Flying On Instinct (13 page)

Olson claims he was never lost, but once he was “temporarily disoriented” flying some schoolteachers in the Norseman on a five-hour trip to Baker Lake from Churchill. The weather was stormy with poor visibility, but if he got to Baker there was a beacon and he could land nearby. But he could not pick up the beacon in the bad weather, so he turned in the direction he felt was the coast and eventually recognized the area between Whale Cove and Eskimo Point (now Arviat). From there, he thought he could make the settlement at Rankin Inlet, and his passengers agreed to go for it. They made it with just a few sips of gas left. After seven hours rattling around inside the Norseman, the occupants were “just vibrating.”

After his six years with the Lambs, and with a family to support, Olson looked for a change of scene and more
regular hours. When he'd started flying the Cessna, he was grossing $240 a month with his room and board included. When he left, he was making $1,000 a month and was paid by the flying hour: $4 an hour south of Churchill and $5 north, plus base pay. Most commercial airlines at the time paid on a cents-per-mile basis. In 1965, the Olson family moved to Winnipeg, where Olson was employed for a year by Transair flying scheduled runs to northern communities in a Beech 18, then in larger DC-3s and Cansos. One day when Olson was wondering if that was all his future held, a friend at the Winnipeg Flying Club told him Air Canada was hiring pilots. He had never thought of them. Olson called, got a job and stayed there until retirement.

Walter “Babe” Woollett was another bush-pilot natural who eventually made the transition to a large airline. Woollett was born in England and got his nickname because he was the youngest in the family. He served in the RAF from 1924 to 1929, then came to Canada and became a bush pilot with the Fairchild Aerial Surveys at Lac-à-la-Tortue, Quebec. His monthly salary of $250 was an amazing sum at the time. Woollett joined Canadian Airways in late 1930 as a flying mailman airlifting mail from Saint-Hubert, Quebec, to Saint John, New Brunswick, by following the railroad line. His first run did not get off to an auspicious start. His engine conked out three times, and each time he had to set down and fix it. The next year, Woollett transferred to the winter airmail run along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence,
throwing mailbags out over a number of villages by aiming at a flag planted in the snow. In 1934, Canadian Airways had the monopoly to supply towns in the Chibougamau goldfields area, and they hired Woollett to fly out of Senneterre, Quebec, in a Fairchild 82 (CF-AXB) doing a job he described as “shuttling back and forth with equipment, food supplies, booze and people of every description including members of the oldest profession.” 

In the winter of 1935–36, Woollett's aircraft was caught in a blizzard and damaged (“pranged,” as he called it) during a rough landing on a frozen river in northern Quebec. Expecting rescue, he put on the snowshoes he kept in the rear and tamped out a landing strip in the snow for his rescuers. But nobody showed up. After five days, the irritated Woollett stomped out the following message in big letters with his snowshoes: land here you bastards. He and his aircraft were finally located and retrieved, and the grumpy Woollett continued bush flying, doing aerial mapping as well as medical rescues.

During the Second World War, Woollett worked with the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, overseeing schools in Quebec and Ontario. He received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for this service. Appointed superintendent of the eastern division of Canadian Pacific Airlines after the war, he worked with Grant McConachie developing the company's Pacific passenger network. Woollett died at his home in Hawaii in 1998 and was inducted into Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame in 2003.

H
enry Arthur “Art” Schade epitomized the resourceful bush-pilot pioneers who handled all risks and delivered the goods. On a Christmas Eve mail run in 1933 north of Sioux Lookout in western Ontario, Schade was heading to the tiny settlement of Goldpines, which had started out as a tent camp clustered around an HBC post and served as home to gold prospectors working at Red Lake and their families, as well as a stopping place for prospectors during the gold rush of the late 1920s. Soon it grew to include three stores, three restaurants, a hotel, barbershop, post office, bank, law office, pool hall and tavern. The population fluctuated between 100 and 130 permanent residents and about the same number of transients. During the winter, frozen waterways served as landing strips but the thickness and smoothness of the ice could never be guaranteed.

Like every other small, remote community, Goldpines depended on bush planes for mail and Christmas packages. Everything was ordered early by mail from catalogues, and all incoming parcels and letters were stored at the Sioux Lookout warehouse ready to be flown to Goldpines. Then everyone waited for the lake to freeze. And they waited. The ice was not thick enough for a ski landing but was too solid for a floatplane landing. On December 24, Art Schade received word the ice was thick enough for his plane with all its packages to land.

Flying over the area, Schade saw a small Gipsy Moth plane already on the ice and decided to put down nearby.
Everything looked good, and there was even a welcoming party of villagers standing on shore with their arms in the air. But everything was not okay. The Moth was stuck in a layer of melting ice and could not break free to take off. Schade did not know this, and there was no radio communication to tell him. He thought that the people waving their arms were welcoming him, not warning him not to land. He landed his big Bellanca only to immediately start sinking through the ice with scarcely enough time to jump out of the cockpit. His plane and all its cargo were soon submerged. Then the weather turned very cold, and everything was locked under a rapidly forming sheet of thick ice.

Not to be denied their Christmas goodies, the people of Goldpines organized a salvage operation; for 10 days and nights, they kept fires burning where the plane had sunk in order to soften the ice. Next they rigged a makeshift pulley system to haul the imprisoned plane out of the lake and up onto shore. The soggy Christmas mail and gifts were handed over to the postmaster, who dried them out and forwarded them to the addressees. Celebrations were late that year, but with painted macaroni strings, feathers and foil from tobacco tins to decorate the tree, and wild game, stuffed partridge, berries and honey on the table, life was good. Schade still had to get his plane back in working order to fly home. This he managed to do. It was, after all, just part of bush flying.

THE LAST FLIGHT OF
La Vigilance
began on September 2, 1922, with pilot Don Foss and engineer Jack Caldwell at the controls of the Curtiss HS-2L flying boat that had been flown by Stuart Graham on what is considered the first bush flight in Canada. They were delivering gas from Remi Lake in northern Ontario to Lac Pierre, a 90-minute flight. On the return trip, they ran into heavy rain and decided to set down on a small lake to wait for the weather to clear, since they had only enough fuel for one run into Remi Lake. But it was a small lake only about a half-mile long. Getting back up would be problematic.

Foss mulled over his situation. On takeoff,
La Vigilance
probably wouldn't clear the trees that grew right to the water's edge. But he had to try. When the rain stopped, he floated over the lake looking for deadheads, then powered up for takeoff. In struggling to clear the trees, a wingtip hit
the water, and the flying boat cartwheeled. Caldwell was thrown out and thumped onto the wing. Foss, unconscious in the submerged cockpit, was rescued by Caldwell. After Foss regained consciousness, the pair hiked along a nearby river to a trapper's cabin, and the next day the trapper guided them to the railway at Fauquier. On a return mission a few days later to recover the downed HS-2L, it was declared a writeoff. Even the engine was scrapped.

The original hull of Curtiss HS-2L flying boat
La Vigilance
was preserved by the Canada Aviation and Space Museum and is displayed next to a Curtiss HS-2L reconstructed from parts of three different HS-2Ls and marked as Laurentide Air Service G-CAAC, the original
La Vigilance
registration.
L.D. CROSS

A
nd there
La Vigilance
remained, slowly sinking into the silt of the lake bed until 1967, when it was discovered by Kapuskasing businessman Don Campbell. Nobody knew the true identity of the HS-2L, but the Canada Aviation and Space Museum decided to retrieve and reconstruct it as historically representative of its type, since no others existed. In the salvage operation from what is now called Foss Lake, the true identity of the plane became clear.

In 1970, the longest restoration project ever undertaken by the museum began on the Curtiss HS–2L. The restoration was complex and time-consuming due to the size of the plane and the need to reconstruct a complete hull. Curators wanted to retain the recovered hull for historical purposes, but the water-soaked wood was not suitable for restoration. In 1986, an exhibit of the G-CAAC
La Vigilance
's original hull and a reconstructed HS-2L aircraft assembled from three different HS-2Ls was unveiled at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, where it can be seen today. This is the only complete HS-2L in the world.

Alberta Aviation Museum, Edmonton, Alberta

www.albertaaviationmuseum.com/

British Columbia Aviation Museum, Sidney, British Columbia

www.bcam.net/

Canada Aviation and Space Museum, Ottawa, Ontario

www.aviation.technomuses.ca/

Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame, Wetaskiwin, Alberta

www.cahf.ca/

Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

www.bushplane.com/

Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, Mount Hope, Ontario

www.warplane.com/

Reynolds-Alberta Museum, Wetaskiwin, Alberta

history.alberta.ca/reynolds

Western Canada Aviation Museum, Winnipeg, Manitoba

wcam.mb.ca/

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Bungey, Lloyd M.
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Cole, Dermot.
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. Surrey, BC: Hancock House Publishers, 2005.

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. Ottawa: Canada, Department of Transport, Queen's Printer, 1967.

Matheson, Shirlee Smith.
Flying the Frontiers
. Vol. II. Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1996.

McCaffery, Dan.
Bush Planes and Bush Pilots
. Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 2002.

Oswald, Mary.
They Led the Way
. Wetaskiwin, AB: Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame, 1999.

Payne, Stephen, ed.
Canadian Wings: A Remarkable Century of Flight
. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006.

Spring, Joyce.
Daring Lady Flyers: Canadian Women in the Early Years of Aviation.
Lawrencetown, NS: Pottersfield Press, 1994.

———.
The Sky's the Limit: Canadian Women Bush Pilots
. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2006.

Terpening, Rex.
Bent Props and Blow Pots
. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2006.

Turner, Dick.
Wings of the North
. Blaine, WA: Hancock House Publishers, 1976.

Zuk, Bill.
True-Life Adventures of Canada's Bush Pilots
. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., 2009.

The page numbers in this index refer to the print edition and have been linked to corresponding anchors in this electronic edition. Depending on your reading device and personal settings, you may have to continue scrolling down or turning pages before the index entry appears on your screen.

Air Canada,
92
,
101
,
129
.
See also
Trans-Canada Airlines