Northern Digs

  

 I’ve posted before about my first real flying job, that took me and my family North, to the Northwest Territories in Canada. 

  Going through my photo-reel, I found some pictures of our humble home when we moved to Hay River semi-permanently. 

  After having come up on my own for the first summer and living in my employers RV behind the hangar, for my seasonal flying job, we made the decision to move up as a family and live year-round in the NWT.

  We had a new-born daughter, she was 18 months old at the time, and I had a 3-month summer seasonal flying job. That’s all we had. I suppose we have the proceeds from the sale of our condo in Vancouver, giving us a small amount of money, but everything else was theoretical. Everyone told us that finding off-season work for me and year round work for my Wife ( ex-wife now ) would be fairly easy.

  We did however have to find somewhere to live. The rental market was pretty dismal and we had the condo-money that we wanted to put back into a real estate “ holding “ so it didn’t evaporate.

  The NWT at the time didn’t participate in the online real estate of Realtor.com, something about the real estate board of the NWT and the national association not getting along. No one really cared as the market was so small in any case. Hay River was a town of about 3500 people and was the second? Third? Largest settlement in the NWT, after Yellowknife and Inuvik. Finding available properties for sale was either through word of mouth, postings on paper pinned to the corkboard at the post office, or through one of the two realtors based in town.

  Given that we needed to secure housing before moving up and not wanting to move twice, once into a short term rental and again into our permanent digs, once found, we scoured the two websites of the local realtors on a daily basis.

  There really wasn’t much available at the time we were looking. Our budget being fairly meager, most of the listings were out of our range. We also had to consider our limited finances as we really had no idea what our incomes were going to look like for a couple years. Biting off a high-overhead mortgage seemed risky, especially if we ended up moving away again in just a couple years.

  Up popped a little trailer, a mobile home, that was quite cheap and well within our range. I had a friend go over and do a quick video walk-through and we spoke to the realtor a few times.

  After a couple weeks with our moving date coming at us without pause, and feeling the pressure to lock something down, we pulled the pin on it and put in an offer. We ended up buying the place, sight “ un-seen “ , other than the video walkthrough.

  It was a small trailer, I think it was 12 feet wide and 50? Feet long. It sat on the large lots of Old Town. Hoooked up to the power system but without water or sewer lines. Hay River had moved the town site up the river a few miles due to the risk of spring flooding in Old Town, and wanted everyone to move away. Therefore, they wouldn’t be putting in water or sewer lines anytime soon. Their decision to move the townsite and “ abandon “ Old Town, made the property values very cheap, if you were willing to put up with septic and water services via delivery or vacuum truck.

 Our road was gravel and access to old town was limited to a single road in and out. About 70% of the lots in old town were vacant, their houses long since relocated to the new town site. Those that elected to stay in Old Town, or decided to build there, were a mix of trailers, warehouses, modern homes and derelict storage lots filled with old boats with trees growing up through abandoned decks and trucks rotting in the over growth. There was a park with a playground down the street from us, complete with a hockey rink that got filled with water and frozen for outdoor skating in the winter. It got very little use though, with a good chunk of the winter being below -20C and not very enticing for the kids to go outside and play.

  

  Trailer life wasn’t all that bad, wasn’t all that great either, haha. Aside from the small space, there were a few challenges. Some of the challenges were specific to living in a prefabricated home, others were the fact that we were doing it in Canada’s North.

  As I mentioned, Old Town in Hay River had been quasi-abandoned, in that they really didn’t want anyone to live there, but they also had to accept that the lack of municipal services, the rick of catastrophic flooding every spring drove the land prices down significantly. Cheap land wasn’t neccassarily a rare thing in the NWT, but this cheap land had been a town once. Streets were in place, power infrastructure was all there, the lots were a decent size and the actual location, right on the shore of the lake, made it a fairly decent place to live.

  Power was provided by overhead cables, like most of Canada. Although I was told by someone that the spacing between the wires in the NWT was non-standard as they were trying to make the wires further apart than the outstretched wingspan of the Ravens. Most of our power outages were inevitably the fault of a zapped raven, so I could see there being some truth to it. 

  No municipal water or sewer existed though, all of it had to be trucked in and out. They didn’t abandon or tear up that infrastructure, it had never existed. A lot of northern communities are like this. The challenges of installing and maintaining underground pipes and drainage are considerably expensive to overcome when you’re dealing with permafrost soil. 

  We had a septic tank outside our trailer, but I don’t remember having it pumped out very often. I don’t remember if it had a traditional septic field attached to the tank. Something tells me it must have, due to the fact that it didn’t seem like we needed it emptied very often. I do remember it having a pump-out pipe that was essentially just a long PVC pipe “ straw “ that stuck out of the inspection hatch on the top of the buried tank. You could look down into it to see the level of the sewage. It also never froze up, even in the deepest, darkest depths of our northern winters. That always surprised me, I suppose it must be due to the fermentation process creating heat? Maybe?

  Water was provided by a truck. By necessity, the water tank had to be inside your house to avoid it becoming a giant ice cube. In the case of a Trailer, where space was at a premium, this meant that there was a closet-sized space, right in the middle of the trailer, that housed our water tank. As you walked down the hallway from the kitchen back to the bedrooms, you passed right by the water plastic water tank. It was about 3 feet in diameter and went to the ceiling, so about 7.5 feet tall. It was translucent plastic, so you could see the water level in the tank as well. Two adults and one small child, with associated dishwashing, laundry, bathing, toilet flushing and consumption, it was a stretch to make the water last between deliveries. We had water delivered three times a week but it was a challenge to not take up too much of your precious living area inside the small trailer and still have enough water to get you through between deliveries. At one point I did the math and came up with a figure of 45 Gallons of water, per person, per day. This shocked me, I mean that’s an entire drum of water every day. Most of my hydration came in the form of coffee, so I certainly wasn’t drinking all that water, but all that other stuff sure adds up.

 

  The extreme cold temperatures in the winter was another challenge for trailer life. Since most trailers are built around the fact that they neeed to be moved over public roads, there was a size limitation that was hard for the builders to get around. Since that made every inch of space so valuable, most of them simply do not have the luxury of wall space for the insulation demands of northern winters. I seem to recall being told by the realtor that our trailer was built with the “ Arctic Package “. Someone told me that it simply meant the walls were framed in with 2x6 lumber instead of 2x4s, to give a little more room for extra insulation….perhaps.

  Primary heating was provided by a forced air Oil Furnace, fed from an outdoor Oil storage tank. At that time, it cost around 1200 bucks to fill our tank and in a typical winter we’d go through about a tank and a half over the winter. Higher consumption due to poor insulation, but offset by the smaller size of the space being heated. I was glad in hindsight that we went with the cheap housing option as the costs of Furnace Oil and Electricity costs up there were pretty dramatic and I really hadn’t accounted for that. Had we moved into a larger, “ normal “ house I think the running costs would have been a hard pill to swallow, especially at the beginning of our time there when things were a bit tight financially. It would have been nice to have a secondary heat source, for both comfort but also for peace of mind. When temperatures fall to 40 degrees below zero, a failure of your furnace meant that you only had a few hours before your home was unlivable and possibly severely damaged, what with bursting pipes.

  When I delivered home heating oil as my winter job, you’d see it a few times a winter, the frantic calls at 3AM when someone runs out of Oil and needs a truck NOW. You’d show up in the middle of the night and everyone is bundled up in winter clothes and blankets and the oven is on, door wide open and all the burners on Maximum with a fan blowing over them to try and fend off the cold.

  The Electricity was also really expensive. Coming from BC which has extensive Hydro ELectric Power and consequently, some of the lowest prices electricity in Canada, possibly North America. Side note, but all the legends about “ BC Bud “, the high quality indoor grown Marijuana that BC is fairly well known for, is a direct result of the availability of cheap hydro electricity, rather than any inherent wisdom of the generations of hippies that live in BC. If I remember correctly, a KW/h of electricity was in the order of 6-9 cents in BC at the time and well over 30 cents in the NWT. Our little trailer cost us, on average, about 300 dollars a month, just for electricity. I don’t even want to think about what a standard house would have set us back on a monthly basis.

  When we showed up with our little moving truck and all the possessions from our little condo, we very quickly realized that there was no way everything was going to fit in the trailer. There simply wasn’t the floor space fora lot of closets or other storage areas. The underside of the trailer was “ skirted “ in that it had boards up so that the crawlspace underneath wasn't subject to the wind and that left quite a bit of room under the trailer itself. The problem was that in order to access that space you had to crawl and shove everything through one little 3 foot square access door that would be buried under the snow for half the year, so it wasn’t really practical. 

  To help with storage I promptly went down to the local hardware store and bought a large wooden outdoor storage shed that had shelves inside. Everything that could handle being stored in a “ freezer “ went in the shed. Anything that you only needed to access once a year, in the summer, would get crammed under the trailer.  

  When they brought the shed out to our property to deliver it, they brought it on a flat deck truck and brought a large front end loader to pick it up and drive it from the street, over the “ lawn “ and place it up next to the trailer. This was in the early spring and the ruts that the loader left in our soggy, half mud, half weed infested gravel that made up our lawn, haunted me the whole time we lived there. 

  One of the few closets that we did have in the house was in the master bedroom, the larger of the two bedrooms, taking up the back end of the trailers floor plan. I remember dedicating one of the shelves in the closet to linen storage, including spare towels and bed linens that we never really used as we had way more than we needed. When we went to move out of the trailer three and half years later, it was wintertime and the linens in the closet had acted like another layer of insulation, being up against the wall of the trailer. The funny part was, in addition to helping keep our expensive heat from escaping, they also did a really good job of insulating that particular piece of the wall against receiving any of that heat. As a consequence, the extreme cold of the exterior wall, had, over time, chilled the towels that were upo against the wall. With no access to the heat and only the cold seeping in over a couple years, the last 6 inches of towels were a block of ice…..inside our house, hidden behind a pile of towels and sheets.

  The cold temperatures were a constant battle. Windows would get so cold that the damp interior air condensed on them, causing them to constantly being wet on the inside…te water would then run down the window and cause all kinds of problems with the window frames. Even more so when it inevitably turned to ice, even inside the house. We were advised that you could buy sheets of plastic to put up over the windows and create a barrier preventing the interior air from touching the window. Essentially “ double paning “ the window and creating some trapped air for more insulation. Every fall I’d go buy the plastic and double sided tape to secure over all the windows and seal us in for the winter. Not that it really matters as within a couple of weeks there was layer of ice on the outside of the windows and in the frames, rendering them completely sealed anyways.

  One time I came home from grocery shopping with my daughter in the car with me, I think she was 3 at the time. Since I’d be opening and closing the car doors to bring all the groceries in, I decided I’d unstrap her from the car seat first, bring her inside where it was nice and warm and then make my two or three trips with the groceries.

  Once she was inside, I closed the front door and went back to the truck to get the first load of groceries. Imagine my shock when I got back to the front door and found that it had locked behind me somehow, trapping my daughter inside the house, unattended and trapping me outside. That’s when I found out that all of the windows to the house were completely sealed in by the ice. Luckily, my wife and a spare set of keys were only a ten minute drive away and she had to come home from work to quickly rescue fail-dad.

  Anorther challenge was the fact that the inlet for the water delivery Truck was located outside the house. Every time they came and hooked up to the pipe, a little bit of water would be leftover in the pipe where it ran outside the house. Over time this would build up and eventually block off the pipe. This was quite a nuisance as it meant we didn’t get that days much needed water delivery and would have to pay for an extra trip once we cleared the pipe. I had an electric heating pad, like you use for a sore back, that I’d wrap around the pipe and then wrap a towel or two over top of it and leave it for a couple hours and that would usually thaw out the blockage. If we went out of town for more than a day or two as well, you’d leave a tap left open just enough to drip, this would keep the water flowing in the pipes I was told and help to keep it from freezing up. Frozen pipes were a big problem. Not only would it likely destroy the pipe or pipes, it would also need to be thawed out again somehow. Since most of your pipes run inside and underneath walls and floors, they aren’t always easy to access. My heating-pad-o-matic worked a few times when we had issues, but only if I could access the offending pipe and blockage. 

  There was a small benefit of having the outside air temperature never above -10 for months at a time though. Freezer space in the winter was not a problem anymore, I’d simply leave items out on the porch in a box, or buried in the snow. We had a deep freezer outside on the back porch and in the winter still used it, but I could just unplug it till May-ish.

  Our yard was actually quite large. The lots in Old Town were 100 x 150 feet and with the trailer being fairly small, that left a lot of room.  I can’t remember if the playground set was there when we moved in, or if we put it in. I do remember loading it in a truck, but that could very well have been when we took it out a few years later. 

  The ground itself kinda sorta looked like a lawn when the snow was melting on our spring arrival. Within a couple weeks though it was pretty clear that it was simply a mix of weeds growing up through some tortured gravel. You could see evidence in the gravel of previous owners having used the lawn for a storage facility for old vehicle,s or perhaps a hill billy chop shop.  Busted glass, bolts, oil stains and pieces of broken bricks. I took it as a challenge to try and make a lawn out of it, but had very little success. WE simply didn’t have the water to spare to germinate any grass seed in the crappy dirt/gravel mix and a very short window. Nevertheless, he persisted. Over the four summers we were there, through sheer force of will, it was a mix of weeds and grass by the time we left. We did get rid of the playground set at some point, if memory serves it was actually in pretty rough shape and starting to fall apart. The outdoor elements up there can be pretty unforgiving.

  We had fantastic neighbors on one side, a semi retired couple that liked to collect boats and motorcycles. I think when we moved in two of there boats were actually parked on our front “ lawn “ and they would stay there for a year or so before they moved them. It wasn’t like we needed the space and they weren’t hurting anyone sitting on our lawn. If anything, it made it look like we had the means to afford some toys…which we clearly didn’t, haha.

  I do miss that aspect of Old Town, that you could park anything on your property and do as you pleased without any fear of judgement or sternly worded letters from the municipal bylaw folks. It was pretty much a free for all.

  Eventually, my employer donated to us an old Trampoline that was stored under their house, their children having long since grown out of it. In fact, their kids were my age, that’s how long it had sat dormant. It was old school build quality, the kind of trampoline that I remember from my childhood in the 80s. If your friend had a trampoline back then there parents were very well off. 

  The trampoline didn’t come with a safety net, and we let the Little One bounce around for the first summer unencumbered as she was so small that there wasn’t too much worry about propelling herself off the edge onto the glass and brick infested gravel lawn below. By the second summer though, we bit the bullet and put one up. We ended up dragging that trampoline around with us for another 5 years or so, with the occasional welding repair to its legs and at least one trip to the Emergency Dept at the local hospital. Every fall it would be disassembled in preparation for the winter and every spring, dragged out of its storage spot and reassembled. Sometimes delayed till the accumulated ice had thawed enough to actually access it, frozen into a block behind the garage.

  The neighbour on the other side was decent enough, when he was sober. More than a couple times he could be found wandering up and down the gravel road out front, shirtless, barefoot, drunk and angry at the world. Just like the lawn “ ornaments “ in old town, this sort of thing was mostly ignored as long as no one got hurt. Him and I would chat occasionally when I was out doing yard work and we both contributed our yard waste and clippings to a shared depresssion on the border of our properties, to slowly fill it in. He popped by a couple times too with bags of freshly caught whitefish off the big lake.

  Every spring would be a bit of a stressful time though. The Hay River that gave the town its name, empties into Great Slave Lake right at the site of Old Town. In fact, Old town is actually on a large island at the mouth of the river delta. The river Ice always broke long before the Lake Ice and there would be a week or two of violent emptying of the broken up ice into the lake. The lake being frozen however, had to make room for all the run off water and Ice. The force of the ice coming out the river mouth would break up the decaying Lake Ice that was at the mouth, and some room would be created that way. Some of the ice was also pushed underneath the lake ice as well. But, every spring, there was the potential for this to not work as desired by the folks living in Old Town. 

  The Alluvial fan/delta of river silt where it empties into the lake creates a large area of shallow water. This shallow area typically freezes right to the lake bed. In the spring, if it didn’t get broken up by the river ice coming out, would sometimes create a natural Ice Dam. All of the river ice emptying into the lake would suddenly stop, with nowhere to go. The pressure would build up in a relatively violent fashion and, hopefully, eventually force its way into the lake. Many times though, it couldn’t and disaster would ensue. It’s amazing watching the river ice during breakup, the sheer weight and unstoppable force of the ice and moving water is impressive.

  I remember once watching along the shore, along with other groups of townsfolk out for the show, and seeing a large floe, maybe 4 metres square, get pushed up onto the shore by this building pressure at the river mouth. It got pushed right up the shore, maybe 3 metres up the bank and right up to the road we were standing on, watching the spectacle. The guardrail along the road, with its wooden posts and metal rail came in contact with the floe as it pushed up and along the bank. Shearing off the wooden posts buried well into the ground as if they were made of paper. The floe didn’t slow, hiccup or lurch as it took out the guardrail, the force and weight behind it were so large. 

  The story I heard was that back in the 60s, a certain prominent, airline owning businessman of recent TV fame, his father used to assist the big lake in accepting the river ice, with the help of a box of dynamite placed out in the big lake to make sure there was a weak spot in the ice and to to prevent a dam from occurring. It didn’t always work, and I think it was in the 60s when they had a big enough ice jam and ensuing flood in old town, that they gave up and moved the townsite. In any case, the old man, we will call him Red, decided eventually that the cost of the box of dynamite shouldn’t come out of his pocket and perhaps the territorial government should reimburse him for it. Bureacracy prevailed, Red threw his hands up and wished them good luck, and shortly thereafter was the large flood that required the moving of thew entire town…so the legend goes anyways…

 As you watched the ice breakup of the river, it was quite a sight to see when it would momentarily come to stop. You knew the water underneath hadn’t paused, but the Rivers’s surface, completely covered in jumbled piles of ice floes grinding against each other with incredible force would pause. The lake wasn’t taking any more ice and the movement on the river stopped. You could literally watch the water level at the edge slowly start rising, until it would build up enough force to push through again and it would resume its flow into the lake, the water level slowly dropping back down. 

  The flooding that comes with the ice jams is so quick, the potential for disaster is always there for a couple weeks. There is all manner of sensors in the river now, and you can see live internet feeds of the water levels and webcam views of the ice at several points up the river so everyone can keep a close eye on it. I’d fly a couple flights during breakup with the ENR guys and the local fire chief and occasionally some folks from the university in Edmonton who came up to study the problem. We’d fly up and down the river so they could assess the breakup, the ice health and flow rates at different spots.

  Our trailer was perched atop a small mound of gravel on the middle of our property, raising it about a half metre above ground level on old towns alluvial island. The ground level in Old Town only sat about a metre above the water levels of the river during breakup. Thus, if it spilled its bank due to an ice jam, the water would reach our place in pretty short order, maybe an hour or two. Being a trailer, it wasn’t “ attached “ to the ground, it sat upon cribbed wooden blocks, that occasionally needed re-levelling as the ground slowly moved underneath it. If the rising water were to get to those cribbing blocks, we’d float off them in short order. No more house.

  If the fire department thought there was a danger of the ice jamming, they’d preemptively evacuate old town since you simply wouldn’t have time to flee if it jammed up in the middle of the night. Old town having a single road in and out, running alongside the angry river and its ice, made it even more precarious. 

   We never did get evacuated in the years we lived there, but it was pretty close a few times, with evacuation watches in effect you had to be ready to leave in short order, bags packed by the door or in the car. They’d drive the fire trucks and RCMP cars up and down the roads with the evacuation orders over the PA. Lots of folks would ignore them until they’d go door to door. Even then, I know a few people that said they wouldn’t leave, even if ordered.

  When we finally moved way from Hay River it took another 3 years to actually sell our property. Long story short, we had a tenant in there when we first moved, while we put it up for sale. We didn’t get any bites and the tenant expressed an interest in buying it from us if we’d work with him on the sale and terms as he didn’t really have the means at the time. After a year of him living in the trailer, it was in pretty rough shape. He was a great guy and very well respected in the community, but he was very “ northern “ and some of things that he did in that trailer made me scared for its ability to even be sale-able. I remember once coming up to visit and popping by to see how it was fairing. Pretty sure there was an entire boat motor being overhauled in the kitchen sink. Those three years of waiting for him to gather enough resources to buy it, while we watched the river rise and fall every spring and knowing the decline of its condition under his stewardship, were pretty nerve wracking for us. Our meager investment always seemed to be hanging by a thread out of our control. Eventually he did buy it and our northern real estate adventure came to an end. In hindsight, we left a trail of distressed properties and nose diving real estate markets in our wake like the trail of a slug in our journey through the north.

Bang. Bang-bang-bang.

 

  I liked Wednesday's. Wednesdays were crew-change days. We had a contract to move oil field workers from our Small Northern Alberta town over to another small northern town, that was rife with oil field projects.  There was so much demand for workers in Fort Macmurray that most of the major, and even some not so major, companies, had to entice workers into working there by flying them in and out. In addition to the demand for workers there simply wasn’t the infrastructure to house and feed this influx of workers. Most of the projects had a construction timeline where they would bring in hundreds or thousands of workers for a couple years and then once operational, they only needed a fraction of those workers. It’s one thing when it’s one company doing this, but there were dozens. 

  The Northern Alberta Oil Sands had been around as a developing resource for decades. Several major extraction facilities had been in place since the 60s. Technology advancement in the area of extracting oil from sand, the continued rise in the price of oil, and some geopolitical forces had made Fort Macmurray a bustling hive of oil field boom activity. Again. And again.  One thing I always found interesting was reading that the Alberta Oil Sands deposit is/was and are, one of the last major, publicly available oil deposits in the world. Most other deposits of anything close in size have long since been nationalized by the host country or otherwise made inaccessible to foreign investment. Not so in Fort MacMoney. The Canadian Government has been trying to find players willing to make the massive dollar investments in extraction projects that they’ve pretty much dangled ownership of a Canadian resource to anyone with the funds to buy in. I can see why, too, without foreign investors, Canada has had a tough time convincing the tax paying public to invest in something like these deposits, particularly in recent years with concerns over the environmental implications of putting all our tax eggs in as large and unsteady basket as fossil fuels.

  I’m rambling a bit, so I’ll try and get back to course here. On Wednesday's, the charter airline that I worked for had a contract to move the workers that lived in our little town, over to Fort Macmurray to work their two-week shift, and fly the guys home who were getting off shift. The Oil Field company housed, fed and transported the guys to and from the job site from all over Alberta and other parts of Canada as well. There were guys who lived out East and flew into Calgary, to be flown up on a charter flight every week from Calgary. Other flights came in from Edmonton, and our, much smaller flight, for the guys who chose to live in our little town.

  The Wednesday charter was well liked by most of the pilots, for a couple reasons. It was an early start, but it was an early finish too as a result. It was predictable, unlike most of our ad-hoc and on-call business, the charter and Medevac side. You showed up at 5AM to get the plane ready for the outbound flight and you were back and done by 3 PM if memory serves. The day before you were pulled off the Medevac schedule fairly early, as they couldn’t risk you getting called out on a medevac trip that ran late and cut into your pre-duty rest period for the Wednesday scheduled charter.  

  I enjoyed it as well as it was easy and predictable. There wasn’t any pressure to get it flight planned, fueled and ready in the rushed, but not rushed, timeline of a Medevac call-out. The trip was the same, the only thing changed was the passenger count, anywhere from 2 to 9 guys. It departed from the terminal, so you would have a ramper or two to help you load dudes and bags. The office and maintenance staff were around as well. Unlike the Medevac calls where you were opening a cold and empty hangar, by yourself in the middle of the night, this one felt like you had all kinds of help.

  The run was helpful for the company as well, apart from the revenue. Because it was a private charter and not being pad for by the Government Health Authority, the rules were a little different as well. The Government as part of the contract process for awarding Medevac contracts, had long since mandated minimum experience levels or the flight crews. In years gone by, this was a non-issue, competition for pilots heavily favored the employer and they could simply limit their hiring to more experienced crews, because, frankly, they could. The resumes piles were tall, stacked with guys with tons of hours and experience. The Low Time Pilot could simply keep looking, a Medevac job was not going to be an option till they had several thousand hours of flight time. Times had changed though, the hiring pools were a lot skinnier and we’d hire guys with fresh licenses and few hours of experience in their log books. This was a problem however, as the Government would not allow a First Officer with less than 500 hours to partake in their revenue trips, it was a contractual requirement. Charter trips like this one were perfect for throwing the new-hire FO’s on, to help them build towards their 500 hours they needed to get included on the Medevac roster and be of more utility to the company.

  I was a fairly junior Captain on this particular trip, I’d only had the left seat upgrade for a couple months. I was paired up with Michael, formerly our dispatcher, who had a bare commercial pilots license and had taken the dispatch job as a way to work up to a flying position, which he had only gotten the nod for a couple weeks ago. He’s been with the company for over a year though and had done a stellar job in dispatch, so was rewarded with the upgrade to First Officer and a flying position. I was actually worried for him, that he did TOO good a job in dispatch and risked being un-promoteable with the difficulty they were going to have in replacing him with someone who worked as hard or as diligently as he did.

  I showed up at 5, with coffees for Michael and myself. I was tasked with stopping at the Tim Hortons on the way in and picking up the “ catering “ for the trip, a half dozen donuts and a half dozen muffins, for the passengers to munch on for the one hour flight to Ft Macmurray.  The charter trip was actually for a broker, who worked for the oil field company in arranging all of the flights, we happened to win the contract for this little piece of a much bigger pie. The donuts and muffins were their requirement.

  Michael had the plane out, tidied up and was manning the check in counter. We would get a manifest the night before as to how many guys were expected on the flight. As such, my flight planning had actually been done the night before, required fuel load calculated based on how much weight I had left to play with after the passenger count and baggage estimate. Therefore the plane had also been fueled the night before. Along with my flight planning having been done already, there really was little to do other than get updated weather, winds and check the NOTAMS, plug the numbers into the computer to spit out an Operational Flight Plan. Hang out at the check in counter while Michael welcomed our passengers, checked their name off the list, help stack their bags on the cart and await our departure time at 6. 

  Around 540, we’d call it closed. If anyone hadn’t showed up, it was technically too late. Although, if they came huffing into the terminal at any time prior to us actually taxiing away, we’d likely take them. Even then, more than once we’d been radioed to taxi back, shut one engine down and board a late arriving passenger.

  Michael was great, as a newly minted FO in his first flying job, he was eager, enthusiastic and on the ball. He hadn’t seen enough of commercial aviation to have as much perspective on things. From his point of view, this was the big leagues. I know when I was in his shoes, and frankly, it hadn’t been that long ago at that point, everything was amazing. The captains never failed to impress me with their knowledge and competence, making me look forward to that day myself. Looking back though, I really didn’t have all that much more experience than he did. On top of the normal enthusiasm and diligence though, he was, and is, just a switched on guy.

  The guys in the back were oilfield technical workers. A variety of trades, plumbers, electricians, pipefitters, engineers of varying skill level. To us though, they were all “ Rig Pigs “, maybe not to their face, but most definitely to anyone else. They came by the moniker honestly though. The oilfield trades attracted a certain type and the things that they had to endure as part of that job, tended to weed out a few demographics. A fairly rough crowd was all that was left that would put up with living in trailer camps for two weeks, away from family and friends, and working outside in some pretty miserable Northern Alberta conditions. Some of the Rig Pigs that lived down south in the bigger cities were a lot worse though. Our guys were actually pretty decent dudes.

  It was a point of pride to estimate the time it would take to load the last of the bags, get the guys in and settled, safety brief done, pre-start checklist and cockpit setup completed, engines started and brakes released at exactly 6:00 AM, our scheduled departure time. Working for a charter broker as well, they were, in my opinion, unnecessarily anal about the times. If we routinely released brakes at 603, there would be a phone call from the broker to the chief pilot, questioning our ability to satisfy their needs as a vendor. When we could routinely have winds in our favor, or working against us, that changed our arrival times by plus or minus ten minutes, those three minutes were irrelevant in my opinion, but what I do I know, I’m only the pilot.

  At 605 we lift off the runway. Positive rate, gear up. Four hundred feet it was flaps up, climb power, after takeoff checks. By 0615 we were cruising along at our cruising altitude of somewhere between 19 and 25 thousand feet, depending on where my flight planning juju had determined the most favourable winds and wether would be found for the one hour flight. It was roughly 200nm from our town over to Fort Macmurray.

  I find it interesting that if you took a map of Northern Alberta and drew our flight planned route onto it, almost exactly at the halfway point you would find yourself in a semi significant point. At that point, you were likely going to be in the most remote area of the province. In terms of distance between towns of any size and highways or roads, there is a spot that we were very near, that is farther from any of that than any other place in the province.

  So, naturally, that’s when the engine on the left side of the airplane decided to fail, catastrophically and with great fanfare.

 BANG. bang-bang-bang.

  You could feel the noise, the first bang very loud, and a series of smaller bangs followed. I looked over my left shoulder at the engine that sits just outside my window. There was a 5 foot long blue torch of flame coming out of the exhaust stack. It was just like the torch you would see off the end of a household propane torch, or the afterburner of Tom Cruise’s F14. Blue, precise and steady. No ragged orange bonfire or black smoke, just a nice neat blue blowtorch coming from the exhaust stack. For those unaware, the King Air 200 does not possess afterburners, and the torch was not supposed to be there. Neither were the little red/orange specks, or “ meteorites “ that randomly came out as well, disturbing the perfect blue torch and randomly shooting off over the back of the wing.

  I turned to Michael and said, “ Let’s shut that down, engine shutdown drill please “. I think that’s what I said, it’s been a few years. Michael, having just finished his initial type training and very first PPC several days before this flight, executed the calls and actions perfectly. Likely better than most would, the experience of having trained for this so fresh. Left side power lever, confirm? Confirmed. IDLE. Left side Prop lever, confirm? Confirmed. FEATHER. Left side condition lever confirm? Confirmed. CUTOFF.

  Next up I called for the checklist. I must have not called for it properly, which would be by the title it appears in the QRH, or Quick Reference Handbook. Michael queried me as to which checklist, suggesting Engine Fire in Flight. I chuckled and said no, the fire is in the exhaust, that’s where its supposed to be, lets do the engine failure in flight checklist. I must have said “ alright, checklist “ or something, for him to ask which one.  The flames had gone out with us taking away the fuel and the propeller had stopper spinning, with us moving the prop lever to the feathered position. Michael grabbed the QRH and read out the remaining engine clean-up items, turning the generator off, turning off the bleed air switch, and confirming we’d done all the necessary steps from the Engine Shutdown Drill, or memory item, portion of the checklist. I’d actually missed the step of shutting off the fuel firewall shut-off valve, so we caught it in the checklist.

  I can’t remember if I had left the autofeather system running at the time. The system is designed to detect  an engine failure and automatically, with no input from the pilot, move the offending engines propeller to the feathered position. Feathered simply means that the prop blades are turned/rotated so that they face edge-on to the wind, instead of paddle-on to the wind, if you will. This stops the wind from turning the propeller and showing an edge-on profile to the wind. This cuts down o the drag the propeller creates as it is no longer providing power. In some cases, Like right after takeoff, or at high weight, low airspeed conditions, the drag created by a windmilling propeller might be the difference between limping a steady climb or being unable to climb and being forced down…or worse. It’s one of the key differences between flying a propeller driven aircraft and a jet, and is one of the few things that might need to be done expeditiously…or else….

    Back to the autofeather, a lot of people and a lot of companies, mandated that the system be turned off at some point after takeoff. Usually when you’ve got enough altitude or airspeeed, like in cruise, that the feathering of the prop isn’t so time critical anymore.  You let the auto system help you on takeoff when seconds count, you do it manually yourself later on in flight, when you have lots of time. Knowing the system, I actually liked to just leave it on. There are no moving parts being worn by leaving it on and I felt like turning it off and on every flight, you were only increasing wear on the switch. At the time too, that company didn’t mandate it being turned off, so I rebelled in my ability to show off my knowledge of the system and my ability to make “ command decisions “ and usually opted to leave it on…and tell anyone my reasons when they invariably asked why I was leaving it on.. I had since fallen in line with turning it off, as it was mandated to be done so in a later update of the SOP’s. The reasoning for the change, I think, was that it gave you a “ clean board “. The annunciator panel would have two green lights that indicated the Autofeather system was armed. If you turned it off, the board would be clean. The thinking being that if you were accustomed to seeing lights there, you might grow accustomed to ignoring them or be subject to confirmation bias as you expected to see lights on. But they might be different lights, on a panel that was your first clue that something might be amiss.

  I was a new captain ok, leave me alone. Anyways, because our engine failure happened in cruise, in the only airplane on the fleet that had autopilot, I suspect that I don’t remember if it was left on or not as there was little noticeable effect when we “ feathered “ the prop and shut the engine down. Either I didn’t notice the adverse yaw from the failed engine due to the autopilot compensating for it, or wether it feathered automatically due to my leaving autofeather on, or wether I simply gave it the corresponding amount of rudder input to compensate and don’t remember doing it, I’m not sure. Some parts of flying are automatic, like turning off your headlights in a car, or closing door when you leave the house. You think back later and can’t remember doing it or not doing it, because it’s such a rote action.

  Checklist complete, it was time to tell ATC. I was Pilot Flying, so Michael was Pilot Not-Flying the guy on the Radios. Most companies use Pilot Flying and Pilot Monitoring now, PF and PM, but at that time and that company it was PF and PNF.  I looked at the GPS and it said 98 miles to go to get to Destination, 102 Miles to go to get back to where we started, and the closest airport with any decent services was Slave Lake, 79 Miles away. I figured we weren’t really in any dire need of getting it on the ground in a hurry, and landing anywhere other than back at home base, caused a lot of new problems for everyone else. One thing was certain, when we landed that plane, it wouldn’t be going flying again anytime soon. Anywhere other than home base and the maintenance guys would be loading replacement tools and engine in a truck(s) and doing an engine change on a cold winter ramp somewhere and we’d be stuck driving for hours to get home, our passengers facing similar logistical issues to get home or to work. I decided we could go back home, it was a choice I felt I could defend, other than simply wanting to avoid a bunch of work. 

  “ Mayday, mayday, mayday”,  He keyed up his mic and said, “ this is Northflight102, declaring an emegency, engine failure, wed like to return to HomeTown.”. The controller cleared us for a 180 turn back to whence we came, and got a few more details from Michael, souls on board, fuel remaining, whether we needed any additional assistance. “ Seven Souls, 1500 pounds of fuel, no additional assistance required. “. I had turned off the autopilot when we had ran the shutdown checklist, so I made a gentle turn back, to the right, to avoid turning into the dead engine, and get us established on a GPS direct track back home. 

  “ Northflight102, would you like a lower altitude? “ they queried next. Naw, I thought, we’re doing fine here, as I glanced down a the cabin pressurization instruments. Doh. We weren’t doing fine, the bleed air coming off the sole remaining engine was now responsible for providing all of the pressurization air to keep our cabin air breatheable up here at 22,000 feet, and it wasn’t keeping up. In theory, one engine should be able to provide all the pressurization you need. This plane however, had come off the factory line several decades ago and it now had all kinds of things ham stringing that ability. Little holes and leaky seals that allowed that air to escape, enough that our one plant couldn’t pump enough air into the cabin and keep it there, to keep it to a “ cabin altitude “ of less than ten thousand feet. I could see on the cabin rate of climb ( or rate of leak ) gauges that we were climbing around 800 feet a minute, it should have reads zero.” Oh, uh, yeah, tell him we’ll take a descent down to 14,000 feet and we will seee if we can hold the cabin there “. I think if he hadn’t said anything, I likely would not have noticed till the Airplane warned us with a “ Cabin Alt High “ warning once the cabin had climbed up over 10,000 feet. 

  Down we went in a slow descent towards 14,000 feet and it was time to talk to the passengers. Since I was flying the plane, I elected to delegate Michael to jump in the back and tell the guys what had happened, that everything was fine and that we’d be back home in Northtown in a little under 45 minutes. For my part I turned and nodded to the guys in the back, hoping to convey that this was no big deal and we were all safe, calm and casual up front. Michael came back in a minute or two and said he’d let them know, that they seemed fine. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, other than I had fulfilled my responsibility to keep them informed, I could check that box and move on to the next item in the list of things we needed to do.

  Up next was talking to the company to let them know what had happened and that we were coming back. I seem to remember talking to the dispatcher on the company frequency myself, although it technically would have been Andrew’s role on the radio as PNF. The chief pilot came on after I had relayed in broad terms to the dispatcher what had happened and what our plan was. He seemed overly calm, almost disinterested, and to his credit, I’m fairly certain that was intentional and he was just trying to help keep everyone calm. He let us know he’s meet us on landing with the tug, so that we could shut down and he’d pull us on to the ramp. The Kingair is not easy to steer on the ground with a bunch of power on one side and nothing on the other. The nose gear turns, but it was usually a combination of differential power and differential braking that you’d use to taxi around. Attempting a turn against a running engine with a dead one, wasn’t easy and you could risk an embarrassing end to a great single engine landing but running off the side of the runway or taxiway at low speed.

  The slog back home was slow on one engine, but eventually we got in range of the control tower at our home field and called them up on the radio.

  They said something about fire trucks and emergency equipment would be standing by, to which I casually told him that I didn’t think we’d need them. In hindsight, that was a dumb idea, to try and call them off but he told me it wasn’t my choice anyways, that once we declared the emergency we were getting the trucks wether we requested them or not. Cooler heads had prevailed.

  Michael and I went over the single engine approach checklist in advance and rehearsed what we would do if we had to go around, and that I would plan on a long landing, with no reverse thrust off our now-uneven reverse thrust capability with one engine. It was a perfectly clear day, with light winds and we planned on a long, straight in final to our landing runway, with little maneuvering required. It really didn’t get much better than this. Even the fact that the engine had failed at altitude, in cruise, was about the best case you could hope for.

  I could see the fire trucks, police cars and ambulances, all lined up just outside the airport gates as we approached. Lights flashing away. It must have caused a bit of a spectacle in town, seeing all that equipment racing to the airport at the same time. It’s a small town, I’m sure tongues were wagging.

  The approach itself was a non event really. Honestly, everything after the first 3 or 4 seconds of startle when it calved on us, were pretty calm and uneventful. You train this scenario over and over again, so the actions are well rehearsed and other than the airplane being a bit slower than normal, there wasnt much for drama. No flaming wing, no trailing smoke, no violent bucking or shaking.

  We landed and rolled long, using the brakes to slow us down and then coasting once stopping was assured. I rolled it to the end of the runway where the turnaround bay was, to give the maximum amount of room to turn around and taxi back down the runway to the taxiway exit that leads off to the apron. I had seen the company tug sitting on the taxiway while we landed, so intended on meeting him there and shutting down for the tow-in. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had actually intended on coming out onto the runway and towing us in from where landed and shut down. I figured I could make the first two turns on one engine. The turnaround at the end would be “ towards “ the dead engine, so the good one could help pull us around and the turnoff onto the taxiway was also a left hand turn, so I rightfully assumed that those two turns would be no problem and we could be towed from there, to avoid any right hand turns. In any event, he saw us turn around and start the taxi back towards him, so they stayed put and we turned off the runway and shut down on the taxiway, facing the tug, so he could hook up and pull us in.

  Once we got pulled up to the terminal, I turned around to talk to the guys before they got off. That’s when I realized that they were a lot more shook up than I realized. I had heard them clapping after we landed, but didn’t put too much thought into it, and honestly, I had other things on my mind. However, one of my biggest takeaways from the whole experience was that I had kind of failed to account for what it felt like to the passengers.. While we were plodding back, slowly, to base, they were composing texts to loved ones and were a lot more anxious about things than I realized. 

  In hindsight, I would have delegated the flying to Michael and gone back there to talk to them myself next time. Not that Michael did anything wrong, but I feel like having the “ captain “ come back and reassure them would have been appropriate, and maybe made them feel a bit better.

  While Michael got the passengers deplaned, I got the cockpit in order and started on the logbook. We were still hooked up to the tug and they motioned that they’d tow us back to the hangar and I might as well sit tight. 

  Pulling onto our ramp and into the waiting hangar, the maintenance guys came out to look at the plane. I remember one of them giving the prop a tug on the now-defunct left engine, and it was frozen tight. Whether mechanically, or due to sitting motionless in the -40 degree air for 45 minutes while we droned back home, I don’t know. Seeing the pictures of the internal damage to the engine later on, I could easily imagine that it was mechanically seized in place. I can only speculate wether or not we would have retained the ability to feather the prop for much longer if the damage had continued, with debris and metal in the oil from the engoine tearing itself apart from the inside out. A prop that wont feather is not a death sentence, neccasssarily, but it would have definitely escalated the seriousness of our situation. Most definitely it would have made our ability to “ go around “ had anything unexpected happen during the landing, very much in doubt.

  After the plane was handed off to the mechanics, Michael and I headed inside to start work on the paperwork. The operations manager was in the flight planning room already and she had most of the incident report filled out already. We both had to provide a brief narrative while it was still fresh in our heads and this was likely a good idea, even now I find myself questioning the sequence of events or details. Even after telling this story a million times. My current job has me flying with a new person all the time, so the rehashing and retelling of favourite stories gets them polished and embellishments or exaggerations get told so many times they slide into the truths place without even realizing it.

  At one point, while we were working on the incident report, I was asked, “ what engine indications did you see before you decided to shut the engine down “. I’m pretty sure I actually laughed when they asked me that. I had small explosions off my shoulder, a giant blow torch coming out of the engine that shouldn’t be there and little red hot pieces of metal blowing out into the slipstream. I admitted that I had no idea, that was the last thing on my mind as to what the Interstage Turbine Temperature was or the Power Turbine’s RPM.

  The whole experience was actually pretty calm, as really, it wasn’t ever really a dangerous or exhilarating event. There was a moment though, after the paperwork was all done, and I was sitting in the flight planning room with the ops manager, that stuck out to me. At one point she reached over and shut the door, “ how are you doing? “ she asked, “ fine, yeah, all good “ I replied, almost automatically. “ No. “ she said, giving me a serious look, “ really, how are you doing? “ . It caught me off guard and there was a brief moment that I felt a lump in my throat and was a little taken aback at my reaction. There was an element of stress that you bury away and make sure the passengers don’t see, that your copilot doesn’t see, and it kind of hit me all at once when she said that. 

  A few months later, I was informed that Pratt and Whitney had concluded their investigation into the engine. I was told that the had determined that since we initiated the engine shutdown procedure while the turbine was still spinning, that they were classifying it as a “ Precautionary Shutdown “ instead of an Engine Failure. A precautionary shutdown is when you decide to turn off an otherwise functional engine, in order to keep it from progressing into a failure, or because you see an engine indication, like oil temperature or pressure, that you suspect might lead to engine damage if you let it keep running. It was impressive with the level of internal damage that the engine had sustained, that we never really did feel any vibration or anything, other than the initial bangs. Its most definitely a testament to Pratt engineering that even after that level of damage, that it was still producing some amount of power and still spinning, at the moment we turned off the fuel and shut it town. That being said…When I hear them advertising these very impressive Mean Time Between Failure statistics in order to sell engines, I keep it in the back of my head that they classified an engine spitting out pieces of its internal structure in an unplanned fashion, a “ Precautionary Shutdown “. Mentally, I divide their number in half. Its still a very respectable number, but….

  Anyhow, I’ve only ever met a small handful of people that have experienced an engine failure in a Pratt and Whitney Turbine engine. Maybe I’m not hanging out with enough old guys, but the truth is, its a very small club.

  I have cell phone video, that one of the passengers actually filmed from the back of the view up the aisle and through thee cockpit window, showing our landing. It’s of potato-quality and honestly, there’s not much to see in the video, it looks like pretty much every landing shot from the back of a King Air. The only clue is he briefly pans past the left wing and you can see the stopped propeller. You can also see the lights of the fire trucks and ambulances briefly as we whizz by. I tried to post it, but it wont take.

  We ended up making the news, in a couple of online articles of the local CBC affiliate. With what you can imagine is the right mix of drama and media embellishment of the hero pilots and their stricken plane.

  Anyways, I’m going through my camera roll and will be working on a couple more posts. I’m finding that if I work on the blog regularly, in small chunks, it feels sustainable. I chuckle when I see on my sidebar the list of blogs that I used to follow when I kept this up regularly. Almost all of them show a last-post date of 8 to 10 years ago. So I don’t feel so bad. I don’t presume to have any regular readers, but I know I have a couple family members that used to follow and this might pop up in their notifications as to a New Post being available.  I’m considering alernating betweeen time-travelling stories of previous adventures now that I can freely post, with former employers and maybe doing a series of Trip Reports for my current employers, that have more to do with travelling the world than with anything related to the plane I am flying now, as its even more off-limits than previous companies were.

  If you’re still along for the ride, I welcome the feedback and hope you have been amused!