BC Air Lines

Jack Kirk: As far as I’m concerned, a lot of people have done a lot in aviation and nobody’s recognized anybody. Especially like Bob Langdon and all the people that helped him. Not to mention the BC Air Lines pilots that started here first.

Stan Kaardal: Bill Sylvester in Victoria was the founder of BC Air Lines and he was one of the first people to bring in the de Havilland Beaver. It was a real hit because up until that time most of the operators, including Pacific Western, were operating the Norseman.

Stan Budd: Bill Sylvester used to have a harem over on Saltspring Island and quite often his engine would quit when he took off from Ganges—somebody was sticking sugar in his gas tank because they didn’t appreciate what he was doing. That was when he was married too.

 Jackie Langdon: Their main office was in Vancouver, but they had bases at Ganges, Vancouver, Campbell River and Alert Bay. Bill Sylvester was his boss and Bob was stationed at Alert Bay. The fellow who was in Campbell River was on holiday taking some time off, so Bob flew down to relieve him.

 Bob Langdon (1975): I came to Campbell River and decided that was the kind of town I would like to live in. It is a nice town. It’s a good little town. And I had an opportunity to come up permanently, which I took; so basically I was pretty early in the game.

 Jackie Langdon: I came back in the summer of 49. A friend of mine phoned me to see if I would like to go for an airplane ride. I had flown before but not in a small plane. It rather intrigued me, so we flew up to camp. I sat in the back seat of the SeaBee; and, on the way back to Campbell River, I took the front seat. And that’s when I met Bob. We didn’t date for about another six months or so, but eventually I married him. I have been in Campbell River ever since.

Tom Langdon: The people said, “We want Bob back.” And he was more than happy to leave Alert Bay. The guy my dad replaced probably didn’t want to be here at all.

Jackie Langdon: When he was relieved by the fellow that had the job at Campbell River, he moved back to Alert Bay and his customers here in the area complained to Vancouver—they wanted Bob back. I understand that the letters had the desired effect. Bob came back to Campbell River.

Bob Langdon (1975): When I first came up . . . in 1948, I came up in a Republic SeaBee. And we used Seabees in 1948. I think in 1949 we added a two passenger Luscombe on floats to our fleet. And then we had a variety including Pipers and small Cessnas. In 1953 was the first Cessna 180 and it pretty well took over as being more practical than the Republic Seabee. And we went to the Cessna 180s, Cessna 170s and then later the Cessna 172. Then of course the de Havilland Beaver came along; which is a wonderful workhorse of the air. And the de Havilland Beaver more or less took over from the earlier Norseman that flew up and down the coast.

Jackie Langdon: When Bob was first flying here out of the front of the Willows Hotel with his SeaBee, he didn’t have a hanger. He didn’t have an engineer. He hired Ed Bellevance, a mechanic. He would come over to work on the aircraft on the beach. And if it was blowing and raining, he’d throw a big tarp up and he’d be working under the tarp with a big torch doing his repair work.

Frank Roberts: Bob was running the BC Air Line base here in Campbell River. I was based in the Port Alice/Port Hardy area and we had a lot of contact with Campbell River of course. So, yes, I knew him when he was with BC Air Lines. He was a good, smart businessman. He was a good guy, very well known.

Jackie Langdon: And he lived at the old Willows Hotel and the office was just off the foyer of the hotel. It was in part of the lobby.

Stan Kaardal: It was probably one of the most popular bases that BC Air Lines had. It was kind of neat for a junior person like myself to be able to remain here for a period of time.

Jackie Langdon: (Bob) was an excellent pilot and I think he made his passengers feel very comfortable. If there’s anyone that can come close to him it’s his son.

Frank Roberts: He actually started flying the SeaBee from the front of the Willows Hotel. He would taxi it across the road and into the water. It got pretty rough to operate down there sometimes.

Bob Langdon (1975): We had people look at this funny airplane, SeaBee, and we would go into a dock anywhere on the coast and all the mothers and fathers and kids and dogs would come down and the dogs would bark at the airplane and the kids would poke fingers at it.

Stan Budd: I worked in the industry for about 40 years, but with BC Air Lines, only about 4 years. Actually, BC Air Lines paid better than most people. In 1952, when I first started in Campbell River, the pay wasn’t that great—about $150 a month and $3 dollar per hour extra. But when I went to Vancouver, I got $250 a month and $2 an hour for flying. In 1952, I made about $6000, which was more than Joy’s dad made as a manager. But you worked long hours—dawn until dusk and sometimes past that.

Bob Langdon (1975): We used to, if there was a sports day, take the airplane over there and hop passengers—barnstorming they called it in the prairies. We’d do anything to get a flight; partly because we were enthused about the company surviving and partly because we were paid on a passenger and dollar basis.

Stan Budd: Bob was a snappy little guy. Some of the guys didn’t like working with him, but I didn’t mind him. I only worked directly with him for about five months, but I was up there all the time after that.

Bob Langdon (1975): I also used to follow the union steamship around. He used to go from Campbell River to Rock Bay and then to another little Post Office settlement ten miles away. And I used to follow him around hoping a logger would get off and have to go to a logging camp two or three miles away, and he’d need to charter the airplane. The skipper of the boat used to laugh at this funny airplane following him around, but he’s not working anymore.

Jackie Langdon: I dispatched from the Willows for the first two summers. I enjoyed it.

Bob Langdon (1975): In 1948 there were three or four water taxis operating out of Campbell River. These people, again in the changing of times, have gone out of business; either joined with the airline forces or done something different.

Stan Budd: When I was sent to Campbell River to work with Bob, I was only there a week and Bob decides to take off for 2 weeks. I didn’t know where any of the logging camps were. And, as I say, there was at least 50 different camps at the time that you had to remember where they were. I sure gave him a hard time when he got back!

Frank Roberts: I still spent a fair amount of time in Port Alice, so that they wouldn’t think that they were deserted. In those days, you must remember there were no roads up there and if you wanted to go from Port Hardy to Port Alice, you either took the water taxi from Coal Harbour or you flew. And then eventually, we got a Beaver or two up there. The Beaver’s were also on amphib gear.

Stan Budd: For people who lived out on Quadra or Cortes or Read Island and needed to come in to Campbell River, the cost of a flight was no more than $10. The rate of leasing a SeaBee was $44 per hour, for a Luscombe I think it was $22 per hour and a Super Cruiser was about $30 per hour. It wasn’t that much considering the prices now. I think to lease a Beaver nowadays would cost about $700 per hour. When I had my own, it was $77 per hour. That’s a big difference.

Jackie Langdon: There were a lot of one or two or three or four-man little gypo logging shows all up and down the coast. For getting parts in and for transportation back and forth to Campbell River, the aircraft was very convenient.

Bob Langdon (1975): Often (you will fly) in and the little kids will say, “Car, car car.” They’ve seen airplanes everyday of their lives and this doesn’t mean anything to them. They grow up in logging camps, sometimes float camps, and they know boats and they know airplanes. They don’t know cars the little wee ones. It’s rather amusing they are not used to cars, they are used to airplanes.

Tom Langdon: The machinery wasn’t very reliable. All these guys were learning it from scratch. There wasn’t another outfit next door to learn from; they were doing it all on their own. So, there were more accidents because of those learning curves. There wasn’t a raft of float plane pilots to draw from so they were basically training everybody from scratch. They were all new because if they had any experience, they wouldn’t be in jerk-water Campbell River flying a SeaBee. There were a lot of green pilots, old crappy machinery, new geography and terrible weather—there had to be some accidents.

Stan Kaardal: Bob had flown for BC Air Lines for quite some time with the SeaBees. They used to dock them in front of the Willows and they used to run em up on the beach there. They moved to the Spit because it was protected. They sold off all their SeaBees at that time which was the big airplane for them.

Jackie Langdon: They had moved to the Spit. He convinced the Chamber of Commerce in Campbell River and the fathers of the Council that it would be in everyone’s best interest. It was a village status at that time, and they fought it. Haig-Brown was in on making sure nothing would harm the Tyee spit area. But the aircraft were in behind, and at that time, Elk River had their big booms in the estuary. It was dead. The estuary was dead you might say because it was covered in these big log booms. They let the aircrafts in which was a good thing because Willows beach in a southeaster is no place to land an aircraft. They were tied up with weather frequently. But the Spit was protected and was an excellent place for float planes.

Frank Roberts: Eventually, he was able to make an arrangement with Elk River Timber Company and was given space down at the Spit. He flew from there and that’s where BC Air Lines basically developed.

Jackie Langdon: The business had grown. BC Air Lines had a big hanger, several aircraft, a big office building and several employees. I am not sure how many at that time. I think the SeaBees were out at that time. They were noted for blowing their pots. They had their problems. They were into Beavers and Cessnas by that time.

Stan Kaardal: I went from BC Packers into BC Air Lines and that was in 1957.

Stan Budd: We’ve got a good one about Langdon’s wedding. The whole crew of BC Air Line Pilots showed up at the wedding and, of course, it became a great party. The owner of the Willows Hotel ended up accusing me and another fella of peeing out the window onto people coming out of the beer parlor. Then he was going around with baseball bats, threatening people who made too much noise. The next morning, Bill Sylvester and myself were the only two who could get up and fly. Everybody else was out for the day…Gone!

Stan Kaardal: BC Air Lines would have gotten the first Beavers in probably the early 50’s. I know that they were operating them full tilt when I came in 1956. I moved from Campbell River and I went to the base in Port Hardy. They had leased an old airforce hangar there in those days  beautiful old building, and lots of facilities there. We operated amphib 180’s and amphib Beavers out of there. I flew out of these in 1958/59.

Gord Beadle: BC Air Lines was a big airline. They were mainly floats, and mainly on the coast, but they did have some wheel stuff out of Vancouver to some of the interior spots like Kamloops and Kelowna.

Jackie Langdon: But Bob was anxious to do things his way. He wanted to be his own boss. He often felt the base at Vancouver had all the perks, but the base at Campbell River made most of the money and was the busiest. He lacked pilots sometimes. He lacked aircraft sometimes. He lacked maintenance people sometimes. He’d come home just frustrated. Also, I think he just figured he could do better.

Len Crawford: It was strange you know? We started out with BC Air Lines and 25 years later it became Air BC. It sort of reversed itself.

Island Airlines

Jackie Langdon: Well, Island Air came into being when John Diefenbaker became Prime Minister of Canada in 1959. He changed the licensing rules for small operators to run their own businesses. Up until that time there had been restrictions on people starting up small charter airlines.

Frank Roberts: That is when Bob Langdon applied for and succeeded in getting a license from the Air Transport Board. In those days, any time you wanted a license, you had to apply to Ottawa and there were lots of procedures that needed to be done.

Jackie Langdon: Bob was in the right place at the right time. He was lucky in that respect. That happens in a lot of businesses.

Gordie Wilkinson: Bob was the manager, (of BC Air Lines) but he had applied for an airline license and didn’t tell BC Air Lines anything about it. They found out and fired him so he was free to go and do his thing.

Don Braithwaite: Langdon got together with some of the doctors in town with money and they consequently backed him on this charter idea. In those days you needed lots of support to get a license. He took BC Air Lines’ planes and went to all the different camps, gathered support and got a charter license out of Campbell River. So you can see how BC Air Lines really has no use for the guy.

Anne Wilkinson: I was the one who helped him with his application . . . and it had to be letter perfect. There could be no omissions or anything else . . . It was neat to do that because I had never been involved in anything like that. There was quite a bit of paperwork to do.

Bob Langdon (1975): And then I started on my own in 1959 with two aircraft and a staff of three people.

Jackie Landgon: He did do better when he finally got his own company. He had a strong support from all his customers up and down the coast because he was very personable and people liked him. He made them comfortable in the airplane and he did lots of services for them. Bob hired good people too. And as business got better with Island Air, he was able to hire more experienced pilots. We trained lots of young pilots for Pacific Western and Air Canada and CP Air.

Len Crawford: We bought our plane in June of 1959. That’s when Bob started his airline. He was down in front of the Willows Hotel at that time, and after that, they moved up to the river.

Gordie Wilkinson: The SeaBees weren’t around anymore. I had delivered all the SeaBees to Vancouver when I was with BC Air Lines. They were long gone. We had a 140 and a 180. The 180 we had bought from Bourne & Weir Tire and the 140 we went to Seattle to pick up. They hired another pilot with an Aeronca Sedan and this kid, his name was Eddie Paul, was working out of this store in Kyuquot. I guess the guy who owned the store and the airplane didn’t have much use for it, so he offered to lease it to Bob and Eddie came with it. That’s how we got the third airplane.

Frank Roberts: In 1962, I came to Campbell River and flew for Island Airlines.

Tom Langdon: He wanted to make flying a success and he developed so many great personal relationships with people out there and the people that they flew.

Stan Kaardal: Bob Langdon left BC Air Lines at that time and had just started in competition with B.C. Air Lines with a little (Cessna) 140.

Tom Langdon: One day dad was putting his pilots uniform on and heading out the door. I was about four or five and I asked him what he did for this company. He said, “I own it.” I remember being very surprised by that. “You own the whole company! You don’t just fly for them?” “No son, I own it.”

Jackie Langdon: Bob insisted that his employees had to wear shirts and ties. None of those greasy covered overalls. And as soon as he had his own company, he had a uniform designed for them—which was sort of an air force blue with little wings, and a shirt and tie and a hat to go with it. They looked smart and professional.

Gordie Wilkinson: If you were the afternoon shift, when you got finished at night, you washed and waxed the floor and cleaned the place up ready for business in the morning. It was 7 days a week at that time to try and get your hours in. I took 7 or 8 months to finish my hours. I had been making over $500 dollars a month in 1956, and then when I wanted my license, I took a wage cut to $150 month. But, it eventually paid off.

Tom Langdon: I think what he was trying to do was say, “We’re not just a bunch yahoos and flying cowboys. We’re actually a professional outfit.”

Gordie Wilkinson: I got mad at Langdon and left the company. He was hiring different people . . . and they wanted to do things that I wouldn’t—like steal passengers from other airlines and that sort of thing. I just said ‘Forget it!’ I figured I wasn’t going to get along with that old bastard, so I left. That was in 1959.

Dave Nilson: I heard about Campbell River and that’s when I came out here. That was July 1962. I worked at Island Airlines, Langdon’s operation. I was there for 14 years. The seventies were crazy . . . just crazy!

Len Crawford: Dave Nilson, who worked at Island Airlines, was a good Super Cub mechanic. I had all my maintenance done there.

Phil Bergman: You would get on the plane in Whaletown where I lived, and then make four or five stops before landing in Campbell River. What is usually about a 12 minute direct flight from Whale town to Campbell River would take about an hour to an hour and a half, but you would eventually get there.

Frank Roberts: Yeah, it was busy. Our airplanes averaged about 1000 hours a year each. We had probably about 25 airplanes going.

Gord Beadle: That’s actually when Island Airlines got into Tahsis. PWA didn’t want the Tahsis to Campbell River license, they wanted the license from Tahsis to Vancouver. So, this is when Island Airlines bought the Tahsis base.

Frank Roberts: In 1970, Pacific Western decided to concentrate more on the heavier airplanes on the mainline runs and wanted to get out of the small craft. That’s when Island Airlines bought out airbases at Tahsis and Zeballos because they were getting out of the business over there.

Harvey Hahn: Island Air put another floor on their office and built that big hangar that they have there, which is now Sealand Aviation. That was Island Air’s “empire” with Gulf Air next door.

Gord Beadle: We had a base in Campbell River and a base in Tahsis. Campbell River had at least 10 airplanes and probably six in Tahsis. Gulf Air was the equivalent in Campbell River and I am not sure how many they had up in the base in Port Hardy. And then there was Alert Bay Air Services in Alert Bay. They had a lot of airplanes.

Bob Langdon (1975): Campbell River is reputed to be the busiest seaplane base in the world, and I would think so. We don’t keep a record of our take offs and landings from Campbell River in total with the two operators here, but they are just busy as bees around here all the time.

Jackie Langdon: Bob worked long hours. I guess from May until the end of September he sometimes didn’t have a day off. Weeks would go by and he’d be flying from first light until dark. He was gone before the children got up and he didn’t get home until after they went to bed. That in itself is hard on a family. If we’d get the odd weekend off in the summer then we would take our boat and go camping.

Gord Beadle: We had quite a few different mail runs but our main run was Cortes Island, which we called the Cortes Sked. We did the mail run every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. As well, we used to do a mail runs to Blind Channel and into Thurlow.

Frank Roberts: We had mail runs three days per week up until the late 70’s. We went to places that now have ferry service, like Cortes Island and we also went to places like Refuge Cove, Surge Narrows, Stuart Island and Read Island. We were really the lifeblood for those communities, especially before the ferries came into existence.

Phil Bergman: The planes would bring supplies, mail and people back and forth. Island Airlines had a scheduled flight that basically serviced only Cortes Island and the surrounding areas like Teakerne Arm. It was so busy that this one little spot had its own dedicated flight.

Norene Reedel: I remember as a real young kid living on Cortes and always hearing these planes. My mom and my brother always talked about Island Airlines and Bob Langdon. My sister and I would yell, “Hi Bob,” every time a plane came over. Well, it turned out Bob was my first boss. When I went to work at Island Air, I told Bob this story and he laughed. I do believe that some things are meant to be.

Jackie Langdon: But Bob is pretty stubborn too. And I think to get along in that type of business, you had to have a thick skin about a lot of things, and you had to be the boss. And that’s all he knew.

Lee Frankham: Bob was a regular son-of-a-bitch at any time, but I enjoyed working with him.

Dave Nilson: I really liked Bob. He was a pretty rough and ready guy.

Jackie Langdon: Bob had the courage of his convictions. He felt that he could handle any competition because he felt he was better than anyone else. You have to have a certain amount of that feeling. Other wise I don’t think you could handle it. You have to have that determination and that self-confidence. Bob had a lot of that.

Norene Reedel: I had the time of my life. I can honestly say those were the best years.

Bob Langdon: (1975) Probably on staff we have twenty-two people. Our basic business is in aircraft scheduled and charter flights, although we are in the outside maintenance field.

Dave Nilson: I used to go to Wichita and buy brand new Cessnas and fly them up here to Island Airlines and put them on floats and put them to work.

Gord Beadle: Island Airlines was excellent at keeping their airplanes well maintained. They also had one big advantage in those days: they were a Cessna dealer. There were only two Cessna dealers in BC: West Coast Air in Vancouver and Island Airlines. We would get brand new 172s, 180s, and 185s off the line and, depending on the engine, fly them for about a year.

Bob Langdon (1975): We have a large hanger up here and we service aircraft in the community. We our Cessna dealers and have been for years now.

Tom Langdon: I started working there when I was about thirteen pumping floats and packing freight. Dad walked me into Harry Taylor’s office and he said, “Harry, you know Tom. Tom thinks he’d like to work here. “Good” said Harry, “we need some weekend help.” “Well, I’ll leave Tom with you and you can tell him how it’s done. Try him out. If he works out fine, give him a job, and if he doesn’t cut it, fire his ass.” And with that, Dad went to his office and left me standing there.

Mark Murphy: When Island and Gulf were going, there were probably 25 airplanes and there’d be days when people couldn’t book a flight between either airline. You couldn’t book a 20 minute trip. It was unbelievable.

Brian McConnan: We had about 25 airplanes and kept busy maintaining them. The day after I got here, they crashed a 180 (Cessna).We collected that. The place was really busy. That’s the way it went. It was all we could do to keep the airplanes going. I used to fly myself. If a plane broke down somewhere, they used to send me out with my toolbox, drop me off and say “fix it and bring it home if you can."

Tom Langdon: Of course I got my rear end kicked a few times, but not so much by Harry. I worked there on and off on weekends and holidays. I worked there full time when I finished high school.

Dave Nilson: Guys like Langdon, if you’re busy building an airplane and they need a pilot they’re like, “Here, you gotta go do this.” And then you still have the job you were doing to finish and they complain because it isn’t done!

Bob Langdon (1975): We run about one third scheduled passengers and two thirds charter. We move about 30,000 people a year on these flights. We have a government mail contract and we fly literally thousands of tons of freight every year.

Dave Nilson: The pilot would have flown three-quarters of an hour, but would have landed 18 times. Just crazy! It’s hard to believe how busy that place was. We had twenty airplanes and BC Air Lines had a whole mess of airplanes. There was more maintenance because of all the landings and take-offs.

Brian McConnan: We used to make a lot of money from logging. You bring all the guys out when they went on strike, and two days later they’ve run out of money—they’re drunk! Then you’re taking them all back in and the strike is over.

Jackie Langdon: It was a busy, busy place. But it’s a business with a high overhead and it is not difficult to go under. Lots and lots of little float plane businesses started up and haven’t been able to make it.

Lee Frankham: And then all of sudden, everybody got laid off, which was tough for them. The logging was down, it was tough. The only thing we had left for a little while was taking little old ladies shopping from Cortes Island.

Jackie Langdon: The business had changed by that time too. The roads were in. The small logging companies had dissolved or been incorporated into the larger companies. It wasn’t the same by that time. I think it came probably at the right time. I think he was ready for it.

Harvey Hahn: I stayed with Island Air after Bob sold it. The new owner had it for about a year and a half, then sold out to Air BC and Jim Pattison. The owner before Jim Pattison did really well with it. He actually got the airline to be more progressive. He was always open to new ideas. I liked him. He actually bought the Twin Otter that Island Air had.

Dave Nilson: When Island Airlines changed ownership, I left at that time. The pilots were talking about going on strike and Langdon’s trying to sell this to some other guy and then Jim Pattison came along and everybody was just angry at that point. So I thought, “I’m outta here!”

Jackie Langdon: Bob used to say, by the time he owed a million dollars, he’d have it made.

Ted Turner: I grabbed a newspaper and started looking through the weather forecasts, thinking that there had to be somewhere warmer in Canada than frigid Ontario. In BC, the weather outlook was for rain and this was in January, so I thought to myself that BC must be a pretty nice place. I noticed a job on the Island that sounded good, so I thought ‘Well, I’ll go see about this one first and try the other one later.’ I walked into Island Airlines in December and there was only three people left because they had laid everybody off. I met the dispatchers: Ev Crumb and Rita, and they introduced me to Harry Taylor who was the Chief Pilot. He was surprised I’d come in December because of all the layoffs, but I told him I had 15,000 hours flying time and also a maintenance license and he hired me right away. They put me in the hangar and gave me a pair of overalls. Eventually, Island Air sold out and I moved on to contract flying with Crown Zellerbach.

Bob Langdon: We get a great deal of all day charters. People, salesmen, government personnel fly out to the areas and do in one day that would perhaps take them two or three weeks to do.

Jackie Langdon: At one time Bob had a base in Tahsis, one at Gold River, and the flying school up at the Campbell River airport. I dare say he had close to fifty employees at one time.

Bob Langdon: Apart from logging camps of course, there are fishing camps, resorts, post offices, stores, and individual places we know. We also have little maps in our office of bays that are frequented by tourists. We know the names of all the people in the bay and where they live. When someone calls for an airplane they don’t say, “Go to Redonda Island”, they say, “Go to Redonda Bay and go to Mr. Jones’ house.”

Frank Roberts: Keith Stephenson, he bought Island Airlines. My contract was that I would stay on for a year under the new owner, give him a hand, and get him started, which I did. After a year, I left. Stephenson didn’t stay in the business too long—he eventually sold out. This was a time of lots of changes down at the Spit.

Gord Beadle: Island Air originally hired me as a mechanic’s helper. The deal in those days was you could hang around the flight line in the evenings or on your days off, and if there was an empty seat in the airplane you could jump in and go.

Gordie Wilkinson: The system we worked under, which had the approval of the Department of Transport, was that you worked the dock and collected your hours until you got enough time to write your commercial exam and then you got hired on. I was the last one to get through on this system before the MOT cancelled it. But Bob continued to do it at Island Airlines without telling anybody.

Gord Beadle: When I was getting started, the pilot designated to do the mail run would let you come along and fly the plane. After you got to know the country a little bit better, they checked you out again. Now if a mail run came up—strictly a mail run—the pilot who was designated to do it, could say, “Let Gord do it”. He could then sit back, drink coffee in the office and get paid while I did his mail run.

Norene Reedel: I was fortunate enough to work in the “hey day” when things were really busy. It was just amazing. When I started at Island Air in 74 things were really going good.

Bob Langdon (1975): We also have a flying training license and a rental license. We can rent airplanes, we can teach flying training. These licenses are issued by the Air Transport Board in Ottawa.

Gord Beadle: We used to keep a running tab of how many miles everybody had. One fellow was very conservative and ended up every month at the lower end of the mileage totem pole. Another fellow was just the opposite. We used to joke that he had inside knowledge of the schedule. He’d head out on a trip and purposely come back slow so he wouldn’t be at the top of the list. He knew the next trip wasn’t so good mileage wise and if he timed it right he would get the better trips up to River’s Inlet and places like that.

Gord Beadle: Some of the smaller airplanes in the old days just didn’t have room for radio equipment. A radio was as big as an apple box, so physically you just didn’t have the room.

Dr. John Ross: Bob Langdon was a pioneer and a good pilot. He was a guy that really loved to fly.

Mark Murphy: I’d say that the seventies were definitely the heyday. At that time, Island Air had the Cessna dealership, and it’d be nothing to put a couple of brand new Cessnas online every year, sometimes three or four and we’d use them for three or four years and then sell them.

Norene Reedel: I enjoyed working with Frank (Roberts). He is a very knowledgeable man and very good at public relations. He had a good way of talking to people. He used to say, “It’s CAVU out there: Clouds all the vay up.” That was his famous saying. I always think of that.

Gord Beadle: In those days there was no radio control or communications or anything like that. We had radio communications, but they were HF (high frequency) and HF was very spotty. There was no talking to the other airplanes. Basically, with HF radio, the further away you were the better it worked. HF radio is quite a long wave; so, in effect, (if you were too close) the wave would just go right over top.

Bob Langdon (1975): Class 4 is charter between points in Canada. The C is one type of aircraft and the B is another and this goes up to the size of the DC3. We can fly from Campbell River to any point in Canada as a charter flight. We also have an I4, which is international. You can charter from here down to the United States. We use this license on great many occasions. We have a Class 3 that is a scheduled flight. We are only allowed to go to specific points. And we take you on a seat rate, rather than make the customer charter the whole aircraft.

Harvey Hahn: Bob was good you know. He was overly conservative. He didn’t like new adventures. He liked to stay with what he had. He didn’t like to branch out. We had to almost put him down on the floor and beat him up to buy that Tahsis base from BC Air Lines. It was a good money maker; but you know, we really had to talk him into doing it. He didn’t like to move too fast on things.

Jack Kirk: I thought Bob was a wonderful person. I thought he was a great guy. He was a fair man and he gave me all the breaks in the world.

Bob Langdon (1975): A great deal of our time and effort on the job and our personnel time is associated with licensing. We are always striving of course to improve ourselves and get better licenses. Our license at Island Airlines reads Class 4: B and C.

Gord Beadle: The 172 engine gets overhauled after 1500 hours. We flew them for about1400 hours and then sold them to private buyers. One hundred hours would last most private guys for several years and allowed them to buy the airplane at substantial savings. I think a 180 was 1200 hours and the 185 was a 1000 hours. We’d put on roughly 1200 hours a year; which averages to about 100 hours per month per aircraft. On the coast not many 172s were bought locally. It was mainly loggers that bought their own aircraft and it was usually the 180 or 185 Cessna. They were faster and more powerful.

Gordie Wilkinson: I worked at BC Air Lines from 1956 to the fall of 1957. Then I got laid off and when Langdon started up in 1959, I was the first one hired with him.

Mark Murphy: With Island, it was unbelievably busy. Nobody realized what was really going on.

Norene Reedel: At Island Air we had this old HF, and it crackled and you could hear the Bugaboo Lodge up in the Cariboo, which is really funny. You could hear them talking . . . oh my God! It was quite something. You really had to listen; but, after a short while your ears become so tuned into it and even now—I guess actually 23 years—your ears are just so tuned in.

Brian McConnan: They would bring a Grumman Goose into Tahsis, then we would take the passengers from Tahsis to the little mickey-mouse places. It was a little different. One of us (the engineers) had to spend time in Tahsis because according to their license, the airplanes had to be signed out every day. We traveled back and forth and kept them going.

Steve Todd: The parent company became Haida Airlines and Island Airlines was the money-making operation. Tahsis was Island Airlines, Gold River was Island Airlines, Powell River was Island Airlines.

Len Crawford: Bob used to let me tie my plane at Island Air for free. We used his business for chartering and he worked on our plane. One day Bob had no airplanes at dock. He phoned me and said, “Can I use your airplane?” The only airplane at the dock was ours. We had a good relationship with Bob.

Anne Wilkinson: Langdon and Gordie never really became the friends they had been. It was a difference in philosophy more than anything. And the working relationship wouldn’t have succeeded had they stayed together, that’s for sure.

Rolly Bartlett: I started working on the docks at Island Air in August of ’74. Don Matheson was the chief pilot at that time and he took me out and got me my float endorsement. Then you would ride around with the fellows—fly back on an empty leg with one of the other pilots—and that’s how you built up your time until they felt you were ready to go out on your own as a pilot. It doesn’t happen anymore because of the way the insurance is. It was kind of a neat thing at the time—a good way to learn and know the area, but it doesn’t exist on the coast here anymore.

Frank Roberts: There’s a fair turnover of pilots. Some stayed with you forever and forever, and then you had a lot of these younger fellas coming just for experience and then were going on to the big airlines. As a matter of fact, there was a time when we had to limit our hiring to older fellows. We found that we were hiring these young fellows with a junior license—they’d work as a dock boy for a while, then on to junior pilot and eventually they became great pilots and just about the time they had reached the point where you could really rely on them and trust them, off they’d go to Canadian Pacific or PWA.

Steve Todd: We walked into it basically at the heyday—the absolute peak of the airline industry out here— when it was the busiest seaplane base in the world. I consider myself fortunate to have worked in it at that time.

Anne Wilkinson: Bob was tremendous—taking people who were totally unknown on. Gord wouldn’t have been flying if it wasn’t for Bob. We couldn’t afford the training.

Steve Todd: I got involved in 1978 when my uncle was the Base Manager for Haida Airlines out of Vancouver Harbour. It was near the end of summer and my uncle said to me, “Well, I can lay you off, or there’s a job opening up in Campbell River for a dock hand.” I hadn’t been to Campbell River. I had no idea of where it was except on a map. He said, “There’s no pressure to make the decision but the flight leaves in the morning.” Vancouver wasn’t offering me anything at that time so I said, “Sure.” That morning I was on a flight to Campbell River.

Val Todd: Right next to Island Airlines there was this little restaurant called the Beachcomber. Two ladies ran it. That was a place to go.

Steve Todd: I’ve got a real good appreciation of the qualifications of the people flying on the coast here. The minimum standards at Island Air at the time were, I think, 2000 hours minimum. As the industry declined there was a glut of pilots around.

Val Todd: I was there for two years in Gold River and had the opportunity to come to Campbell River and I did in 1979. So I’ve been on the spit since 1979.

Anne Wilkinson: Everybody appreciated Bob because that’s how almost all of the pilots on the coast got started.

Val Todd: At that time at Island Airlines we were running a scheduled flight between Vancouver Harbour and Campbell River three times a day. I think it was $35 each way. This is around 79. On the Single Otter we were carrying about 10 people. The poor Otter would be into the hanger every week for inspection because it was just running constantly. That’s when they decided they would get the Twin Otter. Our run was very, very popular.

Gord Beadle: In my last few years in Campbell River I was mainly flying the Twin Otter over to Vancouver, and then over to Tahsis and Zeballos. That was one nice thing about going to Vancouver: you got away from the base pay/mileage. You were strictly salary. There wasn’t the pressure to fly because it wasn’t going to affect your paycheque.

Harvey Hahn: Gulf Air bought the first Twin Otter from Imperial Oil. Island Air kind of went, “Well they got one, so we’ll get one.” Those fellows that bought it from Bob had ambitions, but when Air BC came along and knocked on the door with their check book, they said, “It’s a good deal for us.” So they sold it.

Val Todd: Going back into that Island Air building after twenty years or something it was kind of weird. It was kind of eerie almost. You realize it wasn’t an airline anymore.

Harvey Hahn: I think it was a good deal for Bob because he was pretty flush. He was pretty happy. But he was not a well man. He was really sick after that. Again we didn’t know at the time he had cancer.

Trans Mountain/Gulf Air

Bob Early: I was at Trans Mountain before Bill Macadam. I started my training when Forrest Cochrane started the company—when it was the flying school.

Harvey Hahn: Bill Macadam was pretty colourful. His family is like titled England. They sent him out to the colonies to get an education. His dad was Lord Iverson Macadam. You’ve heard of Macadamized roads? I think his grandfather invented asphalt, and he patented it in Europe. Not new money. He had all this old money. Lord Macadam was the Queen’s capital advisor. He could advise the Queen on her capital investments. He was a nice man. I met him a couple of times. Nice family. Bill decided he wanted to get into the airline business.

Don Braithwaite: Bill, I guess, was one of the black sheep. He got kicked out here to BC more or less. He had a hundred thousand dollars and his sister had a hundred thousand dollars, and Bill blew his money and her money on the airline and was going broke.

Gord Wilkinson : Trans Mountain had the flying school at the airport and when Macadam got into it, he had some money so he bought these two lake aircraft and two Cessna 172’s and flew them out at the Spit. The building is gone, but the ramp and everything is where Vancouver Island Air is now.

Don Braithwaite: Basically, I started getting out of the log hauling business. This is about 1967. Anyway, I had no place to tie my airplane. BC Air Lines, they didn’t have a place to let me on the dock, and Island Airlines was all plugged up, so Trans Mountain, I hit them up, and wound up tying my plane at their dock.

Harvey Hahn: Bill bought out a fellow at the airport that had a flying school and got into the airline business. I left Island Air and Bill Macadam asked me to come and work for him at Trans Mountain. We didn’t have a very good situation there. We made many friends, but we didn’t make much money. Bill was good to work with.

Don Braithwaite: I got in at Trans Mountain one day and Bill Macadam came to me and said he was in financial difficulties and could I help him out? I said, “Well, we’ll have a look see.” This was about September or October. I said, “When I get through logging this fall I’ll have time to look at things and see what we can do.”

Gordie Wilkinson: I left BC Air Lines because Eddie Paul, who was the chief superintendent at Island Airlines, decided to go to Trans Mountain. We were good friends, so I decided to go too. Harvey Hahn was there as well. A guy by the name of Walt Champness was the engineer.

Don Braithwaite: I was working away in the woods up at Knight and all of a sudden Harvey Hahn was there. He was Macadams’ right hand man at the time and he said, “Bill sent me up to get you. You have to come down right away.” So I jumped in his plane with him and rode down.

Norene Reedel: I love my old boss Don Braithwaite to pieces. He always wore those heavy Mack Jackets with those green work pants and the shoes that came up the back. He was our boss and the airline owner, but at heart he was a logger.

Don Braithwaite: Macadam had two 172s on floats and two pilots. I said to Bill, “What’s the damages?” He said, “I need this amount of money, and I need to pay these pilot’s wages and this and that etc.” I wrote him out a cheque and I was now in the airlines business.

Jack Chicalo: We used Trans Mountain mostly. If you couldn’t get there by boat, which mostly you could, and you were in kind of a hurry, or the client would pay for a float plane, then we’d go with the plane. Put all your stuff on the plane. If they could use the 185, they would. Or the Beaver.

Don Braithwaite: That was the fall of 67. I took over the airline right away. There was no sense in horsing around. If you want to get in there, you might as well get in there. I told Macadam right there, “I want fifty-one percent of the shares.” So, that was done. Macadam had another partner in the airline that used to work for BC Hydro. He had some shares. I got a hold of him and bought his shares. I don’t think it was two or three months later when he was dead, so that was a really good move. That gave me quite bit more control.

Harvey Hahn: We had those old VHF radios, they were side band radios. Sometimes they were just great. On certain days you could talk to Campbell River on them and be way up by the North end. And it would be just like a telephone. Other days it was just like bacon frying and you couldn’t hear anything. One time I was talking to some guy and he came in crystal clear. I said “Where are you?” Turns out he was just a couple of miles out of Brisbane Australia

Don Braithwaite: Macadam of course had his flying school up there (CR airport) too. I told Macadam, just keep things going the way they are. He got in my hair again so I said, “Why don’t you go out and the run the planes.” Off he goes. The next thing is he comes in on his off day and says, “I’ve been up to Gold River and they’re really interested in getting a flying school up there. They’ve got a piece of property picked out to build a strip. And I told him you would be able to run one of your Cats over this winter.” I told him that was it. He packed his bags and left for Ottawa.

Bob Early: I was with Trans Mountain through the change to Gulf Air and Don Braithwaite. When Don took over, it was boom times. He had pretty good timing that way. We were crazy busy. There were a lot of young guys like myself and we were all gung-ho. I worked 6 or 7 days a week. I didn’t have to, but I did.

Don Braithwaite: Macadam still had interests in Trans Mountain. The next thing, I hear from his brother saying that they wanna get settled up with this thing. They come up with a price of three hundred thousand dollars.

Don Braithwaite: We started in on negotiating. I was offering 50 thousand and they dropped down to 60 thousand and she said, “Let’s split the difference and get rid of it.” So that’s what we did. In the meantime, when I took it over, things would come out of the woodwork. I guess he bought a sailboat and donated it to some kids over on Quadra Island. Basically hidden costs like that, so we wound up with about sixty thousand dollars that I had to pay out to clean off the old debts. Then the hanger didn’t have any doors on it. I had to spend a lot of money on fixing that up because when you are running an airline things have to be done right.

Don Braithwaite: I formerly took over Trans Mountain Airlines on the first of January 1968.

 Irvin Olsen: Don did a great job for the logging. He had scheds going up and down the coast, started airstrips. Coming from a logger’s perspective, he knew what the loggers needed and he produced it.

Don Braithwaite: We went to Ottawa to see what we could do about getting a bigger license. This was summer of 1968. Tony Sarich( Trans Mountain lawyer) knew the (MOT) lawyer that was there. When we were ready to go he said, “Don’t tell anybody that I told you, but BC Air Lines is going to sell off their bases.” I went and saw them at BC Air Lines (in Vancouver) and the guy was quite perturbed that we found out about this. So he said, “I’ll be over (to Campbell River) in a couple of weeks, I’ll phone ya.” Over he came and I had a meeting with him. MOT told him he had to offer it to us and to Island Airlines. I gave him a cheque for ten thousand dollars for good faith. If he gave it to Island Airlines I wanted my money back.

Harvey Hahn: There were actually three airlines for a while: BC Air Lines, Island Airlines and then Trans Mountain. BC Air Lines was losing their appetite for competition. They sold the base to Don Braithwaite and he moved down to that building. He built that big metal hangar that’s there, and another floor on that office.

Don Braithwaite: He told me he had to meet with Langdon and he would meet me after lunch. I got a phone call about one-thirty and he said, “The deal is all yours.” I thanked him very much and he said, “We’ll get the paper work drawn up for you.” About three o’clock Mr. Langdon phoned and says, “I’ve got a deal for you Don. Come on over to the office and we’ll figure this one out.” He said scheduled airlines are really terrible because there’s so much god damn paper work—you have to keep track of this and track of that. With charter you just write a ticket and it’s done. I said, “I’m sorry Bob. It’s all or nothing with me.”

Harvey Hahn: When Gulf bought BC Air Lines, they of course bought BC Air Lines licences as well. They had all the scheduled licenses from Toba Inlet and north and Island Air had Bute Inlet and South of Campbell River.

Don Braithwaite: We were the first company to buy a base off BC Air Lines, which they really didn’t want to sell because Campbell River was a money-maker. We took that over on the first of August 1968.

Gordie Wilkinson: BC Air Lines sold out to Trans Mountain because they had got a new license in Vancouver to operate a twin service from Vancouver through to Calgary. Trans Mountain bought the old BC Air Lines base. Macadam was long gone. He went back East and wound up working for the CBC. Whatever happened to him after that, I don’t know. We had a wake at Forbes Landing when the lodge was still there, and that was the end of BC Air Lines in Campbell River.

Don Braithwaite: This was 1968, the ticket girl, the dispatcher and myself walked across from the old Trans Mountain office to the BC Air Lines office. We didn’t know what we were going to run into over there because these people might be pretty hostile that we are buying out the base. I went over there and they were really receptive. So we moved our 172s off our dock and moved down to BC Air Lines. That way we had everything in the one building. It took off from there.

Harvey Hahn: After Trans Mountain, I went back to work for Island Air. I didn’t really feel like I wanted to go to work for Don, as we didn’t see eye to eye. We’re kind of good friends now. Back then we just didn’t see eye to eye.

Don Braithwaite: It was quite a struggle competing with Island Airlines and the whole deal. It went along and I had my problems. When I was in the woods the logging would run good and the airline would go to heck. So I’d run back out here and the airlines would run good and the logging would go to heck. Finally, after a process, I got rid of the logging end of it and just stayed with the airlines. And basically, we got bigger and bigger all the time.

Norene Reedel: When I started at Gulf Air I told him my name and he said, “Hmmm, Reedel. I used to work for your uncle Joe. Called him August.” From that day on, we were buds. I just love him and his wife. When I run into them, they are just happy to see you.

Gord Wilkinson: Don Braithwaite was trying to run his logging business and airline simultaneously. Eventually, he gave up on the logging and just stuck with the airline.

Don Braithwaite: The airline was a real good money-making situation in the days we were in. You had a license and no-one could really infringe on that license; but, consequently, people did. There were no two ways about that. Minstrel Air started up and of course they were up on the top-end. The top end was bad for our business. The guy at Minstrel Air, Ed Carder, saw the situation, he was American, so he bootlegged on us.

Norene Reedel: You are getting calls from up and down the coast: from the lady who needs her prescription from the pharmacy, to someone needing an overnight babysitter for their dog. These are just things you did. You didn’t think about it. You just said, “No problem we’ll do that for you.” You were their lifeline at the end of the phone.

Don Braithwaite: We had people that would charge and get into us for the neighbourhood of 15 to 20 thousand bucks. And then they couldn’t pay because business would slow down and the whole issue. Then they would then get busy again and go to Island Airlines and start charging there. Anyway, I would talk to Jim at Island Air, the financial guy for Bob, and I’d say, “This is bullshit! They charge up with me then they come over here and fly with you? If they go broke both of us lost out.” We made a deal then that if someone was cut-off from flying, we would phone and let the other know.

Gord Wilkinson: At one time, we had twenty airplanes and so did Island Airlines. There were a lot of little gypos in those days. Those days are long gone. Water taxis and crew boats are doing a lot of stuff now.

Don Braithwaite: We applied for a license for the Campbell River-Powell River-Qualicum route. I could pick up the traffic at Powell River, which is a big pulp mill town, and take it all right through to Vancouver. Frank Roberts was the manager for Island Airlines at the time. He was a good guy but Langdon and I didn’t see eye to eye. Frank Roberts didn’t like that at all so he applied for the Campbell River-Powell River-Victoria route and he got that. So basically, I was having trouble with the south run and the whole issue, so finally I sold it off to a fellow in Qualicum and then they sold it to another fellow.

Gordie Wilkinson: Don and I were still friends even after he let me go. When I started bringing him business, I was the golden-haired boy.

Norene Reedel: Back in the day at Gulf Air we had to do the Crown Zellerbach crew move. First thing in the morning we had to shuffle eighty to one hundred guys. After that, you had to start your scheduled flights. It was nuts. There were people going all over the place.

Gord Wilkinson: One day I was at the (BC Forest Products) office and I said, “Isn’t it time we did some work with Gulf Air” And one of the bosses said, “Well, we don’t know if the pilots are any good or not.” I said, “Well, if I’m good enough, then so are they.” We eventually we gave them all the work and Langdon got none of it. And that didn’t please Langdon too much.

Don Braithwaite: The name change to Gulf Air came when Macadam wasn’t getting out. I went back to (our Vancouver lawyer) and she said we should change the name and move the licenses and the assets out. So Trans Mountain was nothing but a bare company. I thought Macadam would have kept an eye on that, but they basically wanted out anyway.

Bob Early: It was kind of funny when Gordie left. I guess I was his senior even though he was much older than I was. I was chief pilot when I was in my very early twenties, 22 maybe. There were 10 or 12 airplanes there. I was way too young for it, but I don’t know, I just kind of waltzed right into it and I was full of ‘piss and vinegar’ and just went with it.

Don Braithwaite: Things were going along pretty good but I was having a bit of a tough time trying to gobble all the payments on that big Twin Otter and some of the other planes because I had expanded quite rapidly. We did business with the Royal Bank and like all banks, you get a good manager and things are fine and dandy. Well, we got another manger. My accountant, Glen, suggested moving to the Toronto Dominion Bank. They were just new in town. We signed up with them.

Don Braithwaite: The manager said “We’ve got some sad news for ya. We’re calling our loan. I said, “WHAT?!” He said their chief in Vancouver decided I was a poor risk. Well, if that doesn’t set you on your back side. Anyway, that was on Tuesday. Wednesday, I was still kind of stung about it. He came back Thursday morning and said they didn’t have all the addresses of our customers. They wanted the cheques coming to us to be sent directly to the TD Bank. I wouldn’t tell you what I called him, but being a logger you can fairly surmise. He went down those stairs with his tail between his legs in a big hurry.

Don Braithwaite: So I got off my butt and phoned everybody. I phoned BCFP and said, “Hold your cheques in Vancouver.” I phoned Crown Zellerbach and said, “Hold your cheques please.” Doreen (Bowers) and I Flew down to Vancouver and hired taxis. She went one way with the addresses and I went the other way. We got most of it gathered up and stayed overnight. The next morning we went downtown to Crown Zellerbach and by 11 o’clock we were finished gathering up the money we needed.

Don Braithwaite: We had a loan on these receivables for $250,000 bucks and we owed $215,000. We phoned up and asked them to send a plane down to the Bay Shore. We had a bite to eat and a drink on it and flew back up and tallied it up. Then we went up to the bank before it closed up and I said, “Here you are you little son-of-a-bitch. Here’s your goddamn money. You’d better start counting it.”

Stan Kaardal: I became manager for Gulf Air in 1977.

Don Braithwaite: In the end, Langdon had sold out during the strike and the whole issue. Basically, we were the leading contender by the time it was finished.

Don Thompson: Don Braithwaite purchased the floatplane end of the (ABAS) business and changed the name to Gulf Air after he bought it.

Don Braithwaite: In 1978 I bought out ABAS. I took over from Don Thompson at Port Hardy and that gave us scheduled service.

Patty Kaardal: I started at Gulf in 1979 and worked there for just over a year until Stan (Kaardal) and I got married in 1980. I came in for an interview and Don (Braithwaite) hired me. I thought it was a very interesting job—lots of excitement, lots of activity going on.

Norene Reedel: After a while I would go for rides. I’d pick my days for certain trips so I could see parts of the coast. I thought when you work for an airline you should know what the trip is like. If you’re sending these guys out in this crap you should know what the hell you are talking about. Plus, you would get a cute pilot saying, “Hey, you girls want to go for ride?”

Patty Kaardal: You could hire a Beaver for approximately $45 an hour, and when I left the industry in 1996, it would cost you about $600 an hour. The thing is, not too much of that increase was wage related or inflation. Wages stagnated for a long time.

Richard Von Fintel: The real turning point came when Gulf Air booked too many pilots off one long weekend. At this point I wasn’t allowed to fly passengers; I wasn’t insured for that, but they were unexpectedly busy. So, they juggled things around and they created a couple of freight trips for me to do and I did that without crashing the 172. Then I remember Rheta the dispatcher calling me up to the top of the ramp saying she had a trip for me. This was going to be my third or fourth trip of the day. I ran up the ramp all excited and she said, “I want you to take this passenger to such and such a place.” I was crestfallen. I said, “Rheta, I’m not allowed to take passengers.” And she said, “Oh, let me check with Gil Gardner”—who was the Operations Manager at the time. He was one of those old bush pilot types and he said, “Well, you’ve just been flying all this freight haven’t you? You haven’t killed any of the freight have you?” And I said, “No.” And he says, “Well, you’re not going to kill the passengers are ya?” And I said, “No”. “Well, go out and do it.”

Patty Kaardal: There were also scheduled flights to Vancouver, so there was people coming and going both ways on that. The prices weren’t all that bad compared to now. In 1979, it was probably about $40 one way, $70 return. Now it’s about $200.

Norene Reedel: You have to be able to work well under pressure. Not many people can do it. You have to be a certain kind of person to do it. You can’t get rattled. Usually the people that made the most noise were the people that were the most afraid to fly. That’s what I found. The big tough guys that started knockin’ back beer were doing that because they were afraid to fly. Of course if they knocked back too many we refused to fly them anyway.

Don Braithwaite: I had my sights on Trans Pacific out of Rupert. In the meantime I was already flying to Ocean Falls, Bella Bella, Bella Coola and up through that country. It would have taken me straight right down from the top end. Then I would have started to look at land for runways because we would have come out of Rupert right to Vancouver and Port Hardy. It was that close. It’s a deal that could have developed.

Don Braithwaite: I had a hanger full of parts and spare, overhauled engines for my Otter and Beaver all mounted and ready to go. I had built a new hanger and the whole issue. It was really a good set up. I had hot section for the PT6 engines which were on the Twin Otter and a lot of spare parts for it. I was in good shape. So that’s when I decided to get out. Pattison bought out Island Airlines too.

Don Braithwaite: I just got so fed up with it between the bank, union and the MOT.

Don Braithwaite: That was basically the end of the airlines. Pattison came in around the end of September in 1979. That had to go to the Air Transport Board in Ottawa for approval and it was official on March 1 st 1980. I put twelve years in. By that time I was out of it completely.

Don Braithwaite: We had a lot of fun at it and the whole deal. There’s no two ways about that. I guess I was basically one of the biggest regional air/postal carriers around.

Lee Frankham: There was such a terrific amount of logging. Everywhere you went it was five guys and his brother out here logging. And they had to use aircraft because there was no other way of getting in.

Logging Boom

Phil Bergman: I think floatplanes changed the logging industry over time. Loggers used to travel from Vancouver to the camps on the old Union steamships. When the floatplanes came in, loggers could live in this area and fly into and out of camp really easily. They no longer had that long journey back to Vancouver. It was also easier to get injured loggers to the hospitals. It played a big part with the camps. The airlines could adapt easily to their schedule.

Bob Langdon (1975): The aircraft have changed the type of living on the coast. The logger no longer spends three months in isolation and then tears off to Vancouver for a celebration. He now lives quite a normal life—he’s home every ten days and a lot of them have moved their homes closer to the settlements from which they fly. It’s changed the people.

Walter Davidson: I started logging in 1965.  That was a good period of time for coast logging. There were many small operators making a good living on the coast. A lot of these people were very innovative and seasoned loggers, and operated their own aircraft. 

Don Thompson: We didn’t have a set schedule. If somebody wanted to go somewhere, we would take them. Loggers who’d been too drunk to get back home over the weekend; people that were hurt; the Indian Health Nurse making her rounds—people like that. Run of the mill business. A lot of money was generated by the logging and fishing business as well.

Mark Murphy: There were hundreds of camps and there wasn’t the roads and the ferries like there is now. Even the Cortes ferry, it didn’t start until the very late 60’s, early 70’s.

Dr. John Ross: The gypos could log a lot of sites that large outfits weren’t willing to do. For instance, a mountain where there was some pretty good wood, but it involved building a road and so forth. A company that was paying big wages and workers compensation just wouldn’t go for it. But the gypo outfits, they would build roads or whatever it took to get up there. There are still gypo loggers around but not nearly as many as there used to be. That really cut into the float plane business.

Len Crawford: The gypo logger can be a good logger. The thing is he doesn’t have medical coverage, he doesn’t have a pension plan and that kind of thing for his men. Quite often, because we didn’t have all those things, we had to pay more to our men. We paid more than union rates. We had good guys. Just because we were non-union didn’t mean we were chiselling on our workers. You couldn’t get good guys if you did. Believe it or not, my boss in the bush was an AA guy, so we didn’t have to worry too much about boozing.

Bob Langdon (1975): Its (airline industry) done away with the small stores and post offices where these people used to go back and forth in little boats to get their mail. Now we bring the mail into the logging camps.

Harvey Hahn: There were camps all over the place. Actually, in the early 70’s, we did a bit of a survey there, and there was over 500 logging camps between Powell River, and the north end of Vancouver Island. That’s where our market was. That’s why we were so busy down there; two or three airlines working and flying into all these camps.

Len Crawford: We moved our camp 30 times around the coast. We have pictures of the camp on floats, moving down the channel with the airplane tied behind it. We always had a ramp for the plane in camp.

Craig Houston: The decision to put a base here in Campbell River was due to the logging industry. The heli-logging started up in the late 70’s, and there were a lot of machines out of here.

Bob Langdon (1975): The trend of logging has changed drastically on the coast with the advent of the (seaplane). Where the logger, who comprises a great deal of our business, would come up on the boat from Vancouver, it would probably be a day to a day and a half (trip) Then (he would) go into a camp and perhaps work for four to six months. Now, if we can call him a gentleman logger, now he lives in Campbell River or Vancouver Island—a lot of them do, and they fly home.

Gord Beadle: [Island Air] had Teakerne Arm camp. It was a big log sorting ground for MacMillan Bloedel. These guys were in camp for five days, Monday to Friday, and we would take them all in on Monday morning and take them out on Friday afternoon. It was fifty guys. That’s a lot of shuttling.

Len Crawford: The problem with the Coast is transferring goods from place to place—it’s so expensive. It’s a 4 or 5 hour run with an old gas boat. With a plane, you can do the same job in 20 minutes.

Rolly Bartlett: In those days, there were so many little operators. Guys would go to one place, get fed up, and quit the next day. Then you’d fly them to another one. There were a lot of people moving around. Even as late as 1974 there were still lots of guys out there in the camps. Whereas now, there’s very small crews comparatively and everybody stays with a company now.

Patty Kaardal: I met lots of characters—mostly loggers and fishermen. They just have a different way of life, a different breed.

Gord Beadle: I don’t know how many, but there were a lot of camps, particularly ten-man camps. In Gold River and on up into Tahsis, there were a lot of A-frames. They were just a big float with an A-frame on it. They would run a cable up these steep hills and drag the logs down to the beach. A lot of those were just mom and pop operations.

Walter Davidson: I was given the opportunity to go into sales.  My territory was Vancouver Island, the coast to Prince Rupert, and the Charlottes. On days with no set plan I would fly for [around].  I became very adept at finding out whose camp I was at by reading time slips or purchase orders up side down at the camp office. Of course I didn't want those loggers to think I was just wandering around. I would often travel with some booze and a stock of fresh newspapers, and was pretty much well received. I became good friends with a lot of these loggers and their families.

Don Braithwaite: A lot of the guys bought their own planes for the simple reason if you break something in camp you can load it on the airplane and be out. Downtime was the deal where it really cost you a lot of money. It was a lot quicker to fly parts up there if they needed them.

Irvin Olsen: Where we logged you couldn’t survive without an airplane. You can’t lose a day out logging; that’s a lot of money down the tubes.

Phil Bergman: In years past, places like Toba Inlet, Kincome Inlet, and many spots on the coast, functioned as small communities. They were logging camps, but they were small communities. They had a school. Families lived there, that kind of thing. The isolation of these areas disappeared over time.

Bob Langdon (1975): The majority of our traffic is associated with the logging industry; but, we have the school boards, department of health and welfare, public health, social welfare, post office, telephone companies—just generally everyday living. They all fly. This is the thing I want to get across: everyone flies!

Irvin Olsen: When I first came up to Campbell River in 1966, it was just like a beehive on the Spit—planes continually coming and going. I leased the area where Vancouver Island Air is for 10 years from Elk River. I used to park my planes there, but I got all my gas from Gulf Air and they had room so I used to leave planes there as well.

Len Crawford: For the small logger, the boom years came to an end on January 24 th, 1984. That’s when Forestry cancelled the TFL2 (Tree Farm License) for loggers and it went to the mill here. We were booted out—we were all booted out. That was the downfall.

Irvin Olsen: When Crown Zellerbach shut down TFL 2 for contractors, well, that was the end of the good logging. Then the few surviving ones—it’s so expensive to fly—they did it by crew boats. All of sudden, it was just like shutting the Spit down. Just about all the loggers had their own airplane too.

Len Crawford: The last comment Forestry made to everyone was ‘Well, you knew this was coming. You should have been prepared.’ Things went downhill after that.

Walter Davidson: As the coast freight services such as coast ferries slowly shut down, the aircraft became even more necessary for such things as machinery parts, groceries, and crew.  If you had your own aircraft, and flew it yourself as I did, you had a distinct advantage over people who had to charter. 

Craig Houston: Originally, when we first came down here, 80% of what we did was logging related. Now, it’s probably reversed—only about 20% of what we do is logging, the rest is other things.

Walter Davidson: The aircraft was one of the most important tools in the coast logging industry.  Today, more and more operators are using helicopters, or building landing strips and using wheeled aircraft. I can hardly imagine operating our logging at White & Davidson Logging Ltd. without our own aircraft. It became indispensable.

Harvey Hahn: It finished up. You could see it couldn’t sustain that. Gradually the logging went further north and after a while it was out of Port Hardy and around Alert Bay. All these camps moved up the coast and I guess they’re up in the mid coast now. I guess everything has changed now.

Phil Bergman: As the logging industry shrank, so did the need for aircraft. There are more high speed water taxis which take away the short trips that floatplanes used to do. As well, there are less people living out in the wilderness then there used to be.

Harvey Hahn: The years that the lumber was booming the airlines were booming. But as soon as things went bad for them, the airlines went down the tube. You were just locked right in with the lumbering.

Jim Creighton: All of sudden, everything just went for a total crap. It just kept getting worse and worse.

Don Thompson: Things started to go downhill after 1973—the logging industry was declining and fishing wasn’t as good as it used to be.

Irvin Olsen: In 1966, I first came to Campbell River. To begin with, I was contracting up in Knight Inlet for Don Braithwaite.

Mark Murphy: The big change is logging on the coast. It’s gone from a hundred little camps to half a dozen big ones. Some of the logging companies own planes but they just they play with it. They get in and out of that, but it’s never worked very well for them. They’re in the logging business, not the airplane business and they don’t do a good job of it, although other people will tell you differently. It works far better off chartering.

Steve Todd: It wasn’t just the airline industry that fell. It was the logging industry, the fisheries—all that changed in a short number of years. The airlines were serving those industries specifically, which created a lot of the little town sites and what have you up and down the coast.

Mark Murphy: Aside from changes in the logging industry, it’s in the high speed crew boats. Every time one of those goes by, it used to be an airplane doing it. And every camp has one now. It’s cheaper, but more so, they don’t have to think about weights, and groceries and freight. So, for the logging industry, they like it. It makes it real easy. And they’re not that much slower if the weather’s good.

Steve Todd: Once the major lumber companies pulled their tree forest licenses—pulled the gypos out of the forest—things went down hill. That’s who we were servicing, all the gypo operators. From the moment the sun went up to the moment the sun came down. It was constant.

Phil Bergman: Pretty much any logging company of any size has used the floatplanes for years. Up until about ten or twelve years ago that is how the vast majority of people and equipment got in and out of logging camps.

Mark Murphy: It might take ½ hour in an airplane, 2 ½ by boat. And, a lot of the guys would rather go by boat than fly. There’s been a few bad accidents out of Campbell River and there’s a lot of movement out here.

Phil Bergman: There are far less people working in the logging camps these days and it’s difficult at times to get people on the phone. In the old days every logging camp had a first aid attendant who would always answer the phone. Now, rarely is there someone in the office.

Walter Davidson: Today the situation is very tough. There are a much reduced number of contractors being pushed hard by one or two dominant companies, attempting to squeeze the last bit of profit from these hard working contractors.  I am happy I was able to log in much better times and to make it work profitability.

Phil Bergman: Any of the big players on the coast would have used the floatplanes. Western Forest Products today uses floatplanes. A lot of smaller, owner-operated companies over the years that have now fallen by the wayside used the floatplanes.

Bill Alder: There were airplanes all over the place, but as the tree farm licenses started to disappear and become obsolete, all these gypo loggers went by the wayside. There were no airplanes left. Over a period of 10 years, you couldn’t believe the difference. It used to be wall to wall airplanes

Union Blues

Gord Beadle: I often think that we ended up with the union here, but it didn’t really have to come to that.

Jackie Langdon: Bob fought the union. He wasn’t happy with it all. He was used to a “family style” sort-of operation where you looked after your family and they did a good job for you. The better job they did, the more perks they got.

Stan Kaardal: The first contract we negotiated with BC Air Lines won us one day a week off—because at that time we were working 7 days a week—daylight to dark. If you didn’t, there was always someone waiting outside the door. The second contract, we won two days a week off. From then on, we gradually got the pay sorted out a little bit.

Jackie Langdon: I think (the other companies) treated their employees fairly, but the union movement started in Vancouver, where maybe they needed it more, I am not sure. But it was a sign of the times.

Tom Langdon: He thought he treated everybody well and that should be good enough. And of course it isn’t for a lot of people. My dad would have taken it very personally.

Stan Kaardal: For a lot of years, the majority of our pay was incentive pay and then we became unionized in BC Air Lines, much to the chagrin of other smaller operators.

Jackie Langdon: One thing that Bob couldn’t understand was his crew were paid better under him then they would have under union wages. So he couldn’t understand why they would want to give up the better pay.

Tom Langdon: During the 70s, when I actually started to understand more about this stuff, he took it very personally. This wasn’t just a business, this was his business.

Jackie Langdon: All through the years from the beginning he treated his staff well and paid them according to what pilots were getting. He didn’t pay them any less and he gave them bonuses.

Gord Beadle: There was no union to start with. Later years we became unionized. BC Air Lines was union and Island Airlines wasn’t to start with.

Jackie Langdon: And I think when the union started that bothered him. He felt he could keep his people happy; and, in a sense, he didn’t see the larger picture there.

Gord Beadle: Actually, Island Airlines had the BC Air Lines union agreement; so, even though we weren’t technically unionized, we got paid the union agreement.

Tom Langdon: He took a certain twisted delight in union negotiations and he was very good at it.

Harvey Hahn: We actually had a union of sorts. BC Air Lines were union and we were not.

Tom Langdon: All it takes is a few people to be distrustful of the management’s intentions towards the employees to bring change, and of course change is inevitable.

Gord Beadle: We basically went two years without a pay increase; so, when the third year came up, and the boss announced he couldn’t afford another pay increase, that was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Tom Langdon: The union came in full time in the early 70s. When it went from being a non-union to a union operation, they were, at the time, the highest paid float plane pilots on the coast.

Jackie Langdon: He felt that this union effort on parts of some of his staff was an act of disloyalty. And in way it was, and in a way it wasn’t.

Don Braithwaite: Island Airlines had been union then everybody dropped out. They were still certified though, so all they had to do was go back and pick up the certification and they were in.

Gord Beadle: I think as far as all the guys were concerned there was no question that we were going to get a pay increase, it was just a matter of how much.

Gordie Wilkinson: When Bob left BC Air Lines, they brought back Wally Wiggins to be the manager. I went back and worked with Wally at BC Air Lines from May of 1960 to May of 1965. I got busy and organized a union there and eventually the guys at Island Airlines belonged to the same union. Langdon said, “I’m gonna buy BC Air Lines and fire that bastard!” That was his one goal in life and he never got it.

Gord Beadle: Somewhere along the line the base pay got really lowered down and mileage pay really increased. You basically couldn’t live on it, but hey had to give us base pay in order to keep us around. The rest was mileage so you had to fly.

Harvey Hahn: We were working a lot cheaper than our counterparts, and we were working a lot harder. We were taking quite a lot of their business away from them and we thought we should do a little better.

Gord Beadle: In the wintertime, for the most part, you were on starvation wages because the days are short, flying time is cut down, and a lot of the logging camps were starting to shut down.

Don Braithwaite: My guys asked if I was going to give them a raise. I said, “Not right now. Probably in the spring, but you’re getting more money than those guys over there already.”

Gord Beadle: When BC Air Lines left, Bob Langdon basically said, “Well, my agreement was to pay the BC Air Lines agreement and BC Air Lines is no longer.” So, there was a bit of a kerfuffle for a couple of years.

Harvey Hahn: There were a lot of hard feelings.

Don Braithwaite: We had a strike. My people were not union. I was paying more money than the Island Airline guys were getting, but they decided they wanted to join the union.

Harvey Hahn: In fact we went on strike for a whole summer in 1976  a little over two months. We just shut down. We did very little flying – just emergencies. Bob flew a bit himself but by that time he had health problems. Eventually he got cancer. He was getting pretty sick then.

Tom Langdon: That was a big part of why he wanted to sell: it wasn’t fun anymore.

Don Braithwaite: Of course we were getting Island Airlines passengers because they still had to get out there. Some of them never went back to Island Airlines because we were cheaper.

Ted Turner: We went on strike and we were picketing up across the road from the Tyee Club. We were on strike for about 2 or 3 weeks.

Jim Creighton: Whether it was the spin the owners put on it, or whether it was actually true, we all considered the union something that would be an impeding force, it wouldn’t help.

Harvey Hahn: We had picket lines down there and everything. I preferred not to get involved with it. I just told them, “Give me a call when you get it all straightened out.” I thought their demands were totally way off. I just went to work somewhere else doing other things.

Don Braithwaite: I couldn’t afford a strike when I came so I had to keep going. I said to Langdon, “You have been in business for quite a long time, but I’ve got the bankers sitting there wanting their money, so I have to keep going.” So, whatever they negotiated, I paid, so the crew kept going and we kept operating.

Ted Turner: Gulf Air started a union. The pilots at Island Air were quite annoyed. The attitude was, “If they’re getting a union, we want one too.”

Harvey Hahn: I went back when they settled. We never did go back to work for Bob. He sold the airline while we were still on strike. The new owners called us all back.

Jim Creighton: Everybody was anti-union from day one. Even though you got paid piss-poor wages and you worked til you dropped, the union was never welcome.

Bob Early: It was Gordie Wilkinson that was spearheading the union. He was a good guy though.

Don Braithwaite: Gordie Wilkinson is a heck-of-a-good fella and a good pilot but he got mouthing off at me. I had enough.

Bob Early: I left about the time that the union came in. I was in the middle between the union and Don. I was operations manager at the time, I believe. It was just awful.

Gordie Wilkinson: Don actually fired me. I was on compensation at the time and when I was ready to come back to work, Bob Early, who was the chief pilot at that time, told me, “Well, Don doesn’t want you back.”

Don Braithwaite: I thought, “Do I need this?” I had a bellyful between trying to argue with the bank, argue with the MOT, and argue with the union . . . who needs it?

Gordie Wilkinson: And I said to (Bob Early), “Well, you fire me.” He said, “I’m not firing you.” So I told him I’d be back at work tomorrow. I went into work the next morning and I sat there and sat there. Don came in the back door, said, “Hi”, and walked into his office.

Don Braithwaite: My operations manager, said, “I ain’t gonna fire him.” I said, “That’s alright, send him into my office.” I said to Gord, “I’ve had enough of your bullshit. You are a good pilot but I just can’t take this.”

Gordie Wilkinson: He told me they’d had letters of complaint about my flying, etc., etc. and that they didn’t want me back. I told him he’d have to fire me if he wanted me gone, but he just kept telling me that they didn’t want me back, but he wouldn’t actually fire me.

Anne Wilkinson: Of course, there were no complaints, ever. We never found out the truth of what had happened. After this, we used to get invited to all of the Christmas parties that this company ever had. In fact, when he started working for BC Forest Products again, Don said “Write your own ticket – I want you back.” We never figured it out.

Gordie Wilkinson: They wouldn’t give me a trip and I just sat there for most of the morning. So finally he asks “You wanted to see me?” and I said, “Nope.” He says, ‘”Well, come into my office.”

Bob Early: I felt betrayed by the pilots because I’d flown with them all that time. They didn’t include me in their negotiations and I didn’t know they were getting a union because they felt that I was too close to Don; that I would tell Don.

Don Braithwaite: “Okay”, he said. “I want a written letter as to why I was fired.” I told him to come back at four o’clock for his letter and cheque and the whole issue. So away he went.

Gordie Wilkinson: I told him that the only way they were getting rid of me was to fire me and to say it to my face, so finally he did. So I went back at 2 o’clock for my paycheque and that was the end of that.

Ed Wilcock: I don’t know of any helicopter companies that are unionized in Canada. There’s no need for a union if you treat your people properly.

Tom Langdon: Since those days, flying for both floatplane and helicopter outfits, I have never seen a union rep. I have never belonged to a union. The only time I ever belonged to a union was when I worked for my dad’s company because I had to join the union to work on the dock and in the hanger.

Crazy Regulations

Lee Frankham: Oh, shit, they were always interfering! Planes too heavy, etc. The airlines—they were a little tougher on them, but when we were flying for the logging camps…Jesus! We didn’t care, we’d do anything. It didn’t matter, if it worked, we did it. It would be highly illegal—you wouldn’t do that with an airline.

Mark Murphy: Before 911, you could use an airplane for six months and just pay partial insurance rates for the other 6—they called it a lay-up clause, but the insurance companies did away with all that.

Phil Bergman: Governments are not happy unless they are adding more and more regulations. Whether it’s stricter or better is open to debate.

Dave Nilson: All the aircraft had to be overhauled after a certain amount of time. You’d get all these books and sheets regarding what you had to do. It didn’t seem like overkill in those days, but it got that way. It keeps getting worse all the time. And now it’s so bad, I don’t even want to go near an airplane— somebody will sue me. Bureaucracy has killed aviation right to the ground.

Irvin Olsen: It just got worse and worse and worse. It wasn’t too bad when we started in it. But now . . . it’s just ridiculous. Actually, the logging is getting just as bad now. All these fellas have to be certified now—like a faller, he’s gotta be certified that he’s capable of doing the job.

Ed Wilcock: The government regulations have changed. And the bigger you get, the more regulations you fall under. Transport Canada pretty much knows who the good people are and who the bad people are. The bigger you get, the harder it is to hide anything.

Lyle Whyte: Everything that we do has to be recorded in books that Transport Canada has access to. If we’re working on a major repair over a certain size, that has to be written down on the proper form and gets sent to Transport Canada. We have to abide by the books. There are guidelines. Most manufacturers come out with their own maintenance books and their own repair books, so you are aware of the kinds of things you can do and things that you can’t do. If it’s not in those books, then there is another book which is the AC4313 book and it’s more or less the Bible on everything. It has the basic layout of what you should and shouldn’t do.

Mark Murphy: They’re idiots! Transport Canada, all they’re interested in is paperwork. They don’t know anything or do anything, they’re just a waste of time; it’s just a government bureaucracy. You can have the best operators and the worst operators side by side and as long as the bad one has their paperwork, it’s fine. Everybody knows it’s a joke. That’s one of the reasons I got out of it—I just couldn’t be bothered.

Bob Langdon (1975): We don’t fly at night at all. We are restricted to daylight flying. In the case of extreme emergencies: they would have to be very extreme before we would hazard a night flight. I mean a serious emergency; involving a whole lot of people because we would be contravening our license, and I think even our ability.

Ed Wilcock: In the early years of the helicopter business, you went out flying in April and didn’t come home until October or November. You lived in a tent out in the bush. That’s not the business now. In the old days, there were no regulations; you could fly and fly and fly. Nowadays, Transport has it regulated.

Steve Todd: Even Cessna stopped building aircraft because of the liability factor.

Val Todd: They’ve just gone back into production in the last little while if I’m not mistaken, but they are not producing single engine Cessnas anymore. At one point they had to have a little placard on the front of the aircraft stating, “Flying this aircraft could be dangerous to your health’.

Steve Todd: Like a cigarette package.

Val Todd: That’s what it got down to. And they couldn’t’ afford the liability insurance. I guess they were being sued by people who were crashing the planes. It got to ridiculous, basically.

Steve Todd: There was deregulation of the airways and over regulation of the industry. For good and for bad.

Larry Langford: That was part of the problem with deregulation: you didn’t always end up with people with the experience and good management structure needed. As a result of that, a lot of those airlines that were servicing are gone. And that’s one of the big drawbacks: It created a negative effect for a considerable period of time and obviously, when you have a lot of little airlines with little or no experience, you end up with a lot of accidents.

Phil Bergman: After 9/11 our insurance went way up. It affected everything: The economy; the logging industry; tourism. There was a really big ripple effect. But it was mainly the insurance costs.

Jack Kirk: You have a certain length of time—you have your 50 or 100 hour checks to maintain your CNA (Certificate of Air Worthiness) and when your major time comes up, if your engine is in good shape, they might give you an extension or something.

Bob Langdon (1975): Requirements sent down by the Department of Transport are such that we must maintain visual contact (with the ground) and basically you don’t dare not because we have so many rocks in the clouds around here. The channels are such that they twist and turn that you must maintain visual contact with the water at all times.

Don Braithwaite: You can’t both raise your rates at the same time. So Landgon would say, “I’m gonna raise my rates.” I’d say, “Okay.” So he’d apply to MOT and I’d wait about six months, and then I’d raise my rates up and I might go higher than his, or whatever. We’d always talk about the thing.

Ed Wilcock: The BC Coast is probably some of the most challenging flying of all for helicopters. You can’t fly for the government out here with basically less than 1000 hours. Industries are starting to put some pretty stringent guidelines in place. There have been some accidents in the past with people and now industry is auditing us more than Transport Canada.

Larry Langford: Years ago, you had to apply and get approval for all of your licenses—even to make changes to your fares. We’ve had deregulation, but you still have to apply for a license and you specify what you’re going to do. It is still difficult to qualify. Years ago, no one could operate within 25 miles of another base that had an approved license. But nowadays, it doesn’t matter. We had four air carriers on the Spit here. Qualifying for the license is still as difficult or more difficult that it used to be, which is a good thing. But it’s open to competition, just like the airlines. It’s more open than say, taxis or even buses because they still have to apply for fare change which we don’t. Sometimes that competition is good, sometimes it’s not.

Lyle Whyte: There’s a daily inspection, more or less a visual walk-around inspection that’s done by the pilots. You have to write your daily inspections in the journey log, which the pilots carry with them. Precise record-keeping is very important.

Norene Reedel: Back in the Gulf Air days getting your radio license was a bit of a joke. I remember this Scottish gent came up from Transport Canada; took us in the back office and basically asked us how to spell our named phonetically. That was the test. It was too funny. After that, we were presented with our little piece of paper. (Laughs) It’s tucked away and a little dog eared and weathered, but I still have it. Now, you have to have a proper license for dispatching. I dispatched for 23 years without a license because in those days it was learn-as-you-go. When I worked at Air BC you didn’t need one.

Frank Roberts: Most of these first licenses granted to independent airlines such as Island Air and Alert Bay Air Services were what they called Class 4 Charter licenses. Scheduled service was run under Class 3 and Class 2 licenses, and then the big guys under Class 1. Class 3 licenses were provided to BC Air Lines, and they could schedule service, say from Campbell River to places like Tahsis on the West Coast, and Zeballos and Kyuquot and so on. This was generally open to competition—a charter carrier could also apply for those routes, although there was a period of time in the 60’s when the air transport board granted some protected licenses. This meant that only a particular airline could fly between certain points and other carriers could not.

Phil Bergman: Insurance requirements are far more strict and expensive then they used to be. It would be prohibitively expensive for us to bring someone new into the company with no time. It’s just simply not worth it. We don’t have the small aircraft like the Cessnas anymore, and that’s traditionally what pilots started out on when they were working their way up the company.

Don Braithwaite: I did quite a bit as far as getting airports together and getting them licensed on the Coast here. Bella Bella didn’t have an airport so I was instigator there. I went up and had a look around. I got enough people interested in it and we got a contractor and started building the airport up there at Denny Island and consequently it was constructed. There were problems with the Indians. They wanted a strip over at Campbell Island. Campbell Island had a hill or mountain on it that was 900 feet high. In that country you need IFL let down. At 900 feet in the air you can’t see ground. On Denny Island you are 900 feet lower, which had a better chance of breaking out of the fog and seeing the runway. Anyway, the Indians all jumped up and down and I don’t know where they got their money from, but they built one. There was no airport between Port Hardy and Rupert, but they had two airports at Bella Bella.

Pattison 'Daze'

Don Braithwaite: I call him ‘Uncle Jimmy’. Pattison wanted to buy an airline and I thought, “You are just the man for me.”

Gord Beadle: The stories have it that Jimmy Pattison tried to buy PWA. PWA wouldn’t even entertain the idea and wouldn’t even let him look at the books, “Go away little guy you can’t afford us,” sort-of-thing. Pattison says, “Okay, I’ll fix you, I’ll build my own airline”.

Don Braithwaite: I enjoyed building the airlines up but it just got to ya. Every time ya moved there was someone there between the union, the Ministry of Transport and the bank. You don’t need all that stuff.

Gordie Wilkinson: I was on Don’s dock when Jimmy Pattison came walking up. Don introduced me to him and he had a handshake like a wet dishrag. He bought everything up— Alert Bay, everything he could find. I don’t even know what the hell he was gonna do with them. Then he started selling them off. He didn’t want this one, didn’t want that one.

Jim Creighton: When I first came here, the one evil character that kept rearing his ugly head was Jim Pattison. Apparently, he totally screwed everything up. Larry doesn’t even shop at Save-On-Foods, he refuses to.

Stan Kaardal: Jimmy Pattison came in and purchased almost all the airlines and then he offered me a position as Vice President in Vancouver and also as Chief Pilot. I didn’t want any part of it. They gave me an excellent package and I left.

Ted Turner: I remember the day when Jimmy Pattison and his big shots came walking up the dock looking at the planes. And we thought, “Oh, I guess we’re gonna be owned by him.” He was doing the same thing to every airline on the coast. As soon as he bought the airline, he would dissolve them.

Tom Langdon: What he wanted was the licenses. At the time it was very difficult to start there from scratch and get them approved. You needed to jump through lots and lots of hoops from the Ministry of Transport. So it was a lot easier to buy all these little airlines, sell the assets, lay off the pilots, and then do whatever you wanted with it. So that was the basis of Air BC. It got started with these licenses between Hardy, Vancouver and Campbell River and all those little commuter routes.

Don Braithwaite: They wanted me to run it, so I said, “Okay I’ll run it for a while.” That was probably one of the worst parts in my life. I had to fire a lot of people. They got everybody together in our office and told us no-one would be laid off, you know, just like one big happy family. I said to Rusty—Pattison’s guy—“Where in the hell did you get that bullshit from?”

Norene Reedel: It didn’t really start going to hell until Pattison bought out the seven coastal airlines, and made them into what became Air BC. I was part of that whole transition.

Gord Beadle: One of the first things they did after the sale was merge the two Campbell River airlines. This was Gulf Island Air and we were operating under one roof but as individual entities. I could only fly an Island Air airplane and the Gulf guys could only fly Gulf Air because of the licenses.

Val Todd: Gulf Island Air was a just a name. The Island Air building was here and the Gulf Air building was here. What they did for a while was operated scheduled service out of one building and chartered service out of the other—which meant for some awkward stuff trying to dispatch it.

Norene Reedel: There was some dissention too. When they merged Gulf Air and Island Air, there were hard feelings with some of the management. They didn’t keep everybody and that was bad. It was really hard to see guys like Old Harry Taylor phased out all together. Harry had been the Chief Pilot at Island Air and he actually was the one that originally hired me. There was some bad blood, and that was hard. Harry, still to this day, doesn’t come to any airline reunions. It’s sad.

Don Thompson: But eventually the whole thing was bought by Jimmy Pattison. He ended up with all of it. He made people like me very happy because he had the cash to spend.

Tom Langdon: Well, they mushed everything together into one office; got rid of all but four or five airplanes; and laid off all the people. I mean they paired it right down because it wasn’t making any money at the time. There were pilots out of work all over Campbell River.

Don Braithwaite: It was really a tough time for me because there really was no justification to lay most people off. One gal just about passed out when I told her she was fired; but what do you do? It was a tough go.

Val Todd: It was pretty rough. Jim Pattison came in and sort of cleaned house. A lot of people were just sort of let go on a moment’s notice and it was very upsetting to a lot of people.

Gord Beadle: So he ended up buying . . . about six airlines and merged them all into one and called them Air BC. What he did was pick up the licenses. It was very difficult to get a license; so the easy way to get a license was to buy it.

Steve Todd: Now it’s open air. If you have a plane you can fly anywhere you want. Deregulation came in and. . . and I guess he didn’t anticipate it.

Val Todd: It was upsetting to a lot of people at that time because they were just sort of rushed out the door and “your services are no longer required”. And there you go.

Harvey Hahn: It was really hard on the customers. The people really relied on the airlines. I mean, Air BC said, “This is the way it is. Take it or leave it!” They did not understand their market; they didn’t have a clue. They tried to run it the way someone would run an airline in Edmonton, or something.

Val Todd: I know when Jim Pattison came in they were going to start charging for parking for all the passengers. And boy, that did not go over well. Fortunately that didn’t last very long. It was sort of dropped. It was pathetic.

Gord Beadle: I, in fact, never changed players. Island Air became Air BC.

Harvey Hahn: When an airline comes along and says, “Hey, we don’t care what your schedule is, you have to work around us.” The loggers will just tell you to shove off—and that’s exactly what happened.

Gord Beadle: Air BC really ruined a lot of the aviation industry here because they tried to run the base from Vancouver.

Val Todd: They had all these grand ideas of what an airline should be, but an airline like Air Canada doesn’t equate to what it’s like for a small float plane operation dealing with loggers and all that sort of stuff. They had their own people come up and make all these changes: Fancy tickets and all these grand ideas about how an airline should be run. Well, that stepped on a few toes and made for some awkward moments. People were pretty upset.

Gord Beadle: This would be in the late 70s or possibly 1980. There were all kinds of television news stories and newspaper articles about this situation. Headlines like, “Coastal Communities Left Stranded”. So it really devastated the business.

Don Thompson: After he bought it, the airlines didn’t seem to care anymore. It was just awful for me to find out that the guys up at Hardy were left in the lurch. “Oh, we just shut it down for the weekend” was the attitude. They didn’t want to pay wages on the weekends. When I was in business, you worked 365 days a year, including Christmas Day if you were needed. You never said, “no” unless it was foggy or it was blowing too hard. In the summertime, you started at 7 o’clock and you hit the beer parlour at 10:30 at night.

Gord Beadle: As a result, a lot of logging companies bought their own airplanes. They basically bought them from Air BC because Air BC was taking all these airplanes to Vancouver and parking them. So, there were a few logging company jobs around; but, again things were starting to fall apart in the logging industry. Helicopters were starting to take over big time.

Larry Langford: At one time, there was an Island Air Beaver flying around with a wing on it from a Gulf Air airplane in Air BC colours. It was a very confusing time and a lot of people lost their jobs and had to move away and do other things. Big companies buy little airlines— they don’t know anything about it at all. It was a little bit of a disaster, it caused a lot of problems.

Steve Todd: Things sort of transitioned out. I think they were here two years. I think that’s when all the employees went into a depression. I think it was a low time because of all the uncertainty of what was happening. Because the logging declined, the fisheries declined, the economy declined, the airlines business declined and everyone was scratching to make it work.

Gord Beadle: It was tough times for Pattison because this was the late 70s early 80s, and the logging industry started to tank.

Steve Todd: He (Pattison) came up in his motor home one day—short visit. I guess he got an idea of what he had actually bought into. As a business person, and the way the industry was declining at that time, I think he realized . . . he’d better do something with them and divest of all the liabilities.

Don Braithwaite: He couldn’t fire the union ones but everybody that wasn’t union I had to let go. It was a tough job.

Val Todd: It was all union. I lost my job. Jimmy Pattison said he didn’t want to see me again. They wanted to cut my wages considerably. I wasn’t making a lot of money but if I was going to stay on they were going to cut my wages. So Jimmy and I parted ways and I signed an agreement that I wouldn’t work for him again after I settled the dispute.

Steve Todd: All the Island Air and Gulf Air people had the seniority in the system.

Val Todd: There were a lot of people who had been with Island Air and Gulf Air for a lot of years at that point. Well, all of a sudden with this combined personnel, all these people in Campbell River had seniority over basically everybody else in the whole system, including Vancouver.

Steve Todd: It was the CBRT and GW: Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Telegraph and General Workers. Then the Teamsters came in with Air BC and we were assimilated without any fight at all on our unions’ part. That’s when the bumping started to happen. There were several people in this area that decided to move to Vancouver by bumping into dispatch positions that were available. We opted not to because we wanted to stay here.

Val Todd: Some of them had been there for years and all of sudden there’s all this in-fighting about who gets to go where and who has seniority . . . It was pretty tumultuous times for sure.

Gord Beadle: I was pretty high up so my hours were not affected. There were lots of layoffs with the junior fellas. There were a lot of fellas that had been laid off that went to Vancouver. Campbell River is quite a senior base. It’s quite a desirable base to work in. When the first seniority list came out for Air BC, about 15 out of the top 20 were out of C.R. The lifestyle, the area and the type of flying we were doing were all desirable aspects.

Steve Todd: If you walked over to the Gulf Air part it was Gulf Air personnel and vice versa. And then it was a slow assimilation. Slow by our perception I guess, but it was fairly quick.

Larry Langford: Eventually it became Air BC and then they spat out all the pieces they didn’t want and sold them off again.

Gord Beadle: Pattison was buying at a time when the logging industry was tanking. Air BC was in big financial doo doo. In those days Pattison was quite well known for basically shutting an office down overnight. At this time he was threatening big time to shut it down.

Norene Reedel: When Air BC came along the logging was starting to wind down, and logging companies were starting to go with crew boats. They were just kind of phasing out (the flying). It was an expense to keep flying your crews and the weather was a problem. It was a lot cheaper for them. A market for crew boats was starting to happen. I think there are two or three outfits now.

Harvey Hahn: Pattison was not a good thing for the industry, and it wasn’t good for the airlines. It wasn’t good for the people.

Rolly Bartlett: Air BC sold out the Campbell River base to CoVal Air and then I started working for CoVal. I was only at Coval Air for about 4 years, and then I came here in 1987. So, I’ve been here since 1987 at Vancouver Island Air.

Larry Langford: I was starting my business in 1985. Island Air and Gulf Air became Gulf Island Air and then it become Air BC. The pieces were spit out and became Corilair and Air Nootka on the West Coast.

Norene Reedel: He didn’t want all these funny little airplanes, that wasn’t his thing. He had a vision. I was really glad that I had gone to Richmond because I was able to be a part of that.

Gord Beadle: Air BC started to grow. We started off with one DC3 and then got the two of them. Before long we had three Dash 7s and around the mid 80s Air BC just took off. We had about seven Dash 7s at one point eight or ten Dash 8s. We ended up with a new CEO who saw the potential in some other areas.

Norene Reedel: At one point he (Pattison) said to us, “If you guys will stick with me, and do this deal where we have a five year plan, and you are not going to go on strike, things will work out. He paid us well and we did stick to the five year plan. There was growth and we could see we were going somewhere. When I quit Air BC there were 400 employees. So it was really exciting because I saw it go from the original plan of buying out all these little airlines to the success it became.

A Kid's Perspective

Richard Von Fintel: When I was a little kid my parents took me to the airport one day to watch airplanes take off and land. That was it! I fell in love with airplanes. I think they should have taken me somewhere else so I would have pursued a more sensible profession.

Don Braithwaite: If I’d been born a few years younger WWII would have been over a lot quicker because I would have jumped into a Spitfire and had ol’ Hitler in no time flat.

Mark Murphy: When I was about 10 or 11, I was in Port McNeill staying with a friend and he flew up and said, “Do you want to fly back?” And I said, “Sure”. As soon as we took off, I knew right away . . . “this is for me.”

Dave Nilson: When I was a young fella, I used to go out to the Regina Airport and there was a hangar there for the flying club. I snuck in one day—checking out the hangar and poking around—and there’s this old Gypsy Moth. I’m looking in the cockpit windows and somebody grabbed me from the back, hauled me out and kicked me out the door. That was Bob Langdon’s father. All these things fit together.

Larry Langford: I’ve always had an interest in aviation. My father served in the Air Force, and I did some time in Air Cadets so there was always a background. Like a lot of young, aspiring pilots, I thought about the airlines—you always want to fly the biggest and the fastest, but I came out to Campbell River and started flying floats and liked it a lot.

Norene Reedel: I never liked flying in airplanes. When I was about eleven I used to fly over with my little sister to our tooth appointments. It was never a pleasure trip. Any time I flew over meant a visit with the doctor or dentist. I was so crazy afraid of the dentist that I used to pass out in the chair before he even looked at me. It was a double whammy: scared of dentists and deathly afraid of flying.

Phil Bergman: I’ve been involved with aviation on the Spit from the time I was five or six. I grew up on Cortes Island and before the ferry system expanded to there, the floatplanes were how I got to Campbell River for doctors appointments and stuff like that.

Richard Von Fintel: As kids we were always hanging around the airports and somewhere along the line someone gave us a ride. It was so exciting and I never looked back.

Dave Nilson: One of these Tiger Moths wasn’t running very good but I knew what was wrong with it. I’m just a kid, but I asked, “Well, just let me have a go”. They said, “Well, if you really want to”. So I retimed the engine and got it going . . . and it worked really good. Then they hired me to work on the airplanes.

Walter Davidson: I became interested in flying and acquired some passenger time when my father-in-law bought an airplane. I realized it was within reach of ordinary people.

Phil Bergman: Cortes was very isolated. They only other way in or out was by boat. Boats weren’t as high speed as they are today and it was a multiple hour trip from Campbell River to Cortes. Also, the area around Cape Mudge is one of the roughest stretches of water in the world and can be very dangerous, so the float planes were how you got to town.

Harvey Hahn: I grew up out on the west coast and there were a lot of planes that were here after World War ll. After the war all those fellows came back from overseas. They were quite a bunch. They were used to being in combat situations so it was pretty dull here, so they used to do some pretty amazing feats.

Bill Hill: When I was in Zeballos, my grand scheme of things was to become a truck driver and I never had any idea that I would become a pilot, even though I was on the airplanes all the time flying around. Mainly because I never had any money and my folks never had any money. It was through Don Thompson—he gave me the biggest start. In fact, I owe Don a whole bunch for what he’s done for me.

Harvey Hahn: We were all kids and we used to go for rides. These guys would say, “We’re going to go out to make drop. Come for a ride.” We would all bale in. It was a real adventure.

Phil Bergman: You knew all the pilots and who they worked for. Generally, you had an alignment to one of the airlines—whether it was Gulf Air or Island Air. In early 1965 or 1966, I think the fare from Cortes to Campbell River was about $7.50. And I think it stayed about that price until1969 when the ferry came in.

Tom Langdon: My dad and I always had an interest in flying. And when we were together we’d talk about flying and airplanes. He took me to air shows and fly-ins and things like that. I was in high school. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I did know I wanted to fly and I wanted to get my license and fly for a year or two until I figured things out. Well, I still haven’t figured things out because I’m still flying.

Bill Hill: My mom was the one that pushed me into aviation. My Dad, he wasn’t much of a flier. But my mom said, “Anytime you get a chance to go, go!” She was the one who basically got me going. She was just a very progressive lady.

Richard Von Fintel: When I was a kid me and my buddy decided to build ourselves an airplane. It’s probably a good thing we never finished the project. We were gonna tow this thing behind this old car his grand-father had in the field and launch it like a glider. We were gonna go fly this thing and probably kill ourselves, but we never got off the ground.

Dave Nilson: I was going to become a commercial pilot, but after I found out about the pay, it didn’t appeal to me.

Learning the Ropes

Tom Langdon: I went to the University of Island Airlines. That’s probably the best training I ever had. You learn everything. I had Gord Beadle, Don Matheson, Harry Taylor and a whole raft of other guys that would sit around and talk.

Don Braithwaite: I was a logger, and loggers can’t sit around waiting for airplanes, they gotta go to work. So I got my own plane, learned how to fly and got my pilot’s license in 1955.

Richard Von Fintel: You can’t learn it without pushing it. You don’t really know how far is too far, how much is too much, until you’ve gone in somewhere and done something and said, “Whew, I shouldn’t have done that!” You don’t know the limits if you never push it. I guess part of the pressure on the pilots is self-imposed, because when you are starting out in the business there are guys who are more experienced than you are and you have to prove yourself. You are not gonna do that if you turn around too quickly.

Gord Beadle: I trained at Skyways Air Service in Langley around 1965 or 1966. I was 24 when I got my commercial license. I think it was 35 hours for a private license in those days on a government approved course.

Walter Davidson: In approximately 1960 I started a pilot’s course at West Coast Aviation. I trained on Cessna 140's.  One of my instructors was Lloyd Michaud of the pioneer B.C. family and one of the founders of West Coast Aviation.  I soloed in approximately ten hours and got my license in 30 hours. 

Tom Langdon: Some people get on right away, some people don’t. It depends on the company. It depends how desperate they are for pilots. But it depends mostly on how big an impression you make on them and how well they think they can trust you. There’s no set formula for breaking new pilots in. It happens lots of different ways.

Richard Von Fintel: When I was in high school, I applied for a part-time job at the local supermarket and as soon as the guy said I was hired, I hitch-hiked up to the airport and signed up for flying lessons. I made just enough to pay for one hour of flying every weekend. It was twelve dollars an hour duo, and ten dollars an hour solo. My instructor was an old World War II vet and had a big booming voice. There were no radios in the aircraft in those days and nobody wore headsets. It was incredibly noisy. He had to shout over the noise of the engines sitting in the backseat behind me.

Irvin Olsen: I learned to fly in 1950. I trained on a Cornell and a 140 Cessna. When I got my first license, you only needed thirty-two hours of flight time. I’ll tell you, when I bought my first plane, I put 70 hours on it and I would say by the time I finished my 70 hours, I was confident with my self. Thirty-two hours is not much. It cost me $175 dollars to get it. For a float endorsement, it only took a couple of hours. I really enjoyed flying—I still do.

Jim Creighton: I started in Winnipeg quite late in life. I didn’t start flying until I was 28. I saw an ad in the paper in the Winnipeg Free Press. The ad said ‘Cessna familiarization flight, $5.’ I thought, “Yeah, sure.” We flew around the city and came back again—which was a hell of a deal for $5. I thought it was great. Anyway, after this, I started taking lessons and got my private license. It was cool. I got my private license in about 1974. It was about $5000 or less. I got my commercial license later. Of course, they could never guarantee you a job at that time.

Stanley Budd: To get your private license, you needed to have 125 hours of flying time. Commercial was 300 hours (or 250). It cost me $200. The government financed lessons—$100 worth. That was a good way to do it. I got my license in 1946, I guess it was. And then, my commercial license—not until 1949.

Jack Kirk: I didn’t get my float endorsement until about 1961—through Island Airlines and Bob Langdon. That’s how I got to know all these pilots. All the pilots would help you in every way, shape or form—especially when you’re learning.

Ed Wilcock: For a commercial license, it would be a minimum of 100 hours training in the little R22 and a minimum of 80 hours ground school. It’s usually about 160 hours to pass all the transport exams. The cost would be about $45,000 and it would take about 3-4 months to do it. And it takes 4 years to make an engineer. The kids that train here will be lucky if 1 out of 10 get a job on the BC coast. It’s very hard for these kids to get started—it’s extremely hard.

Gordie Wilkinson: I was born in Nanaimo—I don’t admit that to many people. I started in Campbell River as a bus driver. My boss was out at the Spit delivering some freight one day and he knew I wanted to fly, so he talked to Bob Langdon. Bob said, “Well, send him out—we’ll take him for a ride!” At that time, they had this scheme where you could hire on for a $150 dollars a month—all you could eat. I progressed from there, and then I was hired on the day that Pete Lauren hit the cable at Seymour Narrows.

Larry Langford: I came out to the Island in 1970 and finished off my commercial license. In 1972 I got a job with Island Airlines. I was a dockhand/pilot trainee and I moved over to Trans Mountain and did the same thing there. And then got on as a line pilot in 1973.

Rolly Bartlett: It was 1973 when I first got my license. I’m an American who moved here in 1974, and I got all my licenses prior to moving here, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It cost me $800 dollars to get my private license and since I’d been in the US Military and the US Navy, they had a plan they called the GI Bill. Once you got a private license they would then pay 90% of all your flying training after that. You needed about 35 or 40 hours to get your license. Bob Langdon, who owned Island Air, wrote me a letter saying that if I came up and had my landed immigrant status, he would hire me as a radio technician. That’s the only thing that got us in really. But then, as it turned out, I became a pilot anyway.

Craig Houston: I started with Okanagan Helicopters in 1980. I was trained by float plane pilots. Al Eustace used to fly for BC Air Lines, he started in Tahsis. I was taught by someone that made all the mistakes possible in a float plane and survived. He would give me great advice.

Frank Roberts: For some reason, I ended up in Prince Rupert and met a chap there—Bill Kelsey—who was a Queen Charlotte Airlines pilot and also the instructor at the local flying club. The club was just getting started and he was recruiting people, and so I started to take flying lessons there. That was in about 1952. There was no airport in Prince Rupert in those days, so I got my first 40 hours training on floats at the seaplane base at Seal Cove, which turned out to be an advantage later on.

Harvey Hahn: I lived with my sister in Campbell River while I attended high school. The Comox Flying Club came to Campbell River to do some training once they heard that we were getting an airport. There was a whole bunch of us that got our pilot’s license at that time. They were: an Englishman named Bill Macadam, Jim Duncan, (went on to fly for Canadian Pacific and a few other airlines) and Art Price (the manager of BC Hydro). My whole private license cost me the staggering amount of just over $300.00. It was really cheap. It was about 50 hours to achieve your private pilot’s license.

Craig Houston: It’s finding a balance experience and maturity. I have 18,000 hours now, but we all started with nothing. Younger pilots are not necessarily more dangerous. In fact, sometimes when they are below 1000 hours they are safer. After a 1000, they sometimes start to get a little overconfident.

Frank Roberts: In those days to get a commercial license—which I ended up going for—you needed 200 hours. It was available for 150 hours if you went to an approved school, of which there were several. But I already had 40 hours on floats at Prince Rupert so I went to Skyway Air Service in Langley and completed my training.

Harvey Hahn: I knew Bob Langdon at Island Air and he said to me, “Come on, you have to come and work for me.” I said, “I haven’t got my commercial license yet.” He said, “We’ll work on that. You can work in the shop and the dock and work around airplanes.” When the guys flew somebody out, I would ride with them and fly back. I would pick up the flying time coming back.

Lee Frankham: My training was in Winnipeg 1945/46. We bought an airplane— myself and my buddy—and we took that up north and started hauling fish for a buck and annoying everybody. When I did the training, it didn’t take much because, as a kid my dad was with CPA and I went up to Yellowknife and I flew with Ernie Boffa who was a bit of a legend up there and we got along OK. I got my license right at age 16.

Stan Kaardal: I joined air cadets, and I had never been in an airplane before—not as a passenger or anything. I was selected for an air cadet’s scholarship to take flying lessons and I was the first air cadet in Canada ever to be trained on floats because in Prince Rupert at that time, they just had a float school there—we didn’t have an airport. So, that was kind of unique. I got my private license on floats at a very early age, it was in 1953. In fact, I didn’t fly a wheeled aircraft until I had accumulated about 300 hours.

Lyle Whyte: In some cases, we hire students from the Aircraft Engineering Course here in Campbell River. The training they receive in that course is more of an introductory into sheet metal work—which is a specialized area. What I look for in an apprentice is someone who’s got some of that (sheet metal experience) plus mechanical experience—which is from BCIT or Northern Lights College. They do a two year course in those colleges and the courses tend to be more comprehensive and students end up getting a more well-rounded education.

Bob Langdon (1975): Actually, I have always been personally associated with aviation. My father was an engineer in Regina since 1929, and I lived at the airport. I have always been around aircraft. I joined the Air Force in 1943 towards the end of the war. After I got out of the service in 1944, I took up flying in Vancouver. I think it took me three hours to solo, which is a rather short period of time, but I held the controls with my father—who was also a pilot—and had some basic knowledge.

Gord Beadle: After a while they would allow you to fly with another pilot on board. If an out-going flight had had an empty seat, the pilot, at his discretion, could let you fly. This allowed you to build up your hours. Harry Taylor was chief pilot and the one that checked us out. You would always start off in the Cessna 172 because it could only carry two passengers at the best of times.

Frank Roberts: Once I got my commercial license, I started looking for a job—which was difficult when you only had 200 hours in those days. I finally found a job with a small logging operator on the coast out of Powell River. He had camps on the coast, so I built up some time there until I finally got in with BC Air Lines as a junior pilot in 1955. I was based in Port Alice to start with and spent time at Alert Bay and Port Hardy.

Gord Beadle: One day I was in the hanger in my greasy coveralls and they needed a pilot around to do a mail run. They called me in and I said, “All I have is my greasy coveralls”. And they said, “That’s fine. You are only doing a mail run”. So away I went.

Frank Roberts: With a normal landing, you would approach the water and when you knew you were at the right height, you would level off. You couldn’t do that in a glassy water landing because you’d probably fly right into it. It was quite common. Everyone had to have ‘glassy water’ training before you started flying floats.

Gord Beadle: Once I got a commercial license it was the same old story of trying to get your foot in the door.

Len Crawford: I bought the plane from Ed Selesky who owned Pacific Wings, and he decided to throw in a float endorsement—which usually takes 10 hours and quite a few dollars. When I went down to get my endorsement, the guy who was going to give it to me was just getting ready to board an airplane to Toronto. So, he looks at his watch quickly and says, “OK, let’s get it done.” He made me do one circuit, and that’s it, I had my float endorsement! I just took off, went around and landed again!

George Crawshaw: I ended up going to the BC Vocational School in Burnaby. They had a big campus and a program there for aeronautics. It was a two year program and it kind of got you started with all the basic things with maintenance of aircraft. By the finishing of the course, you could kind of steer yourself in what direction you wanted to go. Whether you wanted to go fixed-wing, rotary or whatever in the aviation industry, you kind of had a grounding anyway of rivets and aluminum and wiring and hydraulics—everything.

Jim Creighton: Then I realized there was a pecking order—you started out with a job on the dock and you loaded aircraft, and if there was time, some friendly pilot might take you up—maybe. So I started applying for dock jobs.

Lyle Whyte: I started out in Scarborough, Ontario at Centennial College and took a 2 year course there. I then went to northern Saskatchewan and worked for a company there and eventually ended up out here and started with Vancouver Island Air.

Stan Kaardal: I was hired in 1955 by BC Packers, a fishing company, to fly a brand new 180. It was a little hotrod Cessna. I was really thrilled at that. I flew that out of Prince Rupert as far south as the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon and as far north as the northern parts of Alaska. I made $500 a month, and I made another hundred for expenses in American, and another hundred in Canadian. If I spent it all, I got no more. But if I slept in the airplane, which I did when I was a kid, I could keep it. And that’s mostly what I did.

Bob Early: I started down at the docks in 1964—the same year I graduated. I started my flight training on September 5 th, 1964 and I had my license by November 1964. That was just my private license. I got my float endorsement in March of 1965 and my commercial license in November 1965. I had 200 hours and I think I was flying passengers by the time I had 230 hours.

Dave Nilson: I started a long time ago. The war was on and I was a young kid. I joined the Air Cadets because I was nuts about airplanes and I ended up being taught how to fly. The Air Cadets paid for the first half (of training) and if you passed that alright, the Air Force would pay for the rest. So, that’s how I learned how to fly.

Weather Woes

Richard Von Fintel: Challenges of flying on the BC Coast? Crappy weather.

Harvey Hahn: You’d be an awful liar if you said there weren’t tense moments. Actually, there were lots of days like that. The scariest days that I had were in the dead of winter. Snow was really hard to fly in, and gave me the most trouble. Other situations included those long hot days where there wasn’t a breath of wind or a cloud in the sky. It seemed like everything was coming up roses and that’s when some of your scariest things would happen.

Bob Langdon (1975): I’ve had some tense times, perhaps more by accident than by anything else. You start out on a flight thinking you can make it without too much trouble, and then in a period of about half an hour the weather changes. Sometimes it gets worse. Occasionally you make the flight and you get back and you wish you hadn’t gone out; and you swear you will never do it again, and the next time it comes up it is easier to try it than sit in the office.

Larry Langford: You might not have the challenges of flying the big jets but we certainly have our challenges in this type of weather and terrain.

Bob Langdon (1975): We can get a ten mile-an-hour to twenty mile-an-hour northwesterly wind and two miles away it is blowing thirty miles an hour south east. Aerodynamically this just raises hell with the airplane.

Norene Reedel: We used to get the weather reports on these old Telex machines. They were really rattly old things. We would also get our weather from the light house or from the logging camps. You got to know the reliable weather sources, the ones you could trust and the ones you took with a grain of salt.

Bob Langdon (1975): We are basically operating on tidal water. The tide goes up and down. There is a rock here today, it is gone tomorrow. So we do have a lot of hazards. We find in our Island Airlines operation that it’s economical to keep our people, to keep our pilots for a long period of time. I think that the junior pilots have been here two years, and the average pilots have approximately 7000 hours flying time in the area. They know every rock in country, every place we go to more than once, and we go to a great deal of places more than once.

Harvey Hahn: I didn’t like it because it was something in the back of your mind. It was more psychological, but when you were flying the North coast and the weather was bad in the winter, there was always somebody there. You probably couldn’t even talk to them, but at least you could fly by and know that at least someone would remember that an airplane flew by there at 4 o’clock. So, even if something did happen to you, somebody would know where you were.

Jim Creighton: The only bad thing I can say about flying out here is the winters. In the wintertime when I initially came out here, I would have to say ‘yes’, I was pressured. You know what the storms are like around here well, you try flying in those. It’s like going ten rounds with Mike Tyson. You’re constantly being pounded in the air. It’s horrible. Some days are better than others, but generally in the wintertime, they’re horrible.

Bob Langdon (1975): The passengers are much more courageous than the pilots. They don’t know the hazards.

Norene Reedel: People that really wanted out of camp always gave good weather reports. It was kind of funny. It was always good weather when it was time to get out of camp.

Bob Langdon (1975): Occasionally they come in and say, “Well I want to go to camp anyhow because I think it’s alright up there.” And we say, “Fine, we’ll take you up there. We don’t think it’s alright up there, but we will take you. But we are afraid you will have to pay for the trip if in our judgment when we get there the weather is not too good”. They usually don’t go. They have a lot of confidence in our opinions.

Rolly Bartlett: I was flying up River’s Inlet and I was coming down into the valley, descending to about 4000 feet and there was just a little thin layer of cloud to go around, but when I got underneath, it was raining and not only was it raining, it was freezing rain. The next thing I knew, the wings were all covered in ice, and the windshield was almost covered. There was a blower, which allowed me to see out in a half-moon shape fortunately. It was December 21st, 1980. That was the same year as Mt. St. Helens and we seemed to have a couple of odd things happen that year. Like we had a really, really high tide on that day, higher than I’ve ever seen.

Harvey Hahn: You had to be really on your toes for all kinds of situations. You’d talk to yourself after a while, and you always had the “plan B option”. You did it so often, it got to be automatic. You’d fly in and look at it and say “I’ll fly in this way and if it doesn’t work out, I can get out that way.” It was always an escape thing.

Dr. Ross: The pilots were pretty good. They did make mistakes sometimes. Generally speaking, if the weather was bad they said, “No, we just can’t do it doc.”

Stanley Budd: The main challenges of flying a seaplane on the coast are weather conditions: fog, snow, high winds. Basically, the worst part of flying seaplanes from Campbell River was the lack of radio contact. If you went any further than about 15 miles, you lost radio contact. Eventually, they smartened up and got proper radios.

Bill Hill: I’ve always flown on the coast, so the weather never really bothered me that much. People from the Prairies and flatland areas were always very uncomfortable with the terrain around here. Me, I’m the other way around—I’m not comfortable being on the flat ground. I prefer mountains anytime.

Norene Reedel: At different times of the year the Spit can be fogged in, and the rest of the town and the straights are fine. I can remember a guy calling me from camp saying, “What do you mean it’s fogged in? We live down at Willow Point and my wife says it’s sunshine.” And I said, “Well, I’m sure it is.” But you know what? The fog started right at Cape Mudge and it was blotto. You couldn’t see the planes at the dock.

Dr. John Ross: Bute Inlet can get very very windy. They call it the Bute winds. They are outflow winds. You’ve got relatively warm air rising over Vancouver Island and it sucks the winds down those inlets. Cold air comes off the glaciers and goes down the slopes. Then it becomes like a ditch of very very cold air and it’s being sucked out because it is rushing down where the air is rising. And it can be bitterly cold. I’ve talked to guys who were there who said the wind blew about 80 miles and hour non stop for two weeks. And everything freezes up. The Bute Inlet winds are just unbelievable.

Frank Roberts: I think everyone who’s flown on the coast has had a few scary moments. If you knew how strong the wind was blowing, you knew whether you could get into a place or not without even leaving Campbell River. Some camps had protection from the weather. Sometimes you could get into one camp and not the next one. You had to use discretion.

Norene Reedel: In this business the customer isn’t always right because they don’t know about the weather. They think because it’s foggy and the scheduled flight is cancelled, that they can book a charter. They don’t get it.

Larry Langford: You can get 4 different types of weather within 50 miles in the spring and the fall.

Len Crawford: Long before I learned to fly, I was told that the BC Coast is the hardest place in the world to fly. The storms coming off the ocean and the high mountains and valleys here, make it extremely hard terrain to fly. You can run into 2 or 3 different kinds of weather in a hundred miles.

Norene Reedel: Towards Tahsis there’s this large hump called ‘The Lookout’. If you could see that, more than likely you could get through the pass. I can remember the pilots telling horror stories about flying through that pass.

Richard Von Fintel: With us guys that survived, we were all smart enough not to push it too far. Sometimes luck was simply on our side. Nobody ever forced us, but there was a lot of self-imposed pressure.

Stan Kaardal: The challenges of flying on the coast can be summed up in one thing: weather. I was one of the first people who got involved in fighting the closure of lighthouses on the coast. It was a big mistake; it’s still a big mistake. But the lighthouses, once you got in tune with reading and checking your weather in the morning, they were like a sheet of music to a musician.

Gord Beadle: The lighthouse keepers used to give out weather reports. It was a little comfort thing. Cape Mudge lighthouse is an example. When it’s a bit misty and and foggy, in your mind you think “Just around that corner should be a light house”. So when you see it, it’s like “Ahh”. It’s a comfort thing.

Ted Turner: I think coastal flying is some of the roughest, toughest terrain. You get a lot of turbulence out here. The passengers here don’t like it and neither does the pilot.

Bob Langdon (1975): We pretty well consider that when we have upwards of five miles visibility and no wind, this is a very flyable day. Usually when the wind reaches forty miles an hour—depending where we’re going—we usually think about quitting. This depends (of course) on the nature and importance of the flight we’re making.

Norene Reedel: There was always a summer fog in Port Hardy and you had to plan your day around that. Sometimes you had to go over the ceiling and the under it to get into some of the inlets. There was always bumpy air over Quadra. As a little kid, I didn’t like it.

Bob Langdon (1975): I think last year we probably lost two days of flying washout because of weather. On this Coast there is such a variation of weather, sometimes we can go south and we can’t go north, or we can go east and we can’t go west.

Don Thompson: My experience before coming here was with the Air Force where the planes are flown at high altitudes, and here it’s all low altitude flying. Sometimes we fly only about 10 feet from the ground. If it’s really thick weather where you can’t see, you tuck yourself up against the shoreline to give you a reference point and you fly the plane as if you’re going to land it at any minute. Just enough power so you don’t land. But if you do suddenly run out of visibility all together, you can just close the throttle and the thing will just flop onto the water. You’ve got to have fairly calm water underneath you if you do that. If it’s not calm, then you shouldn’t be there at all.

Bob Langdon (1975): We don’t go to work in the morning saying, “I wonder what hazards we are going to run into today”. We become aware of the hazards and stay away from them.

Gord Beadle: You’re one man. You’re on your own. If the weather’s bad you really don’t have time to be looking down at your map. You gotta be knowledgeable. It’s not an easy environment to fly in.

Bob Langdon (1975): Basically, with experience, you can see the air currents. You know what to expect. You know if a wind is blowing towards a mountain, then you are going to get an updraft as the wind hits the mountain and turns up. You know if you are on the leeward side of that mountain, and you have a wind, the wind is going to blow over that mountain and come down. (The key is to stay away from these situations . . . that’s all. It is purely and simply experience.

Harvey Hahn: Sometimes you would get caught in a snow storm and you would land because you couldn’t see where you were going. The trick was to keep on the step, even if you just went around in a circle. If you were in the little bay, you knew where you were. You just kept moving at about 30 miles per hour. The minute you stopped and fell off the step, the snow would land on you, and you were out of business; you had to get out and sweep it off. Of course, you’d have a broom. If you were really fortunate, you could find a logging camp to snuggle into. You could get some coffee, and borrow a broom and sweep your plane.

Walter Davidson: Without a doubt the biggest challenge to servicing logging camps on the B.C. Coast is the weather.  As these flights are done on a visual basis, as opposed to airline instrument flying, you are really at the mercy of the weather.  Of course having your own business and doing the flying gives you a lot more pressure to have a look.  Local weather forecasts on the coast are helpful, but you only have to do a little flying to realize how local the weather is. A real bad weather situation at the head of an inlet can very soon become quite acceptable as you approach the outer coast, or vice versa.

Bob Langdon (1975): On an extreme ‘glassy water’ situation you can’t judge the height of the aircraft above the water. This is when landing and within a hundred feet . . . sometimes two hundred feet. There have been fellows that have flown into the wate—literally flown into it-because when it is glassy it is like trying to put your finger on a mirror.

Bill Hill: I don’t miss the weather days. I used to think it was great to fly on bad weather days, but as you get older, you’re thinking changes.

Bob Langdon (1975): Our greatest hazard in the area is rough water, because landing and taking off on rough water loosens up the aircraft and causes a strain on it. Another hazard is snow. Snow is a very bad thing to fly in. Quite often (when you are) flying in snow, you can’t tell distance. Sometimes you are flying in snow and you have three miles visibility and all of a sudden . . . nothing.

Gord Beadle: Over open water it’s hard to tell distance because there is no reference. When you are flying up an inlet or something like that it’s not bad; but, for example, when you are going right across to Cortes Island instead of around the corner and up around Heriot Bay, you have about ten miles of open water. How much visibility you got? It’s hard to tell.

Larry Langford: We fly by sight. and the general requirement is 2 miles forward visibility and clear. But if you can’t see, you don’t go.

Bob Langdon (1975): In the bad weather, of course, we go a lot faster than the boats but not too much higher. Quite often we go two weeks at a time in the winter and we never go over 500 feet while going down the channels.

Phil Bergman: A lot of our customers have satellite internet. Rather than give us a weather report they just send us a picture; which is great because then we know exactly what it is like. On the web site we have a number of web cameras recording weather. This allows us to go on and see the weather for ourselves and not rely on outside sources. We get a picture every ten minutes which is a huge advantage.

Rolly Bartlett: In the old days, there was no one to talk to. If you didn’t know what the weather was like, you just went out and if it was no good, you came back.

Medevacs

Bob Langdon (1975): About all I can say is, in an emergency, it is usually easier to go out on a flight and try it, than it is to sit in the office and say, “There is a man real sick out there, or a woman very sick, or an injured man”. It is easier to go out on a flight with that thought than sit in the office and think, “Maybe we could make it”. So usually we go, but we do have to weigh the emergency against the hazards.

Frank Roberts: Yes, it was a pretty important part of our job. It’s not as glamorous as it’s made out to be but it was pretty essential—especially in those days when there were no roads. Now you can drive to Tahsis and Zeballos and places like that—in those days, you couldn’t. The airplane was very, very important. Nowadays, it’s the helicopters that are flying people out.

Dr. John Ross: A lot of the calls we made were to gypo loggers that had been killed. You may wonder why you would go out to see a gypo logger that is dead, but you have to understand that these gypo outfits were quite closely-knit teams. They’d been working together for years. There were usually ten or fifteen guys and they all knew each other really well. Quite often there were brothers and cousins working for these gypo outfits. When a guy got killed nobody really wanted to take responsibility and say he was dead because they felt so bad. They just didn’t feel like they could declare them dead, so a lot of the runs we went out to were to declare them dead and bring them back.

Tom Langdon: It looks overwhelming at first. You see page after page of accolades from the newspaper of the “Daring-do”, “Risked life and limb in zero visibility”. You’d think this fellow was some kind of superman. Back then this was big news. They didn’t have an awful lot else to write about except loggers getting hurt, but now they were flying out in airplanes, which was new. Everything my dad did back then, through the 40s and even through the 50s, hadn’t really been done before in this area. It was all pretty new so they wrote a lot about it. But back then it was a bit more wild and wooly. People like my dad went and got their butt kicked trying to get around in this stuff to figure it all out. So it was news and it was interesting to people and it made a big splash.

Gord Beadle: The unspoken rule of medevacs: you always tried to go. At times the fog and snow was so bad, the guys would just land and step taxi, which is basically hopping along the water. It was fairly common. Some pilots took more risks than others. When a medevac call came in the dispatcher would ask the next person in line if they wanted to go. That was the rule. If that guy didn’t want it, he could turn it down, but it was important to be diplomatic when you turned it down. It was better to say, “No, I don’t feel up to it today” rather than, “Well, the weather is way below limits, I can’t do the trip”. It left things open and didn’t put the next guy in line on the spot.

Dr. John Ross: I never lost a patient in flight. Usually we transported guys with broken legs or some crushing injury. More often than not, the guy was already dead. We did often transport in difficult conditions. Prior to the BC Government taking over responsibility, a lot of these aircraft weren’t really suited to handling a stretcher. I don’t think we could get a stretcher in a Cessna. We always used to take the Beaver.

Valerie Todd: There were a lot of deaths in the forest back in the day. It was crazy. Every week you’d be going to pick someone up that was killed or badly injured. Sometimes you’d have multiples in a week.

Ed Wilcock: We probably do 2 to 3 emergencies a month, mostly for the logging business.

George Crawshaw: Back then, fire-fighting and med-evacs played a large role. The machines were capable of carrying stretchers which was great because you could get someone to the hospital pretty darn fast. The establishment of heli-pads at the hospital was a big thing too.

Dr. John Ross: There was an interesting guy by the name of Jack Pickup. Jack Pickup was at Alert Bay. He flew himself out to accidents. He was quite an interesting man. I met him a few times. He was a saint really. He worked up in Alert Bay for about forty years. He was the only doctor and he did everything. I don’t think he was appreciated as much as he should have been. Why he did it, I don’t know. I guess he just liked being a bit different. He was quite a guy and quite a musician.

Stan Kaardal: We did all the medevacs. Of course, there were no helicopters operating in those days, so we used to go out in some horrendous weather . . . You’re not allowed to go out at night, only daylight hours, even in an emergency. Some people might have done it, but I never did because basically you’re probably putting yourself and the patient more at risk.

Norene Reedel: Medevacs became part of our daily routine. I remember one day doing ten. And that was not including all our regular charters etc. You’d phone the ambulance and they would wait for the plane at the dock and take the injured guy to the hospital. Injuries in the bush are usually pretty nasty. These guys had power saw cuts, crushed limbs, stuff like that. That was always tough.

Bill Hill: Once the helicopters got involved they took over medevacs from the planes. And the other thing is that we were able to go right to the accident site with helicopters. That made a big difference in airplanes not doing as much.

Gord Beadle: We did a lot of medevacs. For the first year I was strictly on the Cessnas—which is normal for rookies—and then I got checked out on the Beaver. Once you were on the Beaver you did lots of Medevacs. We would do three or four a week. We were servicing all types of Indian reserves as well, so all types of medevacs would come out of it.

Steve Todd: We didn’t charge for medevacs back then. They were a courtesy to the communities we were dealing with. Medevacs were more coordinated with the larger companies, but the Gypo loggers were out there all by themselves. A lot of the time they couldn’t even do first aid. There was no requirement for first aid attendants in those days. All he could do is hold a rag on the wound and hope someone gets there in time.

Jackie Langdon: In the early years they did a lot of that—flying when they shouldn’t have been out there to bring back some injured logger. This was big news in Campbell River. Every time he got a medical emergency, the newspapers got word of it. And the doctors used to fly with him too: Dr Hall and Dr. Depew because Campbell River had the hospital. There were some cases where they made a big difference.

Mark Murphy: When I was with Island Airlines we used to do a couple of stretcher cases a week. The logging industry and the floatplane industry are really intertwined. Always have been.

Norene Reedel: It is tough when you are dealing with life and death. We didn’t save them all. We didn’t get there in time for all of them, but we did our best.

Phil Bergman: For a long time, before helicopters, med-evacs were done by floatplane. Pilots from the early 60s and 70s will tell stories where doctors went along to deal with life threatening injuries. It was a huge part of the industry for years. It’s an unfortunate part of our business, but sometimes you have to drop what you are doing and help someone that is badly hurt somewhere. That’s just what you do. Sometimes the injured wouldn’t make it, but sometimes a life was saved because of the floatplanes. That’s life on the coast.

Bob Langdon (1975): And we’ve had people unfortunately, (that) have had logging accidents. They’ve died on the aircraft. This is one of the things you get into in the business—we are an ambulance as well as anything else. I have personally done up to as many as ten emergency trips in a day. Over a period of many years, I would doubt whether more than one or two patients of the hundreds that Island Airlines has brought in, would have died had we not brought them in right away, but if it were only one, it would be worth it. And there is a great effort that goes into these emergencies.

Larry Langford: Medevacs were very common. There were few, if any helicopters and there wasn’t a provincial dispatch service, so we were called out on a constant basis. Of course, there were far more people in the bush, and safety regulations weren’t as high then. Not many lately. It’s not a nice part of the job.

Walter Davidson: I recall bringing a mechanic from Nimpkish camp to Vancouver with an attack of appendicitis.  It was extremely rough with a strong easterly.  It seemed at times we were almost standing still trying to get past Kelsey Bay. A worrisome trip.

Rolly Bartlett: It just seems that the medevacs were often a thing where you just did what you had to do. A stretcher case was really difficult in the Beaver because the seats all had to be moved—you had to remove the pilot’s seat so you could get it in there and at the same time, you’re trying to be gentle with the person. We don’t see that anymore. It’s all dealt with the helicopters now.

Val Todd: A lot of these companies have their own boats now too. So if they are in a short distance from the island they’ll just use the boats for medevacs.

Bob Langdon: I personally had a baby born on an airplane in 1949. This happened on a twelve mile trip would you believe? And the baby chose about the center of the trip—about the six mile area, to be born. And this is one of the greatest hazards to flying in coastal British Columbia. We are frightened to death of this. We can stand wind and rain and snow but when they start bearing their children on an aircraft . . . !? Sometimes the mother has been alone. The pilot is absolutely powerless to help at all, and about all we can do is get to where we are going about as fast as we can go.

Norene Reedel: I remember once Kevin Thompson was flying in from Guilford Village. He had this little gal on board and she was having a baby. Poor Kevin. We sent this poor guy out and all he knew was that he’s picking up this pregnant lady out of Guilford. I’d call him up and say, “Hey Kev, where are you now?” And he’d say, “I’m Chatham inbound and there’s a helluva lotta grunting and groaning going on back there.” She had an attendant with her so luckily all he had to do was fly. “I just want to get this thing home”, he’d say. Then, a short time later, he said, “I guess it’s here. I can hear it.” So the baby was born on the Otter.

Dr. John Ross: Around the early 60s, I got called out to Squirrel Cove. There was an old man over there; a fine old guy and his wife. They lived all by themselves and I think they lived there for a long time. His wife thought he had a heart attack because he had some terrible crushing pain in his chest. She had access to a radio and she phoned. So the pilot and I flew over and the old guy really did look pretty rocky. But he was one of those tough old birds; he didn’t like doctors. Actually, I don’t think he liked anybody except his wife. I can’t remember his name, but I said to him, “Mr. So and So, the pilot and I can make a chair with our arms and carry you down to the plane.” “No way!” he says, “Bullshit! I’m not gonna be packed down by a couple of city slickers.”

He walked very slowly down to the plane which was about a hundred yards away. There was no wharf there. The land just sloped into the water. To get to the plane there was about an eight foot plank that went out to the pontoon. The pilot and I both offered to help him by having one of us in front of him and one behind. He wouldn’t let us do that. He absolutely refused. He didn’t want any help at all. He walked out on this plank, got half way out and fell right over into the water. I had a suit on because I’d been working in the office—a new suit. I looked at the pilot and he looked at me and he said, “Well, you are the doctor not me.” I walked right up to my chest, brand new suit and fished the old guy out. He later died. He shouldn’t have been walking.

Bill Hill: I had one guy who had a heart attack. He was the father of one of the pilots for Island Air at that time. We were over in Toba Inlet looking at a piece of ground that he had staked. He was on prescription heart medication and he wasn’t supposed to be climbing over the rocks, but apparently he didn’t heed his doctor’s advice. He started to feel bad and started popping his nitro glycerine and then he kept getting worse so he kept popping the nitro, and of course, he OD’d on it. I had to fly him straight to the hospital and thankfully, he made it. He was in the front seat, and he fell forward, and his son who was sitting in the back seat had to grab a hold of him and hold him back because he couldn’t breathe.

Close Calls

Gordie Wilkinson: There are some versions of that story that people tell that aren’t the whole truth. One of the stories is that when the airplane hit the cable, it did a somersault. Well, it didn’t. The practice in those days was to fly low over Seymour Narrows so the passengers could look down into the whirlpools. That’s what Pete (Lauren) was doing. Hydro was supposed to let us know when they were stringing the cables across, but they didn’t. They put up the cable and Pete ran into it. It sawed through all of the struts except the last one and then the cable broke and it whipped up and took out one aileron and half the tail and, of course, the floats were up into the prop by this time and he just went flat into the water. There was a guy who used to live out in Willow Point who was out on a powerboat that day, so he roared up to the airplane after it crashed and the pilots just jumped into the boat and didn’t even get their feet wet! He had one passenger – Dan Holt. That was in January 1956. Pete (Lauren) was flying for BC Air Lines when he hit the cables.

Stanley Budd: The closest I ever came to a real problem was when we had our twin-engine turbo prop. When you change an engine, you have to go up to 10,000 feet and do a test flight—feather the engine, shut it off and make sure it’s working properly. As soon as I did that, the other engine quit. So, I had no engines for about 5 minutes. I was gonna put it on the beach at White Rock, not with the wheels down because the sand’s too soft, but in about a foot of water. Anyway, out of desperation, I happened to hit both start switches at the same time. One engine started, so I just left it. That was very scary. We found out later that the mechanics had reversed the fuel leads, which is stupid, but it’s very simple to do that.

Irvin Olsen: I ran into a snowstorm and panicked. I was flying a 180. I landed and tried to get in the water, and I dug a float, and the plane went over. I had my foreman with me, and he took off, swimming for shore and I told him ‘Get back here! This thing floats!’ So he was on one float, and I was on the other. We paddled it to shore there, and tied it to a limb hanging out over the water. We were near the mouth of Kingcome Inlet. I guess it was only about 45 minutes, and we heard this ‘thump, thump, thump’ sound in the distance, and it was prawn boat. We were very fortunate. The insurance company sold the plane, but it hung on that limb there for seven days. Dave Nilson was with the barge when they came to lift the plane out of the water.

Larry Langford: I had one boat that almost ran into us at full speed. We were landing in a Cessna and you have a blind spot. The boat was coming up on an angle and a customer in the right seat happened to see him out of the corner of his eye. He tapped me on the shoulder and I leaned forward and I could see the boat, so I peeled over to the left and he saw me at the last minute and missed us by about 15 or 20 feet. That’s the closest call I’ve had with a boat.

Jackie Langdon: Before we were married, we were flying home from Vancouver in his SeaBee. There was this little southeast chop that morning. We had a fellow who was one of the CEOs for New Westminster Saw Mills riding along. I was riding in the front seat and this fellow was riding in the back seat. We were just off Gibson’s and the SeaBee blew a pot and the cabin filled with smoke. I didn’t have a clue of what was going on. Bob was very calm. He said, “I think maybe we’ll just set her down.” Calm and cool. No panic. And the fellow in the back seat was getting quite nervous. Bob just sat there and was calm as a cucumber. He took that SeaBee down and hit that chop and we bounced probably about 20 feet. We bounced up and down a few times until finally we settled in the chop. Bob got a hold of the radio and that’s when he started to shake. There wasn’t a tremor out of him until we had landed and that’s when I realized it had been pretty serious.

He picked up the radio and his hand was just shaking and he was calling, “Mayday!” He called the office in Vancouver and they sent word to Gibsons. Gibsons eventually sent out a boat. BC Air Lines had sent up another Seabee, who couldn’t land; it was too rough to land. I think it was a police boat that towed us into Gibsons. We were only in Gibsons for a few hours. It is quite protected. The Seabee could land in Gibsons and were picked up and flown home.

Norene Reedel: Old Jack Gleadle was our senior pilot and he’d been flying for a hundred years or so. One day he was coming in on one of our Cessnas and the tide had gone out so a lot of the sand bar showing. For some reason he plopped down a little short and stuck the nose of the Cessna in the sand. I was sitting there thinking, “Oh Christ!” I had passengers in the waiting room so I just kind of wandered in and talked to them so they wouldn’t look out the window. Someone went out on the boat and got the passengers off. They were a little shook up but otherwise fine. I saw Jack walking up the dock and I said, “Jack, what the hell were you doing?” and he said in his very soft voice, “You know what? I just got a little complacent.” And that’s about the only explanation he gave. I don’t know what he was thinking. He’d done it a thousand times. As the tide came up they righted the plane and pulled it to the hanger. As it went by the office window someone said, “Excuse me maam, do you know where our plane is at?” Then the dock boy says, “There’s your plane”, as the thing went taxiing by. I was thinking, “Oh God, little do they know!” They hadn’t seen what had happened. It was so funny.

Richard Von Fintel: Chuck Jensen was a pilot here around 1976-1977. In the summer we would sometimes take mountain climbers up to the base of the Tellit Glacier. Chuck, in a single otter, was booked to drop supplies for this particular group. It was one of those wonderful, blue-sky days without a breath of wind.

Chuck had a guy on board that was going to shuffle all the supplies out the hatch. They did a swing over the drop area to check it out for wind currents and everything seemed fine. When they got to the drop area on the next pass Chuck’s instruments indicated a calm and rippleless sky. Unbeknownst to him, it was actually blowing about sixty miles an hour. There were climbers up there who witnessed everything and they attested to the strong winds because they were dealing with them on their climb. Anyhow, Chuck does this low pass over the drop area thinking the air is nice and calm and the next thing he knows a down draft just smashes him down onto the ice. Suddenly, instead of wonderful, blue-sky, he is looking at sheer cliffs ahead of him and the open edge of the glacier to the left. This was a little different then his plan to fly in low, make a left turn and gracefully fly off the edge of the glacier. Luckily, as he got smashed onto the ice, the left wing caught and kind of skewed the plane around so it was facing left towards the open edge of the glacier again. As the plane hit, it bounced about five or six times and Chuck just kept the throttle open and applied full power. When the plane got to the edge of the drop-off he just stuffed the nose down, prayed, and tried to maintain air speed. He made it back, but the plane was badly damaged. He was lucky.

Jack Kirk: Bad weather, you really don’t want to remember a lot of it. I was with Fred LaChapelle one time, going up to the head of Knight Inlet and we had a lift cylinder for a blade for a Cat and goddarn, we got this thing in the back and we come in through the entrance to the Knight and there was a big squall there. Oh man, it was rough – couldn’t see nothin’. Fred said ‘well, we better get to the head and get rid of this thing because we’re gonna have trouble coming out’ and some guys came out and took this cylinder out. Fred started it up and at that point they had 2 big barges at the breakwater. And Fred, he pulled out, full flaps down, we had the doors open – everything. And he sailed the airplane back into the quiet water. And we closed everything off, and he milked off what flap he didn’t need for take-off, and poured it on. I never thought that an airplane over 5000 lbs would hang onto a propeller, and it did. We hit 2 swells and we were just a’hangin there. I scared the devil out of me but…Boy, we came outta there. That’s one of the worst ones I guess.

Walter Davidson: I recall a weather incident in Jervis Inlet.  I was flying out from camp and climbing. I was distracted when the time keeper called on the radio to give a last minute parts list.  A pilot from Tyee Air was coming towards me and told me to watch out.  I looked ahead and there was a solid line of very heavy cloud down to the water.  I immediately started to descend and was in the cloud before I could turn back.  I was crossing a large bay and lost sight of the water.  The rain was hammering on the windshield like a fire hose. All of a sudden the windshield was filled with a wall of green timber as I crossed the bay.  I pushed the nose down and turned hard to the right for a second or two, and then, by good luck more than skill, I leveled the nose and wings and felt the aircraft bump onto the water flat and upright.  As we were descending through the weather I heard one my passengers, a faller, repeating, “Any second, any second.”  After landing I asked him what that was about. He said that was how long we had till the crash.  A close call.  I flew approximately 10,000 hours luckily with no accidents. 

Jack Kirk: I got stuck badly one time. I was delivering an airplane for one of the former engineers they had here for BC Air Lines. This airplane had been seized for non-payment and so he asked me if I’d take it down. So I loaded it up and took off from Abbotsford. I couldn’t quite make Pender Harbour—there was just a wall of weather in front of me. So I turned around, and there’s Jarvis Inlet weathered in, and I’m closed right off, I’m in a hole. And I have wheels on this airplane, not floats. I’m thinking, ‘What on earth am I going to do here?” By this time, I started using the ADF-automatic direction. I changed from CD, which is Cassidy, to BLI, which is Bellingham, to get around the Vancouver International—all the heavies coming and going. They would have violated me if they’d caught me. Then I changed to XX, which is Abbotsford, but lightning would let go and it would upset the ADF and it would go to the strongest signal, which is BLI. Holy Mackarel! It’s pulling me to the south. I shut it off, turned it on, and finally I get it right. All of a sudden I look left and there’s all the radio receiving equipment, the towers and everything. I’m thinking ‘Oh, boy’. I swung around. I never even got a hold of the tower. I just put it on the ground. And the guy sent me home by bus. I never, ever delivered another airplane. That’s pretty damn scary. I felt good when I got it on the ground, but I felt even worse when he put me on the goddarn bus.

Bob Early: The Otter accident happened on the backside of Mt. Washington. I was about 4 or 5 miles from Mackenzie Lake, which was my destination. I’m thankful that it happened where it did because I was going in with just one passenger and it happened when I was taking off out of that lake. It wouldn’t have been very pretty if there was no roads immediately close to try and land on. The first thing I noticed was a slight, little whiff of smoke went through the cockpit. I wondered, “What the heck was that?” I thought maybe I had some wiring burning off or something in the back. I was looking down at the gauges, trying to figure out what was going on and trying not to let my passenger know that I was concerned about something. Then all of a sudden, the engine started hitching, and this went on for a while and then BOOM! We’re going down, that’s all there is to it. My passenger was pretty calm, I think – I wasn’t looking at him, but he never made any noise. There were no other lakes around there that I could reach. When you’re coming down fairly steep, they don’t glide very well, probably about a 45 degree angle and I only had at that time about 400 feet. I was still thinking that I was gonna be able to chug back to Campbell River or to a lake. Campbell River was about 20 minutes away. Another three or four miles and I would have been out of the mountain part of the landscape and then there was Wolf Lake and better logging roads that I could have landed on. Where I had to come down was like a corner. There was one tree there that I knew I had to hit to get to the road. I always remembered what one of my instructors said, ‘If you ever have to hit a tree, hit it in close to the fuselage because if you hit it on your wingtip, it will cartwheel you.” So I nailed this thing right on the nose of the float, busted the tree right off and then it was only another 200 feet to the road, I guess. The tree took away my airspeed so I couldn’t square the plane to land flat. I got the plane up a little bit but it hit nose-down and it pushed the floats up into the fuselage and one wingtip hit the bank. But it was smooth. Nobody was hurt, not even a bump or a scratch. I remember my passenger said something like “Oh, I’m glad we made it.” or something like that. I said, “Get the hell outta here!!!” because I thought there might be a fire or something. We bailed out and looked at it, and we figured there wasn’t going to be a fire, so I went back in the plane and tried to call on the radio. I couldn’t get through, so I tried the Campbell River Airport. I didn’t really want to call the emergency rescue. So, I get a hold of the radio operator at the airport and asked her if she wouldn’t mind calling the office for me and asking them to send a plane up for us. A little while later, I saw a Cessna 185 skimming over the trees, trying to find us. The emergency rescue ended up coming for us anyway, even though we didn’t really need them. The plane cost quite a bit more to fix than we realized, but it went back to flying eventually.

Brian McConnan: Sometime we ended up staying over night when we had to go fix a plane. We were usually in a logging camp. I had to pick up an airplane out of Friendly Cove. Friendly Cove is on the west coast, around Nootka Island. It was trying to take off, and hit a couple of big swells. Anyway, it was quite rough, and the pilot broke the float struts, so that was the end of that. They just let it sit there. I went in and figured out what I needed to fix it. They took me up to the nearest logging camp just up the coast from there. I stayed there the night. The next morning the cook kicked me out and that’s another story. The logging camp was quite an interesting life. That particular night, I ran into a preacher friend of mine that I had known in Vancouver. He was trying to convert the loggers. So, I was talking to him about ten minutes and by the time I looked back there was nobody else there. I guess I was pretty tired, and the next morning a bunch of guys lined up for the plane. I said “What happened to you guys?” “Oh, we all got fired!”. I guess they had it coming. It was a great time, though. Anyway, I tried not to get stuck if I could help it. Some of the places I would take the keys out of the plane. I never had any trouble. I had a good time

Favorite Flying Machines

Tom Langdon: Back in those days the machinery wasn’t very reliable. The SeaBee was awful. It was terrible. The only thing it had going for it was it was built like a tank. It was really hard to wreck it. It had a very strong air frame; so, you could generally survive landing in rough water and putting it on the beach and stuff if you didn’t completely destroy it.

Dave Nilson: Some of the oldest airplanes I’ve flown are usable today. A lot of them aren’t financially a good idea. But a lot of them I liked. I used to laugh at SeaBees until I flew one.

Walter Davidson: I flew my SeaBee 900 hours and it gave me very good service.  There were at that time a few SeaBees in the logging business. I had many experiences with the SeaBee during the 900 hours I flew it.

Bob Langdon (1975): Flying boats like the SeaBee were quite a good aircraft. The SeaBee has a stronger hull—can land in rougher water. We tend to discount the flying boat now—not that it is not a good aircraft—just that floats are more practical to this type of operation. Often the SeaBee, for one example, took a lot more room to take off so that you were on the rougher water for a lot longer. But the basic disadvantage to the boat, it was awkward to dock.

Stan Budd: We sent the Rockwell 690B up to Campbell River and Wally Wiggins flew it out of there. But it was ancient, built in about 1939. It was a good airplane, but it was old. You really had to manhandle that old plane, not like modern airplanes. And, we had the odd guy fall out. It just had little latch doors behind there. Ninety percent of the guys you flew with were drunk or hungover, so they’d grab ‘em and pull ‘em back in again.

Brian McConnan: They’re all a pain in the ass!. Anyway the Husky is probably the worst because it was old and the engine was underpowered by 40 %. It was good for carrying contractors around, but didn’t like to carry loads, so we converted it to a larger engine. It worked quite a bit better.

Tom Langdon: The SeaBee was kind of like a boat. It was kind of like a big ol’ 1950s Chevy: big seats, lots of room. It was a big aircraft with not very much horsepower and it wasn’t very reliable.

But I had my own plane, a Fairchild Cornell—me and another fella bought it for $700. We did most of our commercial training on it.

Don Braithwaite: My first airplane was a J3 Cub on wheels which I kept at the Cassidy Airport in Nanaimo. I lived in Nanaimo at the time so on weekends I would fly it around. In 1959 I bought an Aeronca Sedan which I used to fly back and forth to camp.

Jack Kirk: With the SeaBee, the pilot sits way back from the main screen and the passenger is back aways too. But what bothered me was they have a 50 pound chunk of lead in the front to set up the weight and balance. Their glide angle was like a blacksmith’s anvil—they didn’t want to cooperate too easily. They were a very heavy machine—high-lift wings. Everything was very heavy.

Stan Budd: SeaBees were always breaking down. They had a tendency to lose oil out of the chain propeller mechanism, and you could monkey-wrench around and fix it if it wasn’t too badly damaged.

Walter Davidson: My first aircraft was a 1939 Stenson—a three-place, tail wheel machine. After a number of scares over water on wheels, I soon realized this was not the way to go. 

Len Crawford: We bought our plane in June of 1959. I was like a child with a new toy! It was a Piper Super Cub on floats—a poor man’s Beaver!

Jackie Langdon: When Bob started flying the float planes with BC Air Lines, people on the coast were afraid of these little airplanes that sat way up high on these two little spindly sticks and two little floats. They liked the comfortable feeling of the SeaBee, which is like a boat.

Len Crawford: We’ve still got the invoice for Piper Super Cub. We ordered it straight from the factory, brand new, through Pacific Wings in Vancouver. We paid $11,359 dollars for it. I never had a radio in the plane for about 5 years because I never had anybody to talk to. I didn’t need one!

Harvey Hahn: I really, really liked the Cessna. They were fast. It was kind of a greedy thing there because you would make more money with it. They get more mileage and they turn around faster. The Beavers were slow but they could carry a lot of freight. It would slow you down. You had to stop and unload and we never got paid for that.

Stan Budd: I flew Beavers, Cessna 180’s, 172’s, 185’s and 195’s. The Beaver is the old standby.

Dave Nilson: The Husky was a strange airplane. It was the Fairchild Aircraft Corporation that actually built the airplanes—this was at the end of the war. They built some airplanes for the military as well when the war was on. It was a long time ago. The Husky was underpowered. There was only 12 made and I think I’ve worked on 7 of them. I’m the world’s leading expert on repairing Huskies. I’ve rebuilt them, I’ve flown them, and I’ve redesigned stuff on them too.

Don Braithwaite: Island Airlines, they didn’t have Beavers at the time, they had their Husky aircraft but that thing always had problems.

Steve Todd: Most of the old pilots will have a story about engine failure in an Otter. Of course the Single Otter has been converted to turbine now and is a far more reliable aircraft because of it.

Jack Kirk: There wasn’t that many (Huskys) made and they were very under powered. They had the same engine as the Beaver—the R985 Pratt & Whitney. They were a good flying airplane. The whole back end would open up. It would look kind of weird with chunks of lumber hanging out, aluminum pipes for TV antennas, this kind of stuff. They hauled it all.

Don Braithwaite: Then I bought a Cessna 180. I got a brand new one. It was quicker and could pack more and the whole issue.

Dave Nilson: Some Cessna products could be a little tricky. The ‘magneto’ in an aircraft is like the distributor cap in a car, only it generates its own power. Bendix-Magnetos were always a standard part, but they eventually they started replacing them with cheaper ones. I had a lot of trouble with them. They always failed. Eventually, I complained so much to Cessna that they gave me the Annual Product Improvement Award.

Walter Davidson: I started logging in Jervis Inlet and bought a Cessna 185.  I flew this aircraft approximately 4,700 hours. It was a real workhorse.  I kept it for 8 years and traded it for a Beaver. I bought the beaver at a Ritchie Bros. Auction for approximately $60,000.00.  They were selling 10 years later for $300,000.00. 

Gord Beadle: I never really got to fly the 172 too much because I was pretty big and heavy and it was really weight dependent. It could hold roughly a pilot and two passengers and about 50lbs of luggage. Anymore than that was pushing it. We would use them for mail runs to places like Thurlow.

Mark Murphy: The Beaver is overrated. I like the 185 myself. The 185 is a bit sportier. It’s kind of like a sports car: fast and powerful, whereas the Beaver is just a plodder. The Beaver does a really good job, but it’s not fast and it’s noisy. A 185 goes about 140 MPH, the Beaver 110. But when you’re bucking a 30 MPH southeaster, it makes a big difference.

Irvin Olsen: My 185 was my favorite plane to fly.

Bill Alder: Beavers and Cessnas are the most popular around here, although Cessnas are falling out of favor with a lot of operators because of the high costs of running them.

Jack Kirk: I love a 180 on standard gear. I’ve had a lot of time on Cessna 172’s.

Steve Todd: Life and Death. Black and white. (Differences between Otter and Beaver) The otter was supposed to be the super Beaver. It came after. It was kind of an under powered, big aircraft. They needed a bigger engine. It was a very good flying aircraft, but they had problems with the engine durability. They were failing on a regular basis.

Richard Von Fintel: Back in the 80s the Single Otters were blowing jugs left, right and center. They had bad reputations and quite a few failures. It got to a point where we really shouldn’t have been flying them beyond gliding distance over water because the engine was so unreliable.

Don Braithwaite: I went logging up Knight Inlet in 1966 and then I got myself a Beaver because I had to move more stuff back and forth all the time.

Mark Murphy: And the Beavers, they’re a good airplane as far as being able to rebuild them. You can rebuild them so they’re nice and tight again. Unlike a Cessna, you rebuild them and they’re all rattley and shaky. The Beaver is a tough airplane, for sure.

Brian McConnan: The beaver, in my opinion would be the safest. They work well. The work horse! We used to do drops from the back of the beaver. I used to drop supplies. We were tied in and had to remember not to tie ourselves to the packages.

Bob Langdon (1975): I would say that 95% of the equipment flown in this type of work are a combination of Cessna and de Havilland.

Gord Beadle: It is far easier flying jets than flying the Beaver. In a jet, you basically roll down the runway, pull the stick back and then reach down and punch the auto pilot. After that you ring the buzzer for a coffee.

Stan Kaardal: My favourite airplane is the Beaver. The de Havilland Beaver was such a beautiful airplane and it was such a high performance airplane. It was so easy to fly, so forgiving. I just love the airplane.

Mark Murphy: Beavers, you could buy new from the factory in the early 60’s for 50,000 bucks and now you can’t buy one for under $350,000, so that’s the one place you can make money—in aircraft appreciation.

Irvin Olsen: The planes I bought were a good investment too. I bought a Beaver from Tyee Air Service for $50,000. We put it down at Aeroflight in Vancouver and they did some metalwork and engine work, and then we flew it for 3 years and I sold it for $190,000.

Mark Murphy: The first Beaver I bought for $50,000, and sold it for a lot more…

Norene Reedel: I don’t think anything could beat the old Beaver, and the single Otter is nothing but an old workhorse. She’s quite an airplane and they’re still flogging around today!

Frank Roberts: Well, the Beaver was like a flying pick-up truck. It was versatile. It was an excellent performer for getting off the water on a short distance, and quite often, that helped you when you were going into an area with rough weather. They also carried a good load, were good performers, and a good reliable workhouse.

Steve Todd: They were developing the Beaver in ‘46 and were in production during the 50s. A lot of things happened with this aircraft that normally doesn’t happen with the development of an aircraft. de Havilland went shopping for customers for something they hadn’t designed yet. They went to the bush and said, “What do you need for your aircraft for your operation?”

Stan Kaardal: When de Havilland built the Beaver they took a lot of the engineering from the Norseman. There were a lot of Norseman here on the coast because they were operated by Queen Charlotte Airlines and by Pacific Western. I think airline-wise, BC Airlines was one of the last operators to operate any number of them. They had them based here and at Port Alberni.

Bill Alder: The new parts are manufactured by Viking. They own the type certificate for the Beaver—they can manufacture everything. They could manufacture the whole airplane if they wanted to.

Steve Todd: I ended up with a fascination for (the Beaver) and what it could do. It’s versatility, how safe it is to fly in that aircraft. No matter how it looked on the outside, you knew that sucker was going to fly . . . So it’s become known as the greatest bush plane in the world.

Craig Houston: Frank Beban in Nanaimo got one of the first de Havilland Beavers and it was considered to be a Cadillac. It was $20,000 or something like that to buy it and it was considered to be extravagant.

Don Braithwaite: As far as I’m concerned, the Beaver is the best aircraft ever built. I just fell in love with that airplane. I don’t know how many thousands of hours I got on them going up and down the coast.

Steve Todd: The American military were looking for an aircraft and . . . that was the first time Americans bought a non-American made aircraft. The orders the American military made bumped up the production line, which made it easier for them to make for civilians. There were only 60 turbine Beavers manufactured on the production line. Now they are converting the standard Beavers into turbine at Viking air in Victoria.

Walter Davidson: My all time favorite airplane for coast flying is, without question, the de Havilland Beaver. 

Don Braithwaite: I was in the coffee shop and Langdon said, “Are you going to get an Otter? It will never work in here. It won’t land in the river. It’s too big of airplane.” Loggers go for anything’s that bigger. Move more stuff.

Harvey Hahn: Bob Langdon was actually pretty smart. Everyone wanted to get a Twin Otter. Bob thought they were money eaters. He couldn’t see any way to make money with it.

Steve Todd: The Otter has this humongous, ugly, big tail on it, which I hated with a passion when I was a dock hand. The slightest breeze would catch that thing and it’s heavy. I got arthritis in my hands at that time just from those ropes. The pilots hated it because it could carry so much cargo and they had to load it in and out.

Don Braithwaite: I turned around and bought a Twin Otter. It cost about 800 hundred thousand dollars. Biggest cheque I ever wrote in my life!

Harvey Hahn: (Twin Otters) are very labor intensive on floats. They require a lot of maintenance. You have to have two pilots on board - expensive to fly. Float planes just barely break even, but twin engine airplanes!

Don Braithwaite: The Otter just got me more and more business all the time. Those airplanes did nothing but make me money.

Steve Todd: The Twin Otter was the elite group and everyone wanted to be left or right seat on that thing.

Norene Reedel: That’s when the Twin Otter really came in handy. It is a great machine for shuttling quickly because it could carry a lot of passengers and it could get in and out of docks really easily because it had reverse.

Steve Todd: The Twin Otter is a fantastically designed aircraft. When I was with Island Airlines, Gulf Air had one and we wanted one. We bought one from Calm Air and had it painted in Vancouver. We were proud like crazy of that aircraft.

Irvin Olsen: Everybody claims that the Beaver’s the airplane, but after we had the Otter, there’s no comparison.

Walter Davidson: The Stranraer was a little before my time but, in spite of their looks, were a good load hauler and a reliable machine.

Don Thompson: They had the old Stranraer flying boats. They eventually came to be known as ‘Whistling Shithouses’ for the sound they made flying through the air. The noise was caused by the struts and wires that held them together.

Craig Houston: This base was here in 1966 and they started out with Bell 47’s. The company bought a couple of Jet Rangers and they were just terrible machines. They threw blades and they couldn’t keep them running. And then the company decided to go with Hiller—they had brought out a new turbine helicopter. The company got the bad name of ‘Hiller Killers’ because we had 12 of them and we had 4 accidents. We ended getting rid of them. But they could actually out-lift the Jet Rangers. They outperformed the Jet Ranger until they put a different engine in the Ranger.

Stan Kaardal: Wonderful airplane (the Norseman), I loved it. It was canvas and wood, very little metal, a seven passenger airplane. They were really well built, but not as good a performer as the Beaver. But it was a wonderful old airplane. The last one I knew of was being flown by Hannah Air out of Nanaimo and it could still be in existence somewhere

Phil Bergman: We have a twin engine Beech 18, which carries nine passengers. The Beech 18 is rare because only 70 were ever put on floats and we have the only one on the coast of British Columbia.

Larry Langford: A Beech is certified to fly on one engine. If you’re at altitude and you lose an engine, it’s not really a crisis; you’ve got the time to deal with it. Let’s put it this way—I’d rather be in a twin-engine airplane and have one engine quit than be in a single engine airplane and have one engine quit.

Stan Kaardal: My favourite aircraft from a standby of fun, was the Grumman Mallard. It was a luxury aircraft when they first built it.

Bob Langdon (1975): If Cessna were making an aircraft adaptable to floats that would carry six or seven passengers, I am sure we would roll along with that. The de Havilland fills the gap. It’s built for this type of operation more so perhaps than the Cessna.

Dave Nilson: The Grumman Goose was a lot of trouble. We flew them out of here, the flying boats. They were old, second World War stuff.

Brian McConnan: The bigger Cessnas, the 180’s, 185’s, are the same size airplane, but one has a bigger engine that is fuel injected. The other ones, the beavers, are fine and have very few problems. The Beavers have a Pratt and Whitney R 95’s. 985 cubic inches, 450 horse power.

Stan Budd: We also had a hotrod too…a Mustang. A couple of us down at the airport bought one. I sure wish we had it now—they’re worth a million dollars now. We paid $13,000 dollars for it in 1969. But it burned 80 gallons an hour, a real gas-guzzler. It would go about 400 miles an hour. Lots of fun, but noisy!

Stan Kaardal: The ‘Found’ aircraft was an aircraft that was Canadian built and it was built by the Found Brothers in Saskatchewan. It was a good little airplane, but they couldn’t find skilled labor to build it. It had problems. One of the problems was that it had an internal spar in the wing and it had no wing strut. One of the wings came off one that was being flown on the West Coast and they found the wing about a mile from the airport. We also had one flying out of Ocean Falls and as the pilot was pushing off from the dock, the rear stabilizer almost came off in the guy’s hand.

Reflections

Harvey Hahn: A perfect day would be when nothing broke down and you didn’t have too many people that were drunk.

Don Braithwaite: I no longer own any planes. They are worse than a boat.

Norene Reedel: I remember sitting at the Spit and watching the sun light up the mountains. It was a beautiful way to start the day.

Harvey Hahn: There were sure a lot of adventures there. Everyday was fun to go to work because there was always something going on. It was a fun ride. It was real interesting.

Jack Kirk: So many things happened over there. We had some wonderful parties – good memories there.

Bob Early: I thought it was a real exciting job and that pilots made a pile of money. Some of it was true, some wasn’t!

Gord Beadle: It was a dream while I was growing up. Not necessarily commercial flying, but flying period. I got my private license and flew around for a few years and decided to go for a commercial license.

Bill Hill: If things started getting tight, I used to whistle. If you knew things were starting to get a little dicey, you started to whistle a little bit.

Patty Kaardal: It was far more personal when the small owner/operators were still in business—more of a family atmosphere. The money wasn’t great, but you enjoyed going to work.

Stan Kaardal: I had so many experiences. It was quite satisfying. It was like having a huge meal, it really was.

Norene Reedel: There were days when you thought, “What the hell am I going to do?”

Jackie Langdon: I think there is closeness between people who share their trials and tribulations and exciting moments. Those shared experiences bond people and shared, suspenseful experiences bond people even more.

Bob Early: I was doing what I wanted to do and my family wasn’t really worried about me.

Harvey Hahn: My wife never let on that she worried about me. She knew I really liked it, and that I would never quit. So, years later, I finally quit. Only then did she tell me how concerned she was. I regret that part, but not the rest of it.

George Crawshaw: I enjoyed my time in the industry. I saw the real golden years of the helicopter industry in aviation.

Jack Chicalo: It was interesting coming from Richmond and coming up here. It was always an adventure.

Ted Turner: There are six guys out of our original crew of seven that are still alive. We are the only ones in the world with that many crew guys still surviving. We went through 35 trips in the war together and never got a scratch. And we’re still here today.

Steve Todd: When I was a dock hand the pilot would sometimes ask me to come along. Off you’d go and see country you would never imagine. There was a real appreciation for the country that you were seeing because so few people got to see it. I miss it.

Pat Hadikan: It’s been a wonderful ride in the twenty-two years that I’ve been down on the Spit. I work in one of the most beautiful locations, in one of the most beautiful parts in the whole world.

Mark Murphy: The industry is a tough industry, and it used to be a lot more fun than it is now, I wouldn’t want to be in it now. The fun has gone out it.

Craig Houston: Flying is a mind game and lots of people can get lost in it. You are always kind of going, “Should I be here, or shouldn’t I be here?”

Don Thompson: I don’t really miss flying, but I miss being young enough to do it well. I’m 86 years old—they wouldn’t let me loose!

Jackie Langdon: It was a happy close-knit bunch too. Bob knew everybody up and down the coast. Lots of people had worked for Bob and moved elsewhere, so he had friends and associates on the west coast, Vancouver, and up north.

Norene Reedel: It was the best time of my life. It was so fun. I can’t believe all the years that have gone by.

Don Thompson: I get together with some of the boys every few weeks for lunch. All the good ‘ol boys—tell each other lies.

Frank Roberts: I enjoyed it, but it became a job. Of course, when you’re a young fella starting off it’s pretty exciting, but it became pretty routine.

Harvey Hahn: Flying around here is a thinking man’s game. If you were the kind that flew around while your mind was somewhere else, you got to be on the 6 o’clock news for sure.

Jackie Langdon: It’s funny to have lived through an era that is, in a sense, history making.

Stan Kaardal: There was always competition regardless of anybody saying any different. There was always an underlying pressure to fly. That was just built into the system—right from the president, the managers and accounting and on down – if you didn’t fly the trip and you didn’t complete the trip, you didn’t get paid.

Norene Reedel: We were really close-knit. You were always concerned when your crew was out there flying in the crap. You were their link when they were out there. You were the only one they could keep in contact with. It was pretty important.

Mark Murphy: It’s unbelievable the amount of airlines that have come and gone.

Stan Kaardal: Surprisingly, I miss aspects of it. But I did so much of it! I did it for 50 years and I spent over 35,000 hours in airplanes of different types.

Ted Turner: I retired in 1982. I don’t miss flying at all. I’ve got a flight simulator on my computer that I really enjoy. I can fly any airplane there is in the world and I’ve been all around the world via my computer. Heck, I go to Honolulu every day!!

Mark Murphy: I found a phone book from the early seventies. That’s when flying was really in its heyday on the coast and there was probably about 40 different airlines. Now, 20 years later and I think there’s one of the 40 that’s still around.

Jack Kirk: If you’re gonna fly, you better learn and you better trust what you’re looking at. In a lot of cases, if you get in trouble, never change your mind. I’ve had a lot fun and good experiences.

Gord Wilkinson: I retired in 1986. I miss the flying but I’m getting on in years—one little mistake is all it takes. I’ve never flown since I retired.

Bob Early: When I was younger, I watched pilots age over the years and it appeared to me that they either thought they were invincible and started doing silly things that way, or they started to lose their nerve a little bit and get a little twitchy. I said to myself, “When that start’s happening to, get out!” And it was happening, so I got out.

Norene Reedel: I remember being bit leary when I posted the new sched because customers had no idea of the cost to operate an airline. Flights were about five or six dollars from Cortes to Campbell River.

Jack Chicalo: I like flying. Usually if you took a sched, which was much cheaper, you stopped at different logging camps and places where they’d drop off mail, pick up passengers—this kind of stuff. That was interesting because you got to see all kinds of little place you’d never go to.

Larry Langford: Any time I go flying I always enjoy it. Let’s put it this way – it’s easier to go flying than write cheques. When you go flying, you forget about the other end of the business.

Norene Reedel: You spend 16 hours with these people some days. You are closer to them quite often then your own family.

Bob Early: The exciting part was definitely there for the first 25 years—I just couldn’t get enough flying. But, after that, it sort of became a job too.

Norene Reedel: I was there when things were really happening; when the airline industry was moving and shaking, and I am happy that I played a part in it. I know my name will live on.

Tom Langdon: It never was a great deal of pressure or any significance to be Bob Langdon’s son. I suppose it was always there a little bit that I had to do a good job. Jackie: It probably would have been more apparent if Bob retired and Tom had to take over Island Air. Tom: Thank God we didn’t do that!

Tom Langdon: If Robert (son) gets his pilot’s license, he’ll be fourth generation.

Tom Langdon: The other thing that I have gathered from some of the old pilots that went on to the bigger airlines is that there is a lot of inter-politics amongst the staff; schedule battles, and battles with management. It’s not really glamorous.

Gord Beadle: I don’t really miss flying. I miss getting together with the guys and bullshitting.

Tom Langdon: Once in a while someone will say, “I flew with your dad back in the old days.”

Gord Beadle: I can remember flying the coast here lots of times with a 747 Captain. He’d say, “Boy, I’d sure like to have your job.”

Mike Farrell: One of the young ladies that was born out on Stuart Island—right from the time she was a little girl, she was taught the telephone numbers of the local airlines. They only had radio telephones then, and I guess all the people out on the Islands always knew the airlines number in case of emergency.

Gord Beadle: For the first few years of my career I was flying Cessnas and Beavers and then we ended up with a Twin Otter. Even with the Twin Otter, you’re still interacting with your passengers. Down in Vancouver, once I got into the bigger crafts like the DC3s, the Dash7s, and the jets, I never really got to meet the people. For the most part you lost that whole interaction with the customer and it became a “job’.

Gord Beadle: There were a lot of recluses living up in Toba Inlet, Knight Inlet etc. Some of them were artists, some of them were authors. The first time you (meet them) you wonder what the hell is going on with them because of their shaggy beards and this kind of thing. You come in and they are tearing the mail bag apart because, for example, he wants to find out how much he got for his last painting; or if his last manuscript was accepted. You get to know these people fairly well after a while.

Jim Creighton: There’s people out there you wouldn’t even dream exist, they live on these floats out in the middle of nowhere. They have all these wonderful stories to tell.

Gord Beadle: All of a sudden you felt yourself really being drawn in; really being part of it. You realize what is going on out there. It was kind of interesting. It was the start of the hippy generation.

Mike Farrell: That’s the most rewarding part for me—still knowing that the same people still live in the villages. You’ve seen them from little tiny babies and now they’re all grown up in their twenties and they have their own babies.

Gord Beadle: You suddenly started getting attuned to what was going on in the whole world out there. You started being part of these people’s lives and really got to know them. If I was early on the charter or had a bit of free time, often I’d just grab their mail and drop in for a cup of coffee or whatever. And they would be more than happy to see you.

Mike Farrell: The people have been wonderful. I love the northern villages, the locations. It’s just the people that make our job easy.

Gord Beadle: As a pilot on the coast you could basically go anywhere and be guaranteed a coffee and/or a meal or a bed if you needed one. You never worried about being turned away. It became really interesting when you became part of the whole community.

Jim Creighton: I don’t fly at all now. I kind of had my thrill. And to tell you the truth, I think I lost my nerve. I miss mostly the people. I learned so much. What a better way to see the BC Coast? I’ve been everywhere; every little nook and cranny and met the people that live there.

Len Crawford: I flew for 38 and have flown roughly about 10,000 hours. That’s several times around the Earth. I don’t have my plane anymore and I don’t really get out flying anymore either. I miss flying on good days, but not at midnight when it’s snowing!

Patty Kaardal: I miss those days. I wish we could go right back into that period of time. I really enjoyed it. But after Stan left and I went back to Air BC, it wasn’t the same—the operation wasn’t the same. I didn’t feel bad about leaving again.

Jim Creighton: In the tough times, I would chew gum and I would hand out gum to the guys. The guys would be sitting there calmly, chewing these great wads of gum. It didn’t calm me down, but it gave me the persona of a calm person, just sitting quietly chewing this damn gum.

Lyle Whyte: I never really had the urge to be a pilot. I think it’s because when I was working in northern Saskatchewan as an apprentice, there was a couple of pilots there and they were flying all day and then working on their airplanes way into the wee hours of the night. I don’t need to work that much.

Mike Farrell: I think the best stories come from people on the airplanes that have a really good time. They don’t see a lot of float planes where they come from and they just find it really fascinating because of the age of the planes, and the fact that it’s a Canadian built machine.

Stan Kaardal: There’s a standard truth in the industry: How do you make a million dollars flying with a small VFR aviation company? If you want to make a million dollars, start with $1.5 and that’s the truth of it. It’s a high cost business.

Larry Langford: One thing about this job is you’re home every night, the hours are fairly reasonable. You can live in a small community; it has its rewards.

Stan Kaardal: People ask me, “Why did you never own an airline Stan – you were in it for so long?” Because I had a good psychiatrist – every time I thought of doing that, I used to give him $75 bucks to talk me out of it.

Val Todd: It’s always something new happening. It rarely gets boring.

Harvey Hahn: There was a real camaraderie there. If you ever ran into these guys somewhere up the coast or wherever, you hung out together, you would go booze it up. If you were stuck over night in Prince Rupert, everybody would meet in the bar. There were always stories to tell.

Lee Frankham: Well, it’s pretty tough. The business isn’t here anymore. What we had, it was based on the logging industry. If there was no logging, nobody wanted to fly. It’s been a lot of fun. I can’t recall one customer that I really (despised). There were a few that were total assholes, but still they were likable jerks.

Don Thompson: When you were stranded due to weather, people were so very hospitable on the coast. You never had to worry about a place to stay. They always found a place for you, food, and very often, too much booze as well.

Lee Frankham: When I first came out, a lot of our stuff was going back and forth to Cortes Island. All the little old ladies would come out and I think it was $5 bucks to go to town. It was really good fun because there was people there to talk to and I could lie my head off. They put up with it, but I don’t know if they liked it. It has been a fun way to make a living.

Mark Murphy: It’s a very competitive business. It always has been, but that’s usually good in some ways. It’s vicious competition, but not among friends. Little airlines are a tremendous amount of work. It’s also a very personal relationship with the customers; you have to be there and talking to them—they like that and appreciate it.

Bob Early: That’s one regret—that I never did use my own aircraft for the enjoyment that I bought them for in the first place. I had four aircraft and one helicopter. I leased them out to the airlines with the idea that they would get paid for and if I wanted to use them myself, I could do it. But by the time I got around to getting them paid for, I wasn’t so interested in flying.

Ted Turner: It was competitive between pilots when it came to miles. Guys would try to step out of line, thinking they were the next to fly a trip. It was the dispatchers you’d really want to talk to—you could slip her a twenty or buy her a beer to let you take a flight.

Phil Bergman: As soon as the ferry service came into Cortes there were no more scheduled flights. That is a good example of what has happened to the float plane industry. As access to these areas became easier, the float plane service became obsolete. Tahsis is another example, as soon as the roads were built, scheduled service ended. And that’s the floatplane industry in a nutshell.

Len Crawford: We used our airplane just like you would use your car. If we wanted to do anything, we used the plane.

Jack Chicalo: We’d fly to Stuart Island; Dent Island—which is close to Stuart Island; Bute Inlet. All kinds of little holes in the wall.

Stan Budd: After being retired for this long you don’t miss it that much, but I like to go up with some of the guys now and then. I don’t hold a license anymore because I had bypass surgery about two years ago. I could get one back now after a year, but I’m getting too old anyhow.

Steve Todd: Back in the day we’d do the RON (Remain Over Night) flights. It could be short distance or long distance and the pilots would remain over night and become a part of whatever location they were at. Relationships were built.

Norene Reedel: I had the time of my life! I was 20 years old and I worked with all these handsome pilots. I can tell lots of stories! We worked hard and we partied hard. We were a close-knit group.

Jack Kirk: I was 32 years at the pulp mill, but you’re always looking up when those things go over. I think I got out of the flying part of it before I got stuck with it. It gets into your system. I thoroughly enjoyed it—I miss it.

Harvey Hahn: I quit flying in 92. I just go out with other people. I haven’t kept my private licence up. I’m thinking of getting it back. I’d like to get back into flying. It would be fun.

Lee Frankham: I managed to get fired by every company in the area at one time or another.

Norene Reedel: I was proud to be part of the industry and it was very hard to give up my job.

Steve Todd: The aviation industry is still making history everyday.

In Memoriam

Harvey Hahn: When something happens like that, you just get used to it. There is something strange about that. You know, pilots never feel really bad, not like other people. Somehow, it’s just part of the trade. And you accept the fact that there is a certain amount of risk. There has to be. We’ve always accepted that, I think. You always feel bad for the family, but you never really felt bad about the pilots because they were doing what they wanted to do. It’s a profession of choice. It is not something you do because you have to. You do it because you want to.

Jackie Langdon: I think it’s something people forget when they think about the past. They think about mistakes that were made or errors in judgment—whether it’s political or in business or whatever. You have to think about those things in context with the time and the place where the people were and not from hindsight. Hindsight’s easy.

Jack Kirk: John (McNeil) was checking out a fella by the name of Norm Silvers with the old Husky. They got off the water, got to about 800 feet and they blew a tank—otherwise they ran out of fuel. The Husky’s got a very high flying tail—the tail feathers are very small, so the airplane became inverted. Johnny’s wife was at Discovery watching this. The goddarn thing came in, he wobbled that fuel up, got the engine running but the angle of attack on the impact…That was it. He was a hell of a pilot.

Frank Roberts: We had a few accidents that involved people that you worked with and people who were friends. We had a pretty safe record, but we had a few, especially in the earlier days. Johnny McNeil was killed right in front of town here. I think that was in 1965. He and another pilot were in an old Husky airplane. Johnny was checking the other fella out in this airplane and somehow he lost it and the airplane stalled and went into the water.

Norene Reedel: I worked for Irv and Joanne Olsen at Western Straights Airline when they had the turbine Otter. One of my nephews was killed in that crash in Courtenay. He was 22. I love Joanne and Irv. I just really enjoy their company. They were really good to me when I worked for them. And Lee of course had been their pilot long before they had the airline.

Harvey Hahn: Ken Ford’s son, Buddy, picked up time by doing the same thing and eventually got his commercial license for floats. He got killed flying for BC Air Lines. He was a nice kid, too. I didn’t know him very well. I just knew him a month when he had that accident.

Jack Chicalo: They were going hunting up to Chilko Lake, which is over the Coast Mountains and into the interior. To get there you go up Bute Inlet and then you go up Southgate River. Apparently you go over a high pass before you drop down into Chilko Lake. They were on their way in and I think they ran into snow or clouds. I’ve never been up there myself, but I’ve talked to guys that were, and they said, “Once is enough. It’d scare the shit out of ya.” Steep, high mountain and this narrow valley, and they ran into these snow flurries – clear as a bell here. They tried to turn around and couldn’t. The pilot tried to put down in this swampy area, and the Beaver that they were in had wing tanks and belly tanks for gas, and as they were coming into this swamp, apparently this belly tank ripped open and the plane caught fire and everybody was killed. There were four of them. Christie Smith, Andy Hudock, Bob Austin and Mark Davies (pilot). It happened September thirteenth, 1971. They recovered the bodies and some of their stuff. I don’t know if they brought it all out. It’s a very difficult place to get into. I talked to one of the rescue guys at the airport, but I was so bloody grief stricken you know, at the time. Somebody gave me some of the coins that Bob had in his pocket - a dollar or so in change - and the coins were all kind of charred. I still have them. We were business partners since 1963. It was a very, very sad time in my life. It was the very first time I came face to face death with somebody close to me.

Stanley Budd: I don’t know if you heard about the bad one right at the Spit. Denny Larsen, who was the pilot, he was up on holidays and he went with this other chap to pick up passengers, when he decided he wanted to fly back. He clipped the corner of the hangar and just rolled up into a ball. He was killed instantly and the other two lived. I saw the other pilot in the airport when I was running the airport here about 5-6 years ago. He didn’t fly anymore, just was passing through. That was in 1952.

Irvin Olsen: Actually, the fella that gave me the float endorsement flew for Don later on and they lost him in a storm and they never did find him. His name was Gordie June. He went down somewhere close to Loughborough Inlet. He was an excellent pilot. I just couldn’t believe it happened. I was living at Lake Cowichan at the time, and I came up and came in to land at the Spit, and there wasn’t an airplane there. They were all out searching. And it was a beautiful afternoon, but the morning had been terrible. Weather can change so fast.

Norene Reedel: I remember coming in one day and Evy told me we had lost Paul Smith. Sometimes you forget where your planes are, so I’m not too surprised by this. I did not understand at first. So I said, “What do you mean we lost Paul?” He had crashed into Shoal Harbor. It was so hard going on to shift and knowing one of your crew had gone, but you still had to do your job.

Don Braithwaite: That’s another thing I didn’t like about it. We had three or four bad accidents. It’s not bad to go to one funeral but when you have to go to five or six all in the one afternoon, it gets difficult. Jesus, people look at you like you are a murderer. We had a bad one on Shoal Harbour. I don’t know why he did it, but he took off into the wind into the end of the bay. He saw he wasn’t going to make the trees so he decided to turn and went straight into the beach. Of course the beaver’s loaded with fuel in its belly tanks and BOOM! I think one guy got out of it but he died on the way to the hospital.

Dave Nilson: Jackie Spruce, he worked with us for awhile. They called him Black Jack. He was a very interesting guy, done a lot of strange things. But he ended up in Sechelt and he got a real good operation going down there. Sometimes on the CBC TV, you see this airplane flying down near Sechelt—sometimes they mention it. Black Jack flying this thing. He finally killed himself—he crashed. Very unusual thing too. Nobody seems to know what happened—whether he had a heart attack or whatever.

Norene Reedel: We lost Don Matheson. He was one of the princes of the industry. He flew the Goose.

Lyle Whyte: A friend of mine was a pilot and we had plans on actually owning an airplane. I was going to be the mechanic, he was going to be the pilot and we were going to do contract work. But that dream died when he was killed in an airplane crash. But, I just kept on going at it because I enjoyed working on airplanes.

Down on the Spit

Dave Nilson: I was talking to William Macadam who was a friend of Harvey’s. He was working for a newspaper at the time and he came down to Campbell River—he was an airplane nut. He was looking at all these planes coming and going, and he says, “This is something. We should write about this. What could I say?” And I go, “Well, you could say that this is the busiest seaplane base in the world.” I’d never thought about it—it just came out like that. So he goes back and he had it published in the newspapers in Victoria and Vancouver and finally it ended up all over the place. It was true! Anchorage had more people, pilots and airplanes, but not near the amount of movement that we had.

Patty Kaardal: I just loved it out there early in the morning. You’d see a lot of the sport fishermen go out, my dad was one of them. I’d recognize his boat and I’d be waving at him as he went by. It was really nice. And then all of a sudden, you’d hear the planes starting up and the boats. It was just kind of exciting to me because I’d never worked in the airplane industry before.

Phil Bergman: There are people that want nothing on the Spit but parkland and others that want it used solely for commercial purposes. That’s not realistic. There needs to be a balance.

Lee Frankham: When we first came in, everything was so busy. I think there was something like 28 or 29 airplanes working off the Spit and they were going back and forth all the time. That’s where they got the reputation of being that busy—it wasn’t the amount of work they did, it was the amount of take-offs and landings they did.

Gordie Wilkinson: We were up in Campbell River last weekend and we were talking to Larry Langford and he said, “There are days around here when two Beavers would handle all the business there is on the Spit.”

Stan Kaardal: It was the busiest seaplane base in the world, no question about it. And there was tremendous revenues generated by the airlines at that time, as well.

Len Crawford: It was also the busiest base without a control tower.

Harvey Hahn: What was happening down there at the spit was unusual. It’s just a kind of shadow of what it used to be.

Craig Houston: The Spit’s 300 or 400 hundred feet lower than the airport. That’s why we don’t want to be up there. The other thing is you’re approaching or departing over the water—you don’t have the same impact on people as you do when you start flying over them everyday.

Harvey Hahn: It was like millions and millions of dollars of business went through that seaplane base.

Stan Kaardal: There was very little opposition to the airlines in the early days. It was as the area built up with homes, etc, and then you had a number of people who didn’t like the noise. Planes are very noisy, so it was mainly opposition to that. But there’s nowhere else for them to go—still isn’t.

Harvey Hahn: They hardly do any flying compared to what we did back then. In the 70’s, it was a mad house down there.

Mike Farrell: We live a unique lifestyle out here and that includes boats, floatplanes and different forms of transportation that city people wouldn’t always be used to.

Jack Chicalo: There used to be a little airstrip on the beach too—where the Indian band have their trailer park. That flat part. I landed there a few times. I don’t know if you could even land a Beaver on it.

Len Crawford: My Dad put in the airstrip at the spit as well, before the trailers were there. That was in 1968.

Gord Beadle: I go down to the spit now and it’s depressing. It was go, go, go, back in the day!

Dr. John Ross: They did talk a lot about moving the bases to McIvor Lake. The only trouble was, in those winters we had thirty years ago, it often froze over. They would have been unable to fly out of there at times.

Phil Bergman: One idea was to build a dyke up at the airport. It is not unheard of to have a very small service dyke but it would be phenomenally expensive and probably wouldn’t work in this area. Aircraft need to get in and out safely and a large body of water right next to the runway would cause water fowl problems.

Craig Houston: The Spit is a natural place for the aviation industry. For the floatplane side of it,
it allows you to land pretty well in any kind of condition here. Here at the spit, we have an incredible insurance of returning to this base. Once we get into the water here, we should be able to get back.

Phil Bergman: The question is: How do we want to preserve it and what is best for the community overall? Realistically, there simply is nowhere else for the float plane companies to go. If you remove us from the Spit it means you are basically removing those companies from the community. They’ll cease to exist. If the city carries out its plans for the Spit it will be a very nice place for everyone.

Dr. John Ross: And then there was talk for a while about going up to Menzies Bay, which, in southeast gale, gets pretty bad. But nothing ever came of it. The Spit really is the best place. I mean, it is fairly noisy down there, but it’s also quite colorful to see those planes take off.

Len Crawford: I think it’s fantastic seeing the planes going first thing in the morning because that means work. We heard a lot about moving the goddarn airplanes, but where are they gonna go? There’s no place to go. The spit is the only place to have them.

Phil Bergman: This is a beautiful and unique piece of property that it is now owned by the city. It’s an incredible spot. There is no question that the vast majority of it should be turned into park land for everyone to enjoy, but the float plane companies need to fit into that.

Len Crawford: In the paper, somebody had written a letter of complaint about the floatplanes, saying they were waking her up too early in the morning. The airplanes were there before she was.

Phil Bergman: Being based out of the airport would limit your flights. The weather here is strange. On days when you couldn’t get out of the airport, more than likely it is fine down on the water level.

Gord Beadle: Our biggest problem was always with the boats. We could see the boat and we could see that it was going to be well in front of us, but all of a sudden the skipper decides that he is going to stop. Well, a boat just doesn’t stop, it stops and drifts. Now the boat is right in front of you.

Phil Bergman: It has allowed our community to be seen by a lot more people and I think over time, the more people that see the area, the better and healthier it becomes. It’s a huge tax base for the city and it is very important to the people that work out here on the Spit.

Len Crawford: To take industry out of the town completely . . . it’s all right for retired people, but younger folks are trying to make a living.

Gord Beadle: Even today there is no communication with the boat. The only thing they have down there is a Mica strobe light (strobe). That came in around the late 80s, and I think was funded by the Ministry of Transport.

Mike Farrell: I think that people still enjoy having the floatplanes here. I know that a lot of people went to bat for the Spit when they wanted to move the industry out of here. As far as I know, it still could be a reality that we might have to move. We’ve lived in limbo for so long, we don’t even worry about it anymore.

Len Crawford: The original thought, before they built the airport where it is, was to build it right in town—then people would really have something to complain about!

Mike Farrell: I don’t think noise is really a concern for people in the area. They realize that that’s how people get back and forth to a lot of their jobs on a daily basis. There are only so many forms of transportation to get to some of the islands around here.

Jack Kirk: Well, where else would you put a floatplane or helicopter base that is as efficient? It’s got everything you need here. They're not doing any more damage to the environment than what some of these boats do. They’re employing a lot of people down there.

Phil Bergman: They did a study about seven years ago as to the economic impact of the floatplane companies on the Spit. It surprised a few people when it was concluded that the economic impact to the city on the Spit was almost the same as the airport.

Mark Murphy: The community over the years, I don’t think they had an idea of how big the business was out of the Spit. That really filtered down for parts and equipment, groceries. I don’t think it’s ever been recognized properly for what it was.

Steve Todd: There still are a lot of people in town that don’t realize there are float planes out there. A lot of people don’t realize how many people and how much freight goes out on floatplanes. People should know.

Anne Wilkinson: We did become really good friends with everybody on the Spit because, when there was a problem, everybody pitched in to help. If somebody was missing, or there was an accident or anything like that, everybody helped.

Frank Roberts: On the average, each of our aircraft landed three times and took off three times every hour. So that gives you an idea of the volume of traffic.

Jack Chicalo: It was deemed that the floatplanes didn’t impact the environment very much. There used to be a bunch of concrete plants on the Spit there. When a cement truck had a couple of yards of concrete left over, they would just dump it on to the beach where the ramp is. You can see it there.

Phil Bergman: As far as pollution, what we put into the water is pretty minimal. It is no worse than a boat.

Craig Houston: The city kind of talks out both sides of its mouth. They would tell the environmental people that they are going to buy the Spit and turn it into a park and kick everybody out. Then they would come down and have meetings with us and say, “You have to stay here. Where would they put you guys?”

Phil Bergman: It’s a huge part of our community and its played a very large part in how our community’s been shaped

Stan Kaardal: The Spit’s the only protected area here. I fought for that very heavily when I was involved with the airlines and even when I later went with the Department of Transport.

Val Todd: I worked for five different companies on the Spit and never moved out of the office.

Larry Langford: They did a study. They had somebody sitting on the end of the Spit for 12 hours a day in the summertime and they counted the airplanes and in that 12 hours there was an aircraft landing or taking off every 6 minutes. So it was pretty busy.

Frank Roberts: Considering the traffic that went through there, there were very few accidents.

Gord Beadle: I remember a couple of university students one summer recording the take-offs and landings at the spit. It was probably a study for the MOT, but I can’t recall. It was busy, no question about it; extremely busy.

Norene Reedel: The old Island Air Office is the Silver King Lodge, and the old Gulf Air office is the Corilair office.

Jack Chicalo: Campbell River float plane base in the estuary was reputed to be the most busy float plane base in the world. It was constant—planes coming and going.

Larry Langford: Years ago, the worst time was Friday afternoon, that’s when everybody got off work and they were going out in their boats. There’d be a steady stream of boats coming out of the freshwater marina. There’s been some close calls.

Harvey Hahn: On Monday morning we used to shuttle two to three hundred people. We just went right at it from first daylight in the summer until 9:30 at night.

Bob Early: Nowadays, it’s depressing to me. You go down to the Spit, and you wait, and maybe one plane will take off every so often. They lost a lot of business to boats as well. I guess that’s the way it goes.

Phil Bergman: I don’t think the float plane companies are going to be asked to leave. It was just making sure that our footprint on the Spit stayed small.

An Eye to the Future

Mike Farrell: I think the biggest challenge over the years has been adapting to the changing economy on the coast. Things certainly aren’t the same as they were 20 years ago. It’s all changed. Everybody’s doing business in a different manner. I won’t predict the future but we’ve had a really good run.

Phil Bergman: More than anything it’s about changing life here on the coast.

Mike Farrell: Surge Narrows store is the coolest store! They have a large library about the local Desolation Sound area. We fly on average about 500 people a year from Vancouver, from the Westin Bay Shore Hotel, to the Desolation Sound area. We drop them off wherever they need to go; marinas, boats, their friend’s cabin on the beach.

Mark Murphy: When I first started, tourists were just a pain. We didn’t even like doing it. With the tourists, you go there to pick them up at noon, you get there at noon, and by the time they kiss each other goodbye and exchange addresses and chit-chat and get their stuff, and their slimy fish, half an hour’s gone by. It just interfered with our real work, as far as we were concerned.

Bill Alder: For ourselves, the operation is going to be maintained now primarily just for floatplanes. The industry, on the floatplane end of it, has been going downhill for years and has probably pretty well bottomed out by now. It’s probably not going to get any bigger. At the airport is where we do all major modifications and rebuilds.

Harvey Hahn: So radios were always an adventure. They were not as good as they are now. Of course we never had GPS. We would have died for GPS in those days. That’s a marvellous thing to know where you are all the time. It would have revolutionized that kind of flying. Lots of times we got stuck in places, and if we had only known that we had another mile to go, we would have got through.

Larry Langdon: Same thing is happening to the forest industry as the float plane industry. Larger companies are buying out smaller companies and merging. The time of little four or five man camps in every bay along the coast is long gone. Twenty-five to thirty years ago there were hundreds of these camps.

Jack Chicalo: What I’ve noticed in the last ten years or so is how few floats planes there are and that they’ve gone to helicopters. The last ten years I worked, I retired in 2002, it was almost all helicopters rather than floatplanes. And maybe the nature of the jobs weren’t so much on the coast anymore where you had docks and you could taxi right up onto the beach, but on bluffs and more inland.

Bill Alder: At one point, we had about nine or ten people in the shop. We averaged an inspection per day, per year. It was just absolutely insane. We were flat out, seven days a week. You don’t see that anymore. We’re five days a week now. In January and February, inspection time, we might be lucky to see two or three airplanes a month. Summertime is different, everybody’s flying, and we’ll probably do ten inspections a month.

Larry Langford: Forestry obviously isn’t as busy as it used to be, and technology itself has played an extremely big part. Where you used to have a 100 man camp to produce x-number metres of wood, now with technology, that same amount of wood can be produced using 30 people, so when you reduce the number of people necessary to travel back and forth, obviously the need for aircraft is diminished. So, right now, in Campbell River probably 7 floatplanes can handle all the business, whereas upwards of 25 were needed before.

Phil Bergman: Tourism has become a bigger part of our business and accounts for over half of our revenue. There is a lot more work with the fishing lodges; grizzly bear viewing is a big core of our business; and we do a lot of flight-seeing. People that can afford it want to be picked up in Vancouver and be at their remote location in an hour rather then spend two hours on the ferry and another couple driving up to Campbell River before flying out. There’s definitely an increase in the high-end tourism where people are willing to spend the money to get to their location quicker.

Mike Farrell: A large population of people go from Vancouver to the Hollyhock Farm on Cortes Island, which is a beautiful location on its own. It’s very well-marketed. We get people from all over the world going there. Our times are scheduled around Hollyhock’s schedule so that it works very well out of Vancouver. I don’t think there’s a prettier sight than leaving the downtown Bay Shore Hotel and flying out over the bridge and Stanley Park. To me, it’s probably one of the most scenic flights you could ever do.

Larry Langford: We can truly say that the internet has generated business for us. We can’t quantify how much, but we get inquiries from all over the world, and we know that we do get people to ride in the airplanes because they have seen them.

Mike Farrell: Actually, I’ve seen the industry change for the better. We have better webcams for weather because there are fewer people to talk to out there since they closed the lighthouse stations. We have way better communication with the airplanes as they’re equipped with new technology—there’s tracking systems, satellite phones.

Mark Murphy: And now you can always get an airplane within an hour or so when you want it. It’s becoming a real summer seasonal thing.