Yellowknife

   I mentioned that I worked for an outfit out of Yellowknife and spent just a little over a year working jump there. I was born in Yellowknife, but moved away as a baby, so had no recollection of the place really, but technically I guess I was “ from “ there.

  I did live in Hay River for a little over four years and Hay River is just on the other side of the Great Slave Lake from Yellowknife. My flying in Hay River was summer-seasonal, whereas when I came back to fly out of Yellowknife, it was a year round gig. Year round employment, but I was a “ Rotator “, in that I didn’t live there, the company I worked for flew me in and out from the small town in Northern Alberta where I lived at the time.

  Rotational work was pretty common in the north, not just in Aviation, but in a few other industries as well. Oil and Gas in particular relied heavily on rotational employees from all over Canada.

  Our arrangement was pretty standard. I worked a 2 week on, 2 week off schedule. Travel to and from work was done on your days off, and thus you technically weren’t paid for your travel days, but that was semantics really. The thought of doing unpaid work is pretty universally frowned upon, but since I was paid on Salary, rather than on an hourly basis, you could just look at it as working 16 days on and 12 days off if that made you feel better.

  We had a travel coordinator that booked your ticket to/from work and the e-tickets would just show up in your email about a week prior to travel. The Travel Coordinator had your preferences on file, Aisle/window and frequent flyer number to include on the booking. Where I work now has a whole travel department that basically operate like private travel agents as our travel needs are way more complicated. My travel needs back in my yellowknife days were pretty simple though, there was really only one flight that worked as far as civilized departure times and connections / routing. 

  My typical travel days would start at Ungodly O’clock in the AM, where I’d load my bags in my truck and drive about an hour and forty five minutes to the closest town with a regional airline flight. From there I’d fly about an hour and a half in the exact opposite direction of Yellowknife in a Q400 regional turboprop aircraft. I came to really dislike that aircraft after awhile, but in the beginning I still looked forward to my airline flights to get to work.  Grande Prairie was the town that I’d fly out of and I used to operate medevac flights into that airport at least once or twice a week at my previous employer. As such, I was on friendly terms with the owner of one of the two FBO’s on the field and this came in handy when it came time to find a place to park my truck for the two weeks that I’d be away for work.

  When I started flying out of Yellowknife, some of my coworkers at my last job mentioned that another guy that used to work for us was also working up there and lived just down the road from me in the next small town over. Him and I met up once I started up there and became good friends. He operated out of one of our other bases further north, in Cambridge Bay, but he was on the same work rotation as me and we worked out a car pool schedule where we alternated the driving over to Grande Prairie and travelled together to and from Yellowknife. This came in handy as it allowed both of us to alternate leaving an extra vehicle at home for our partners to be able to use in our absence if they needed it, as well as cut down on the gas and driving duties. Those drives could be a bit dicey too, in Northern Alberta Winters at 3 AM.

  Out of Grande Prairie, we’d fly an hour and a half south to Calgary.

  From Calgary we’d connect with the flight up to Yellowknife, another 2 hours away now at that point. Departing home at 3 in the morning to arrive in Yellowknife usually just before supper time.  Crew Change Day was every second Thursday and arriving into Yellowknife after a long day of travel, it became tradition for the rotators in and rotators out to meet up at one of the local pubs for Steak Night, often joined by some of the non-rotational, Yellowknife resident pilots as well.

  The steak night offerings were pretty basic, but it was a nice way to catch up with your coworkers and enjoy a decent meal. Fine dining in Yellowknife wasn’t as easy to find as you might think, haha. They’d throw a piece of plywood on top of the pool table and a table cloth on top of that. That became the buffet table where you could load up on salad and potato sides to go with your steak plate once it came out of the kitchen.

  Dave would be off on the company flight up to Cambridge Bay later that night and I’d be off to the Crew House. 

 When I first started, the crew house was actually a three bedroom apartment in a high rise apartment tower, the Coast Hotel.

 In the crew apartment you’d have a bin or two of clothing and belongings that you’d keep up there, stored in a closet while you were away. Everything else you’d bring back and forth with you in your suitcase. It was so much nicer to travel light, so most of us eventually just built up a second work-wardrobe that stayed up there so all you had to bring back and forth with you was your bathroom kit.  Most of us kept the bulk of flight-bag contents or even the entire thing up there as well. I would occasionally moonlight for my old employer on my off days, so that travelled back and forth with me.

  The crew apartment would typically house the same guys on the same rotation as you. Occasionally someone would quit and there’d be a spare bedroom available that the company might utilize for a mechanic or office staff that might be in Yellowknife temporarily. When that happened we didn’t get any advance notice that they were coming, someone would just show up with a key and let themselves in, but other than that, it felt like “ our “ home. We each had our own” own “ bedrooms, but since you were hot-bunking with someone on the opposite rotation as you, you still had to pack everything away at the end of your trip.

  I was quite glad that the other guys in the apartment that shared the same rotation as me were decent guys and we all got on quite well at the apartment. Occasionally we’d cook dinners together, but just as often we’d have our own food “ strategy “ while on rotation. 

  The challenge is that you didn’t want buy too much food that you’d end up throwing stuff out or giving it away to your cross shift. You also didn’t want to live on instant noodles and Kraft Dinner either. Some guys liked to cook elaborate meals, others lived pretty simply.  I was mostly the latter, but I liked cooking and eating good food as well so it was a mixed strategy for me, depending on my mood and budget. We each had dedicated cupboard space that we could build up supplies of non-perishables and there was certain amount of shared basics like seasonings and some cleaning products and kitchen sundries as well. There was no real system, but you tried to keep it fair with buying things like Dish Soap or paper towels that just made sense for everyone to use.

The apartment tower itself was technically a hotel, with some of the floors dedicated to permanent residents, like ours, and some of the floors that were actually hotel rooms. We didn’t have cleaning staff or anything like that on our floors, but they were around for the floors that housed the tourists.

 A lot of the tourists up there were actually in the winter. Every winter there would be bus loads of Japanese and/or Chinese tourists that came up on package tours to Yellowknife, to what I thought at the time, was to view The Northern Lights.  You could tell when the tour groups were in town as they issued them all matching Canada Goose winter parkas as part of their tour experience. These weren’t cheap tours as the jackets alone, at that time, went for about 1200 bucks. The Canada Goose Jacket is a good example of getting what you pay for in terms of quality. They really are worth the money in Arctic temperatures. Our company had a discount deal worked out with the local supplier of Canada Goose Jackets, which gave us a 50% deal if we wanted to buy one. I never did as they were actually too warm and a little on the bulky side to be of any use in the cramped plane or the short periods of time that we spent outdoors. I often toyed with the idea of buying one though, as I could easily sell it after a few years of careful use and be able to recoup my money back after that 50% discounted purchase from new. 

  I found that a few decent layers of undershirt, shirt, hoodie or sweater, flight suit and then parka served my needs just fine without a thousand dollar price tag. I did invest in some Baffin Boots though, as proper footwear, in my opinion, was equally if not more important, than a premium parka.

  I found out years later, after having left Yellowknife, that the Asian tourists weren’t actually there to see the Northern Lights as I had assumed. It’s a reasonable assumption, as the tours were all about the Lights. They had busses picking them up from the hotels in the middle of the night, they had signs all over town with the color-coded Northern Lights / Solar Storm Forecasts and signs indicating that evenings probability and intensity of show. Turns out, the viewing of the Northern Lights is definitely a draw for them, but the motivation to spend thousand of dollar to come to Yellowknife in the depths of winter was slightly different. Apparently, conceiving a child underneath the Northenr Lights was a huge thing in terms of said child’s luck outlook for their life. Now the glass igloos that I assumed allowed them to view the lights from a more comfortable position, were for an altogether different purpose. 

  The company had us on the same Rolling Duty Day system that I had previously worked under. That is, you were put on the call list for pilots at the bottom of a three-team list and as each team got called out on Medevac trips, you moved up the list until you were #1 and next in line for dispatch. On Team 2 or 3, you could go about your day fairly normally, but once you were on Team 1 you had to pretty much be ready to drop everything and head for the airport when you got the call.

  We didn’t have crew cars or anything like that, instead, they’d issue us a stack of Taxi Chits when we arrived for our rotation. There were no real limitations on how you used them and you could just go get more if you needed them. Personal use was fair game in addition to getting you to the airport when you got called out.

  Most of the Taxi drivers in Yellowknife were Somalian when I lived there. The Canadian immigration policies at the time gave extra “ points “ to an immigrants application if they committed to living in some remote locations, like Yellowknife, to promote diversity as well as get workers to places that desperately needed them instead of in the cities down south. I had also seen it in other communities as well where particular ethnic groups would start to establish little population clusters based on word of mouth to their friends and family back home. Over time, they’d put down enough roots or married into the communities so they could also act as sponsors to help friends and relatives from their home countries make the move over. Hay River had a burgeoning Filipino community and Yellowknife had the Somali cab drivers. It was funny too as my Father was a cab driver back in Yellowknife at the time of my birth.

 The company I worked for had several different divisions and fleets. There was the “ Bush “ side, which operated Twin Otters, Dash-7s and Caravans. Then there was the King Air side, which operated three brand new King Air 250’s for the provincial government medevac contract and a handful of much older King Air 200s for the charter side, doing a variety of charter work and crew change flights for the diamon mines in the Northwest Territories.

  Once you got to the top of the Dispatch List, you’d take the next Medevac call that came in. If you were at the top of the list right around supper time and there was a charter or scheduled passenger flight the next day, you’d be taken off the list, put into rest, and assigned the scheduled flying the next day. 

  It was an interesting mix of aircraft. The 250’s on the Medevac fleet were brand new. They had less than 2000 hours of the aircraft itself. I remember thinking it novel that it was likely the first time I had ever operated an aircraft that I actually had more Flight Time than the aircraft did. I also remember thinking how fantastic these planes were, they actually had cup holders!

  Conversely, the charter machines, not being bankrolled by Provincial Government money, were some of the oldest flying King Airs in Canada. The company had very good maintenance, but there’s only so much that you can polish a turd.

 A year or so after I had left the company, they actually had a crash of one of the charter machines. I knew the Captain who died in that accident and had flown that plane many times. The particular mechanical issue that they had in that plane was also one I had experienced before, although not nearly as badly as they had. 

  The plane has two Attitude indicators, gyroscopic instruments that you use during instrument flying, when you can’t see out the window, to be able to keep the aircraft upright. Both of these instruments get checked in the pre-flight / run up process before you take off. At that level of regulation, “ 703 / Air Taxi “, you were only required by law to have two separate Attitude indicators in the cockpit. On larger aircraft that carry more people, 704 Commuter and 705 Airline, you are required to have at least three separate instruments. 

  On that day, one of those instruments was “ slow to come up “, something that many of us had experienced before. The gyro operates esssentially like a spinning top. It uses vacuum air from the engine to spin the gyro and once it’s spinning, it will be able to tell you the planes attitude, as it will generally stay fixed in space, even when the plane changes its attitude. In -40 degrees Celsius, the oils and mechanisms in these instruments, as well as the vacuum air system itself that is used to spin it, can be slow, sluggish and might not work properly until its been operated for awhile and given a chance to warm up. That could take awhile in a cold soaked airplane in the middle of the night. Given the time constraints of a a Medevac trip and the pressure to get going, it was not at all unusual to just accept that one of the two Attitude Indicators might not work properly until you were off the ground and on the way to your destination. 

  On that day, for that crew, the Copilots Gyro never “ came up “, instead of just being slow to warm up it had actually failed, leaving them with only one functioning Gyro.  It was the same type of instrument, but on the Captains side of the instrument panel. About twenty minutes before landing at their destination, while descending down through the clouds, the Captains Attitude Indicator failed as well.

  A failing Gyro-operated instrument can fail in a horrible, horrible way. Instead of simply stopping, or a failure flag popping up to tell you that the instrument cannot be trusted, instead, one of the failure modes is that it very slowly spins down. Instead of staying fixed in space, with the aircraft moving around it, it will slowly start to fall over to one side. As a pilot, flying on instruments, which the attitude indicator is one of the most important ones, you’ll imperceptibly follow the failing gyro, eventually turning the aircraft upside down, or into a dive, steep turn or climb. You’ll do this almost without conscious thought, like you’d steer a car down the road with automatic adjustments of the wheel to stay in your lane.

  You’ll ignore the sensations in your body that tell you that you are accelerating, turning, climbing or descending, because you’ve trained yourself to ignore these sensations which are typically caused by G forces and not gravity. You are flying on instruments, you are trusting your instruments. When they emerged from the bottom of the cloud deck, they were likely too close to the ground to make any meaningful recovery from whatever attitude the plane was in once they could actually see outside and they both perished.

  That accident was a real wake up call for me and I think for a lot of guys that worked in similar companies. We’d all been there and made those decisions, accepted that things didn’t work, accepted the normalization of deviance, made the same calls as Will did that day.  So many times you’d see a news story or accident report and the decisions that led to an accident and think “ Well, I certainly wouldn’t have done that “ or something similar. It hits a little different when you can easily see yourself exposed to the same risks and the possible outcome.

  From Yellowknife we’d typically be dispatched out to a community to pick up a patient and bring them back to the regional hospital in Yellowknife, Stanton Terrritorial Hospital, or to the nearest big city, Edmonton for treatment at a specialized clinic or just a larger hospital.

  Most of the communities in our coverage area were anywhere from a twenty minute flight to closer locations like Hay River, Fort Resolution, Fort Providence or L’utsulke, to further away points like Inuvik,  Paulatuk, Trout Lake or Norman Wells. Occasionally we’d get assigned to go to some of the further North stations that could actually be classified as “ Arctic “ , There was another Base for our company, in Cambridge Bay that would typically handle those flights with their King Air or Lear Jet, but if they were busy on another call they might dispatch a plane out of Yellowknife instead. 

  The flying was relatively remote for us “ down south “ in Yellowknife, but it was even more so out of Cambridge Bay. There are only a coupe of “ highways “ in the NWT connecting the larger communities in the southern part. Well, connecting some of them anyways. Most of the communities had little road access.Some had winter road access, a couple had summer barge or ocean access, but many had no access at all, other than by Air.

  I’ve always been interested in the history of the Arctic, in particular the Arctic exploration by European explorers in the 1800s. I was very interested in getting to visit some of places that were mentioned in the books and stories I had read of these explorers. Cambridge Bay, Gjoa Haven, Coppermine, Frobisher Bay and the like. I had a version of what these places would be like, based on the books I had read. When I finally did get to go to some of these places, I was, sadly, a little disappointed.

  Above the tree-line, roughly 65-70 Degrees North, there aren’t actually any trees. With no trees, in the geography of that area, that means there isn’t a lot of dirt either. Without trees or dirt, that kind of only leaves rock and water. Sure, there are some combinations or other forms of rock or water, like dust, sand, mud or ice. Some portions of the Arctic have the Rocks piled higher than others, in the form of mountains. Some areas also have the water piled higher as well in the form of icebergs Both can be pleasant from a scenery perspective. Frankly though, I found it a little on the bleak side. I’m not much of a fan of desert geography either, so part of it is personal preference.

  In the picture above, it’s interesting to me to think that the Utility Pole was shipped to this place. Someone had to source it down south and arrange for it to be shipped up here on one of the summer barges.

  This was in Gjoa Haven, I think, and there was  actually a cruise ship in town. Some of the cruise operators had decided to sell Northwest Passage type trips as I guess I wasn’t the only one fascinated by the romantic tales of the Arctic. I couldn’t help but feel though that a large portion of the passengers that had paid large amounts of money for these trips might have felt a little disappointed as well once they saw the endless expanses of Rock and Water. There was also a fairly well publicized problem of the cruise ships, the larger ones holding upwards of 2000 passengers, would overwhelm the limited resources of the communities. The largest community in that area would be Cambridge Bay at roughly 1700 people. It’s by far the largest as well, Gjoa Haven for example only has 1300.

  When you’d get a dispatched to one of the Arctic communities our company required that you held two alternates on your flight plan. The distance between available airstrips up there was simply so spread out that the normal procedure of having enough fuel to fly to your destination, then to your alternate and then for another 45 minutes could still put you, mathematically, in a challenging situation.

  An IFR flight plan requires that we file a plan with ATC, showing that we had enough fuel on board to be able to fly to the above destination, alternate and reserve fuel ( 45 minutes ). That way, if we arrive at our destination and the weather had gotten worse, we had enough fuel to go somewhere else, that had a forecast for better, or at least adequate weather conditions. If things went further sideways at our alternate, we would still have our reserve fuel to get us, hopefully, to another airport. The problem in the arctic is that reserve fuel of 45 minutes flying time usually doesn’t actually get you anywhere useful. Luckily, the King Air 250 and King Air 350 that they used in Cambridge Bay, could carry full fuel and our limited passenger load, and about 4.5 - 5.5 hours of fuel, so it usually wasn’t an issue to be able to flight plan and accept a dispatch even with holding more fuel than that required by regulation. It’s fairly common for companies to have even more restrictive requirements than required by law, for one reason or another. Sometimes that reason was that they had an incident at some point and the corrective action put in place to appease the regulator, was to be even more restrictive in one area or another.

  I liked working in Yellowknife. Despite the climate challenges, it has a lot going for it for me. I liked the personal; connection, being my birthplace and I liked the aviation history of the town. Even today, a lot of people that I work with know of Yellowknife by way of the Ice Pilots TV show from a few years ago. The show was being filmed up there during the period that we lived in Hay River and I knew a few of the guys that worked for Buffalo Airways and were on the show. Even the crusty Old Joe McBryan was practically my neighbor in Hay River. Let’s be honest, in a town that small and isolated, everyone is practically your neighbour. I remember a friend of mine who grew up in Hay River telling me, “ at any given time, someone in town, who you may or may not know, is talking about you. “…. It’s that small.

  Yellowknife and the North in general however, didn’t fit with our long term goals at the time. The challenges of public education for our growing children and the limits to the aviation opportunities there for me, put an expiry date on our time there. I don’t regret leaving, and I certainly don’t regret the time that we got to spend there.