NO FLIGHTS OF FANCY THESE – PART 1
“For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.”
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519)
“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible”
Simon Newcomb (1835 – 1909)
Bush flying is considerably different from what now have most often become the dubious pleasures of flying in large commercial jets, at least in North America. Granted, on the latter you can buy a stale sandwich for half a day’s wages, or if in first class can enjoy not a bad meal and a bottle of wine providing you have left half your retirement fund with the airline, which in North America is just as liable to be bankrupt as not. On airline jets you also have flight attendants who used to be known as stewardesses and were all female. Required at first to be qualified nurses, in those politically incorrect but more joyful days, being young, attractive and let us say proportionately assembled was part of the job description. Now of course you can’t call a flight attendant, male or female, a stewardess, even if you wanted to, and female flight attendants have graduated to that complete state of age and gender equality that make them more representative of the general aging population than say, those in the Playboy palace. But hey! Who’s to argue with that except maybe most of the world’s male population?
But while bush flying has none of these amenities, at least you don’t have to take off most of your clothes and snake dance through five different security checkpoints in order to board the plane. Your baggage, if not in plain sight, is known to be with you and will arrive at the same time and on the same plane as your own worthy self. Furthermore, you can actually retrieve that baggage before the next day dawns. Although you are asked not to feed beer to the pilot, liquids are allowed on board, notwithstanding the normal lack of toilet facilities that require not only a certain amount of restraint but above all a sound experience in bladder control. Entertainment facilities on bush planes are normally severely limited but it has been my experience that the view to be commanded from just about any window in the aircraft, all of which you can normally access without leaving your seat, and providing you are not in the middle of fog or a snow storm, more than makes up for the lousy movies they are making these days and showing on commercial flights. That must explain the profusion of remakes of old classics by new actors that reinforce just how good the old, original classics were since the new remakes are just as lousy as the new, not remade movies. The food and beverage service tray on longer bush flights is normally the pocket or packsack of someone who has remembered to bring some sandwiches or a large bag of chips and some cans of pop. Aside from some possible squabbling over who ordered the ham and cheese as opposed to the tomato and lettuce, there is no charge for this in-flight cuisine and you are allowed to keep the tooth picks that hold the sandwiches together.
Flying in a single engine bush plane or helicopter does however have some disadvantages. You don’t fly very fast or very high. The latter might be of some relief to vertigo-challenged passengers although I would guess that for them, and not to put too fine a point on it, whether it’s ten feet or a thousand provides little consolation. In bush planes you often find yourself seated while jammed between packing cases or in other awkward positions on the cargo load, body and legs bent into pretzel postures, much like in economy class on airline aircraft. On bush planes there are of course no stewardesses (I like the old terminology. It helps bring back fond memories) and your pilot is just as liable to be in shorts and a T-shirt in the summer, and parka and mukluks in the winter. There is no sign of the captain’s four stripes on the non-existent epaulets and braided, peaked officers’ hats, that unless in general fashion, are in absentia. As for the co-pilot, not to put too fine a point on it again, there is none. It doesn’t take two pilots to fly a single engine bush plane and an extra pilot is an extra cost, not an asset.
Lest you dear reader wonder out loud, or silently, or even with your finger, depending on your reading habits, what might be the typical profile of a normal bush pilot, let me hasten to say that in the many years that I spent flying around in bush aircraft, I never once met one. This is not to say that bush pilots are “wild and crazy guys” to quote a formerly well known American comedian. It’s is just that normality is generally not part of the job description. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that being a bush pilot is not a normal profession, at least not on a long term basis except for those few who might be considered as, well, not normal, at least not in the normal sense of normality.
The Young and The Restless
Bush pilots normally (heh! heh!) come in two basic varieties. One brand is young, sometimes disturbingly so when you as a passenger are at an age where you can remember being the pilot’s age but now can’t remember where you’re going. These youngsters most often have ambitions not to become bush pilots, but rather fancy, uniformed commercial pilots on big airline jets, where they will make lots of money, travel to exotic places, and possibly be in the company of the odd stewardess who accidentally satisfies the old job description no longer asked of them. Such a pilot might even have an ambition to latch on to one of the oriental airlines where the stewardesses must have, er, specifications happily left over from the good old days; or maybe they all just come from Utopia, a place I can’t seem to find on any map. In any case, what all young pilots aspiring to fly the “big birds” require is air time to coin a radio phrase. Air time is flying time and that’s what any young pilot signs on to do; and fly and fly they do.
Bush plane operations are normally fairly small affairs, ranging from the ownership of a single plane in the extreme to those with maybe a half dozen aircraft, often requiring skis as well as wheels or even worse and most often, expensive floats for water work. Representing a substantial investment often owned in effect by the bank, and in a cutthroat, sometimes dangerous business with skinny profit margins, a plane not flying is a plane not working and not working is not producing revenue never mind profit. Since the plane does not fly itself, substitute pilot for plane and it is easily seen why a young bush pilot is guaranteed lots of flying hours. The other thing he is guaranteed is low pay but that is inconsequential in his need to log lots of flying hours.
Since bush planes normally only fly using visual flight rules (VFR) where visual reference with the ground is required at all times, bush flying is necessarily restricted to daytime and good weather. Under VFR regulations, the boundaries of an official day are one hour before sunrise and one hour after sunset. The “good weather” aspect gets a little hazier, if you’ll forgive the cheap metaphor. While VFR ground clearance has certain strict regulations in urban areas, be it absolute or relative to prevailing cloud cover, in the far reaches of the northern Canadian bush, away from the prying eyes of radar and bureaucrats, judgment, necessities and financial considerations often supersede formal regulations and VFR sometimes becomes “Very Flexible Rules.” I will eventually, some might say, get to a few stories I have experienced in that regard.
In the meantime, if you are a young bush pilot yearning for flight time, in Canada at least you live for the days of summer, those days providing about twice as much flyable daylight hours as in winter. As far as mineral exploration goes however, winter can be nearly as productive as summer. While snow cover in eastern and northern Canada may preclude surface mapping of rocks, winter often provides an even better environment for diamond drilling of exploration prospects, especially if a site is located in the boggy marshlands that characterize summer conditions in much of that region of the country but become frozen in winter and accessible as a result. Although the days are short, pilots flying bush planes with skis substituted for summer floats, can still find considerable work during the winter months. West of the Rockies where fixed wing bush aircraft have fewer natural landing sites away from coastal waters, work tends to diminish in the winter as heavy snowfalls and violent storms preclude exploration of any type in the often precipitous terrain of the mountains, and such as there is, is normally supplied by helicopter no matter what the season. No matter where in the country however, all pilots restricted to flying under visual flight rules welcome the hazy, if not lazy days of summer.
Longer days mean longer flying time, legal or otherwise. Without implying that civil aviation regulations are frequently or even ever blatantly broken by bush plane companies or their pilots through the demands of business or perhaps just unexpected conditions, considerable bending of the rules has been known to occur. Sometimes wrongly, young bush pilots are pressured to fly beyond their comfort levels, whatever they might be, in order to maintain their jobs under the demands of their employers. When it comes to young if relatively inexperienced bush pilots, there seem to always be a supply of perhaps more malleable others eager for the opportunity to fly.
The Old and The Tuskless
The second general class of bush pilot is the “old veteran” to coin a corny phrase; maybe not that old in years but certainly well seasoned. This is the pilot who above all enjoys the life that bush flying brings, because the one thing it does not bring is a lot of fame and fortune. The other attribute that defines a veteran bush pilot as opposed to his younger counterpart is his survivability index. The older, experienced guys have “been there, done that”……………..many times! They are in effect repeatable and are still around to tell stories, and lots of them. There is an old saying that defines bush pilots. “There are bold pilots and there are old pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”
While some might view them as glorified bus drivers, those bush pilots that make a life’s work of their profession never seem to tire of flying over whatever part of the planet they have been assigned to or to which they are attracted.
What follows are some of the stories that involve them, young and old, their aircraft and me.
Planes, Pilots and Process
Bush planes are named as such for what their principal role which is to ferry people and supplies over and into remote areas of the world, collectively known as the bush. It matters not whether these are bushes in northern Canada, in the remote wilderness of the USA, in South America, Africa, Australia or wherever. Bush planes service the bush, even if it is in the Sahara desert where there are few bushes!
Bush planes can also be described under a series of generalities that like all generalities are ultimately defined by their exceptions. As a rule however, the majority of bush planes in operation today are old, slow, fly low and noisy, and unlike you and me, seem to have an interminable life span, albeit often with extensive face lifts that would make the skills of any cosmetic surgeon pale by comparison. While this description may seem like damning with faint praise, the apparently ageless nature of these planes is hardly pejorative. Although there are many worldwide manufacturers of planes that have the adjective “bush” attached to them or are specialized niche aircraft, there are none so supreme that can claim to be the king of bush plane makers as can de Havilland Aircraft of Canada Limited. It is this company that produced the famous single engine Beaver and Otter aircraft that became synonymous with the term “bush plane.” The company subsequently expanded the original Otter design into a Twin Otter version, producing a plane that has become as equally well known around the world. It is not the purpose of this essay to recount the history of de Havilland Canada or even that of the Beaver and Otter bush planes, but no talk of bush planes and their pilots could possibly take place without the inclusion of these magnificent aircraft. Some of their history and abilities however are discussed a little later.
Although many companies such as the famous Cessna make, or at least at one time did make bush aircraft, there is one plane to be singled out herein for its historical perspective. Ancient as I may be, I nonetheless was still not around during the early part of the twentieth century when famous planes and famous names were playing an instrumental role in building and defining the history of northern Canada. Those stories may be found in the wealth of well-written books to be found on the subject. During the 1930’s however, another Canadian company was to develop and manufacture a bush aircraft that was the true forerunner of the single engine Beavers and Otters, and indeed for a period after World War Two was contemporaneous with the latter two. I speak of the Noorduyn Norseman bush plane, developed and manufactured in Canada by Robert Noorduyn, a Dutch immigrant with an artificial leg, a pilot’s license and a major vision. Designed in 1935, the Noorduyn Norseman was the first aircraft designed and built for Canadian bush flying. Not only could it cope with the rigours of bush flying, it was easily adapted to wheels, floats or skis. And the wonder of it all is that while the fuselage is made of welded steel tubing, the wings and tail pieces are mainly made of spruce wood that also supplements the fuselage, and most of the aircraft is covered in fabric! Although last manufactured in 1959, there still remain many Norsemans at work around the world.
The essential role of the bush plane is to carry the maximum load possible, fly in awful weather if necessary, and get in and out of ridiculously small landing and take-off areas. In the case of the latter’s dimensions, size, ahem, really does matter. To handle this inadequacy therefore, it was necessary to make planes that had a lot of lift to their wings over short take-off and landing distances, as opposed to jet aircraft by comparison, which have virtually no wing lift over any distance unless thrust through the air like a rocket. That made the Canadian adventures of the “Gimli Glider” such an amazing feat of airmanship. What was the affair of the Gimli Glider you ask? You should look it up. Was that amazing feat of airmanship recognized? Certainly, but not in Canada mind you. The Americans gave the pilot a medal. In Canada they gave him an official inquiry that ruined his career and disparaged his heroic saving of lives.
As applied mainly to float planes in my experience, but also for other restricted landing and take-off situations, the concept of “STOL” aircraft was developed for bush planes. Short for Short Take-Off and Landing, bush aircraft with this feature developed high lift over relatively short distances by virtue of thick wings, full span flaps, and certain other wing related features along with powerful radial engines, all of which aided and abetted this ability. While this was certainly an important feature of the Beaver and Otter aircraft, as well as other true bush planes, it ironically was a feature missing in the Norseman. Old, slow, low, incredibly hardy and versatile it was, but a STOL aircraft it was not. In contrast to the original Beaver or Otter whose take-off distances might be measured in hundreds of metres, it seemed that the Norseman required hundreds of kilometres to get airborne. On more than one occasion while churning down a very long lake, have I snuck a peak at the pilot to check his sweat level. We always made it off the water however, although tales are told of those who if they did, needed more than one try!
That aside, the Norseman bush plane had the general characteristics that defined the norm for such planes and that were, high wing lift aside, not to be greatly exceeded by the development of the Beaver and Otter after WWll. Chugging along with a cruising speed of about 120 mph, the Norseman could be passed by a Beaver cruising at 130mph and by an Otter flashing by at close to 140 mph, all three usually propelled by various versions of Pratt & Whitney radial Wasp engines. And how about deliberate slow flight? All three stalled at somewhere around 60 mph or lower, a speed that might almost make them legal for road travel. As for climbing abilities once airborne, it was steady as you go and hope there was no one close by doing stair training who could probably beat you to a thousand feet.
If today, by virtue of the fact that the above mentioned aircraft are no longer manufactured, and the descriptive generalities of old, slow, noisy, low and hardy can be applied to define the classic bush plane, then the Norseman is the classic type example. That bush planes are designed not for speed might rest on two accounts. Firstly, while those exiting the bush on leave might applaud a little bit of hustle by their bush plane taxi, getting there in the first place rarely invokes the same sentiments. After all, when you arrive at your destination you have still not got to anywhere notable, and when you get there you most often just have to go to work anyway, so what’s the hurry? Now if on the other hand you were bound for a fishing lodge running you a thousand a day or more, well that’s a different story. Where the hell is that jet on floats?
Bush planes rarely are seen with conventional wheels attached. It is not that they make belly landings without them, at least not very often. More to the point is that the landing strips for bush planes are most often lakes, rivers or oceans, or the frozen version of the first two, be it snow or ice. The latter surface that comprise glaciers as opposed to frozen lakes, most often requires bush planes equipped with soft, oversize balloon tires that provide a certain measure of stability and cushioning on the rough and often rubble strewn glacier ice. Finally, there are variations that combine wheels and skis, or wheels and floats, and that increase the versatility of such equipped planes, allowing them amphibian-like abilities.
TO BE CONTINUED
Copyright © 2009 Ian de W. Semple
