remembers the officer then asking to speak to the parents of Reginald Vogel. Reginald was the given name of Brodie, Erik’s sixteen-year-old brother, but no one in t
he family ever called him that. Erik reluctantly climbed the stairs to his parents’ bedroom and knocked on their door. His mother’s reaction surprised him.
“I don’t want to talk with him,” she’d said. “Tell him to go away.”
A moment later Joan Vogel descended from the bedroom. Erik remembers hearing the officer stammer the words: son and Reginald. Erik’s mother yelled: “I don’t have a son named Reginald! His name is Brodie!”
The colour drained completely from the officer’s face and he shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to another. He tried again: “Your son … Reggie?”
By that time, Bill Vogel had appeared on the stairs, his face ghostly white.
Later that morning Erik accompanied his father to the morgue. By then they had learned that Brodie had borrowed the sports car to take his girlfriend home. Driving back along the highway from Vancouver, perhaps speeding to get home before the owner missed her vehicle, Brodie had slammed into a cement overpass.
“It was terrible,” is all Erik could say of the moment they pulled the sheet off his little brother’s body so that he and his father could identify the corpse.
Erik took a two-month leave after his brother’s death to help his parents cope with the loss. Something intangible had shifted inside him when he returned to his job with Simpson Air in January 1982. Though never a risk-taker, he began to be unnerved by the dangers of bush flying. The echo of his mother’s plea not to return to the North reverberated in his head: “Please. I can’t bear to lose another child.”
Meanwhile, Simpson Air was flourishing, expanding its reach north into the High Arctic. It purchased an old airline base 300 kilometres above the Arctic Circle in Cambridge Bay—an outpost on the southeast shore of Victoria Island servicing passenger and research vessels travelling the Northwest Passage. The company offered Erik a captain’s position on their six-seat twin-engine Piper Aztec, their sole plane stationed in the community at the time. Logging pilot-in-command hours on a multi-engine aircraft was gold to a rookie pilot, so Erik migrated further north to the frozen forehead of the continent.
The High Arctic during winter is one of the harshest environments on the planet. Darkness drapes the days and blizzards frequently strafe the landscape, erasing the margin between earth and sky. With no visual reference to the land or guiding hand from air traffic controllers, Erik had to rely on his fledgling dead reckoning skills. Flying was often perilous and he had several close calls to prove it. One occurred during an emergency medical evacuation or medivac to Gjoa Haven, a tiny Inuit community 370 kilometres east of Cambridge Bay. Erik was to pick up a pregnant fourteen-year-old in distress and transport her more than 1,000 kilometres south to the hospital in Yellowknife. Ted Grant, Simpson Air’s co-owner, came along as co-pilot. A long-time northern RCMP officer, Grant had recently quit the force to turn his part-time passion for flying into a second career. Though he’d held a pilot’s licence for years, Grant had just acquired his IFR rating and was relatively inexperienced flying on instruments.
Erik had a terrible cold the night of the medivac, his sinus pain unbearable as the plane carrying him, Grant, the patient, and a nurse ascended out of Gjoa Haven. Rather than climbing to 10,000 feet, Erik elected to give his aching sinuses a break by flying at 7,000, though it would make it more difficult to pick up signals from any en route ground beacons. With seven hours of fuel on board, Erik filed a flight plan directly to Yellowknife, just under five hours away over barren terrain with few navigational aids. When the plane reached altitude, he contacted the nearby Distant Early Warning radar station for help with his bearing, and then set a course southwest.
“I’ll take over this leg,” Grant offered, urging Erik to go to sleep. Knowing he’d have to fly another charter later that night, Erik didn’t argue. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes for what seemed like only a minute. When he opened them, Grant had an IFR chart spread in front of him and told Erik that he hadn’t picked up the en route navigational beacon at Contwoyto Lake. Erik was instantly wide awake.
It was ink black outside and snow buffeted the cockpit windows. Terror gripped Erik and he immediately thought of Martin Hartwell. Hartwell was a Canadian bush pilot who, several years earlier, had flown a medivac from Cambridge Bay to Yellowknife carrying a nurse and two patients: a pregnant Inuit woman and a twelve-year-old Inuit boy with appendicitis. The plane left during a fierce storm, became lost, and smashed into a hillside, instantly killing the pregnant woman and the nurse. Hartwell broke both of his legs in the crash, but he and the Inuit boy, David Pisurayak Kootook, survived. For weeks the two huddled near the wreckage, enduring brutally cold temperatures. The boy gathered wood and built a fire. He kept Hartwell and himself alive by cutting pieces of flesh off the nurse’s body for food. It took thirty-one days before rescue teams found them. Hartwell was alive, but the Inuit boy who had cared for him had died the day before.
Erik’s insides turned liquid as he took the controls and flew blindly into the night. His eyes moved frantically across his cockpit instruments, but they offered little comfort. He had no choice but to keep flying, though he had no idea of what lay ahead. It was only by sheer luck that Erik eventually picked up the signal from the Yellowknife navigational beacon more than 150 kilometres away. By the time Erik landed he felt totally spent. Refusing to fly the second charter, he checked himself into a Yellowknife hotel room for the night.
Erik had barely recovered from the unnerving experience of his medivac when he heard news from a fellow pilot that Duncan Bell had crashed his plane. Bell, who was flying a medivac to the small Inuit community of Coppermine, had been lucky. He’d flown into the tundra at cruise speed on approach to the airfield. His plane had torpedoed into the snow, bounced and then careened along the surface until it eventually came to a stop. But the fuselage had remained intact and all three people aboard—Bell, his co-pilot and a nurse—had survived.
Why would Bell do something so stupid? The opportunity for Erik to ask him never arose. Bell lost his job with Ptarmigan after the crash and disappeared from the North.
Erik put Duncan Bell out of his mind. There were other things to worry about. Until his brother’s death, Erik had accepted that a certain degree of danger was part of his job. Now it seemed that bush flying was demanding too much of him. Bush operations often require pilots to overlook minor but potentially costly maintenance issues, and to push the weather.
“If we never pushed the weather,” Erik recalls his boss, Paul Jones, telling him, “we’d never stay in business.”
Erik remembers another occasion when the company asked him to fly from Fort Simpson to Fort Liard despite a severe thunderstorm warning. Erik could see enormous thunderheads rising like dark gargoyles from the horizon—a definite no-go scenario.
“Just fly around them,” he remembers Paul Jones telling him, before ushering the passengers onto the aircraft. Erik skirted the black wall for a time, flying parallel to the front, but eventually his heading led him straight into it. A gaping crevasse appeared ahead and Erik entered it. For a moment his plane seemed to hang, dreamlike, in a void of atmosphere. On either side of him clouds towered like grimy fortress walls and far, far above, he glimpsed blue sky. Light rain began to speckle the windshield, building until it ran in rivulets along the cockpit windows. Then hell erupted. The aircraft pitched violently for a moment before smashing into a seemingly solid wall of obstruction. Erik wrestled with the controls and the artificial horizon gauge oscillated as the plane shuddered violently. He heard a passenger vomiting and the smell filled the small cabin, heightening the sour taste already in Erik’s mouth. Lightning split the clouds and the sky hummed hot and electric around him. Seconds later the air cracked with a deafening boom of thunder. Erik felt his insides churn, and a clammy wetness glossed his palms where they gripped the yoke.
As he neared his destination and began his approach, a fierce crosswind pushed him off course and Erik struggled to crab back onto the glide slope path. His wheels tou
ched down, but the runway was slick with water and the plane skidded off the end and onto the grass. For several minutes Erik sat limply in the cockpit. In the cabin no one moved. No one uttered a word. Finally, Erik mustered the energy to deplane his passengers and unload their baggage. He was scheduled to fly a return flight, but refused.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Erik told Jones. “We just got the shit kicked out of us.”
In the ensuing weeks, Erik’s relationship with the company further deteriorated. He began refusing flights and insisting on immediate repairs. Tensions reached a breaking point on April 21, 1982, the day before his twenty-second birthday. Erik’s former high school sweetheart, Lee-Ann Rydeen, had come north for the occasion. She arrived in Fort Simpson the day Erik was to fly the company’s new engineer to Cambridge Bay, and was going to come along for the ride.
As Erik was preparing for takeoff, Jones radioed him from his incoming flight. “Shut her down,” Jones told him. Within moments Jones was on the ground and striding toward Erik’s plane.
“What’s she doing here?” Jones asked, nodding toward the young woman in the co-pilot’s seat.
Erik explained that Ted Grant had given him permission for Lee-Ann to accompany him and the engineer to Cambridge Bay.
