By Eric Watt: From my book, Campsite Memories. This true, heartwarming story will make you smile.
Forward:
Erik Watt is a politically incorrect misfit who fled North after thirty years as a fourth-generation newsman to avoid becoming a journalist. He's known Canada's Northwest Territories since he was a teenage Mackenzie River deckhand in 1943, was a southern-based Northern reporter from 1956 to 1962, arrived in Yellowknife in 1976 and put in seven years as director of public affairs for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada's N.W.T. Region. He's been a writer and media consultant on his own since 1985.
Erik is the author of Yellowknife: How A City Grew (Outcrop Ltd., 1990), and McDougall's Bash, a collection of Northern poetry (Outcrop Ltd., 1993). His article, "Don't Worry, Doc, we'll make it!" first appeared in the October/November, 1992 issue of UP HERE: LIFE IN CANADA'S NORTH magazine. It is the heart-warming story of Jim McAvoy--a daredevil Canadian bush pilot who carved history with his wings. I loved the story and know you will too.
C.J.
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Single Otter: It can carry one canoe on one pontoon. Or, two canoes on one pontoon if they are nested. Rob Kesselring in canoe at right.
In 43 years of flying in the North, Jim McAvoy has become a figure of legend. And in Jim's case, that legend is based solidly on fact.
There's an aviation maxim that says there are lots of old pilots and lots of bold pilots, but not many old, bold pilots. Jim is one of that rare breed, still flying a Single Otter out of Yellowknife Bay, still turning his intimate knowledge of lakes, bush and Barrens into smooth landings in places nobody else would attempt.*
He's a pilot of many reputations, not the least of which has been his uncanny ability to find and rescue people in distress. He's also known as a superb flyer with a devilish sense of humor, a fierce battler of red tape, and--in his early years at least--a good-natured hell-raiser of heroic proportions.
These days, Jim resists the temptation to buzz anything he sees moving below. But if he has a friend aboard, he's not above enlivening a dull flight by waiting until the engine of his Single Otter stops before switching to his reserve tank.
"He gets me every time," growls Bill Tait, a Yellowknife tourist operator. "We'll be chugging along, and all of a sudden there's this awful QUIET and we're going down.
"
You can switch from the main tank to the reserve tank on an Otter, but you can't switch back. Usually, Jim makes the switch while he still has fuel in the main tank, but not when he has me as a passenger! I guess he likes to see the look on my face when the engine quits!"
McAvoy has perhaps 40,000 flying hours under his belt, but nowadays, Ministry of Transport regulations are severely cutting into his flying time. The rules keep airline pilots from flying more than about 80 hours a month.
"I can remember one summer putting in 642 hours in 15 weeks," McAvoy says. "That's more than a lot of pilots do in six months nowadays."
No wonder rules irritate Jim: he's used to operating on his own excellent instincts. Yellowknifers used to know winter was over for sure the day Jim McAvoy ambled out on the candling ice of Back Bay to his deHavilland Beaver, and flew the six miles to Long Lake, where he'd switch his ski-wheels for floats.
His was always the last plane off the ice.
DeHaviland Beaver on floats. The Beaver is the definitive bush plane. It can carry two passengers and gear, and one canoe on one float. Note canoe on left pontoon. It's always on the left side so the pilot can see it. Yes, canoes have come off floats! If one comes off in flight, it can hit a control surface and damage or down the airplane.
Today, we know summer has arrived when Jim and his co-pilot Salty--a five-year-old toy poodle--drive into town in the RV that's their summer home. They head for CF-CZP, a venerable Single Otter parked at Air Tindi's Old Town float base. Jim McAvoy--and no one else--will fly CZP until the season's finished.
McAvoy sold Latham Island Airways, his Yellowknife-based float and ski charter company, in 1978, allegedly to retire to an acreage he and his wife, Betty, bought near Edmonton. He was back in Yellowknife and flying again, by the following spring, and he's been doing it ever since.
Jim and Salty haul tourists, trappers, fishermen, geologists, prospectors and their supplies all over the western NWT until freeze-up, in September or October. Salty hates flying, but he hates being left behind even more. "If it gets a little rough he'll dash back and hide in the tail compartment," says Jim.
Jim McAvoy first arrived in Yellowknife in the spring of 1944, when it was a 10-year-old mining town with a population of less than 4,000. Fort Smith, not Yellowknife, was the unofficial Territorial capital in those days, and our town was barely hanging in, it's gold mines shut down by the wartime labour shortage. But mining exploration never stops, and many a husky teenager was filling the boots of a man off to war.
Jim, a 14-year-old farm boy, had come North to join his father, Jim McAvoy Sr., a well-known Territorial prospector and mining developer, in the bush. His first work was as a helper to shaft miners and diamond drillers at a small mine his father developed northeast of Yellowknife.
"I was nearly always out in the bush after that, " Jim recalls. "I worked as a staker and prospector, and I did a lot of drilling and trenching (sampling surface showings) all over the place."
He insists he got into flying "because I hated walking," and, quite literally, by accident.
"By 1948, Dad had 14 or 15 camps spread all over the western NWT, and he had real problems keeping them supplied. Aircraft were hard to charter in the summer, you sometimes had to book two weeks ahead because they were so busy. So Dad decided he had to get a plane of his own."
Beaver on wheels (tubby tundra tires), landed on a gravel bar along the Noatak River, Alaska. A wheeled Beaver cannot carry a canoe outboard. We used folding canoes for this trip.
Jim Sr. had a close pal with deHavilland Aircraft in Toronto. He persuaded DeHavilland to resume production of its biplane Fox Moth, a pre-war bush plane that had done well in the North (see Up Here April/May 1987) He took delivery of three Fox Moths; one after the other, they were written off in crashes. In desperation, his father sent young Jim south to Edmonton to learn to fly.
Jim got his commercial license in March, 1949, and flew planes for McAvoy Diamond Drilling, West Bay Mining, and his father's other companies until Jim Sr.'s death in 1953.
After that, McAvoy flew for outfits like Gateway Aviation, Carter Aviation in Hay River, Koenen Air Service or anyone else who needed a pilot with his own plane. He had no trouble finding work; he'd built himself a solid reputation as a pilot by then. And there was always prospecting to fall back on.
Whenever things were quiet he'd be off to check out prospects he'd noted from the air. (He and prospector-pilot Joe Herriman discovered gold in the Indian Lake area, site of the now suspended Colomac Mine, in that period.)
Jim's younger brother, Chuck, had also become a pilot, and in 1960 Jim and Chuck teamed up to form McAvoy Air Services, based in Yellowknife. They had four single-engined aircraft--an ancient Fairchild 82, survivor of the pioneer years of bush flying, two STOL (short take-off and landing) Helio couriers and a Cessna 180, all on floats or skis.
That enterprise lasted just a year; the brothers McAvoy had their differences. Chuck kept the company and Jim struck out on his own.
On June 9, 1964, Chuck, the old Fairchild and two prospectors vanished without a trace on a flight to Izok Lake, east of Great Bear.
Single Otter, unloading my canoe (Dagger Venture 17).
"Jim flew more hours on that search than anyone else," says Glenn Warner of Yellowknife, an ex-Mountie and friend of both brothers, "and very inch of that area was checked out. We never found anything. The weather was poor, and the best guess is that the Fairchild iced up and went straight to the bottom of a lake."
It wasn't just in the air that Jim McAvoy made his name in that era. Yellowknife was a hard-drinking town, and no one loved a good party--or a good fight--better than the soft-spoken, good-natured and burly Jim McAvoy.
Old-timers still recall with awe the nights when young Jim McAvoy decided to flex his muscles. The Gold Range Cafe, next door to the rip-roaring Gold Range bar, was his favorite spot. Almost invariably, someone would wind up flying through the cafe's big plate-glass window, and the whole RCMP detachment would be called out to restore order.
Next morning, Jim would apologize to everyone, commiserate with the casualties, pay his fine and settle the cafe's damage bill. And Yellowknife would heave a sigh of relief, until next time.
"Jim was never a mean drunk," says long-time Yellowknifer Smokey Heal, an old crony. "But he sure did love to fight!"
McAvoy's marriage to Betty McChesney, who'd come North in 1946 when her father went to work at the Beaulieu Mine east of Yellownife, probably pleased no one more than the Gold Range's proprietors. And Betty, who often flew with him, quickly proved her mettle.
She was with Jim the day in 1958 when he decided to fly under the inclined Yellowknife Highway bridge at Frank's Channel, 100 km east of Yellowknife. Great Slave Lake's well-treed North Arm is pretty narrow at that point, and the bridge's high end is just 12 metres off the water. Jim is pretty indignant about the persistent story that he looped the bridge. "I only flew under it," he protests. "Both ways."
There is no shortage of eyewitness accounts of his favorite sport of that era: swooping down silently, prop idling, on unsuspecting Cat operators, prospectors or road-builders out in the middle of nowhere. He would then open the throttle wide and thunder past, over their heads. "I remember once catching four guys working with pluggers (gas-operated, portage rock drills), on a piece of highway right-of-way," McAvoy grins. "When I looked back, all I could see was the four pluggers, still banging away by themselves. The crew were flat on their bellies in the bush!"
Not surprisingly, McAvoy proved to be a constant burr under the Department of Transportation's saddle.
He knew exactly what payload any aircraft he flew could get off the ground, and that was often well above DOT'S load limits. He knew when he could get from A to B, and how to get into C with fog hanging in the trees, and to heck with DOT minimums. He knew the capabilities of the aircraft he flew better than the people who designed them did. In an emergency, with every other aircraft within range grounded by weather, people knew Jim McAvoy would somehow get through.
Jim McAvoy always liked to fly low, watching the terrain below him with a prospector's keen eye, slipping down for a closer look if a rock formation attracted his interest, often landing to check it out. In the process, he's learned how to get in and out of impossibly small or shallow lakes and sloughs.
In 1958, I flew with Jim in his fully loaded Cessna 180 to a highway construction camp on a drought-shrunken pothole lake southwest of Fort Rae. I held my breath as he literally flew the plane to shore, his floats barely skimming the surface once we touched down. Just when it appeared we were going to wind up in the camp cookhouse, Jim chopped the throttle.
We came to a swift stop three meters from the dock, floats high and dry. When we got set to leave, the camp crew had to haul us out to the middle of the lake with a tracked Nodwell vehicle before we were in enough water to float us for our takeoff.
Two weeks later, he flew J.E. "Doc" Savage, then NWT supervising highways engineer for the federal Department of Public Works, in and out of the same lake. The weather had stayed hot and dry and the lake, by then, was even smaller.
They skimmed into shore all right, but McAvoy ran right out of lake on return take-off. In the instant before the floats charged up onto the muskeg, McAvoy turned to Doc Savage and grinned.
Twin Otter: my favorite bush plane. It can carry five (nested/remove yokes) canoes, ten passengers and gear inside the airplane. And it can reverse engines and pivot.
"Don't worry, Doc! he said. "We'll make it!"
And they did, though they zipped over the muskeg for a hundred metres or so before Jim got enough speed up to yank the Cessna into the air and clear the trees.
McAvoy earned his reputation as a spotter of people in trouble below because he's constantly scrutinizing the ground as he flies. He doesn't miss much, and on several occasions he's found people before anyone knew they were missing.
One of McAvoy's best-known exploits was his rescue in 1958 of three people forced down north of Fort Rae, just before freeze-up, when their two aircraft became lost and they ran out of fuel. One pilot managed to walk out for help, but by the time a search plane located the downed planes, the lake on which they'd landed had frozen over.
The ice was too thin to support a plane, but too thick for floats. The situation was dire, since one of the stranded people, wildlife biologist George Hunter, had developed a critical infection. His wife was preparing to amputate his hand in a desperate effort to save his life.
The search plane flew back to Yellowknife, where the Royal Canadian Air Force search-master called a hasty meeting to discuss the crisis. There were no helicopters closer than Ontario, and by the time one could be flown up, or a ground party could get to George Hunter, it would be too late.
No one invited Jim McAvoy to that meeting; he was grounded after one of his many run-ins with the Department of Transport. But he heard about Hunter's grim plight quickly enough. And while the emergency meeting was being assembled, Jim quietly took off from still-open Yellowknife Bay in his Cessna, and headed north.
An hour later, he was examining the lake on which the party was stranded. By then, darkness wasn't far off.
MaAvoy made his decision quickly. He made one low pass across the lake, bouncing his floats on the ice to smash it. Then he swung around, landed in the ice-choked, perilously narrow channel he'd created, picked up the stranded trio and took off again--miraculously without holing his floats.
Hunter was admitted to the hospital in Yellowknife before the emergency meeting ended, and he was out of danger a week later. DOT didn't press any more charges against McAvoy. Not just then, at any rate.
McAvoy was famous, too, for the mountain searches in which he participated. More than one observer who flew with him recalls with terror that Jim was the only pilot who'd search blind canyons too narrow to turn around in and too deep to climb out of.
As the granite walls of a canyon converged, McAvoy would haul back on the wheel and pull his aircraft up into a loop, rolling off the loop at the top. Then he'd fly serenely back the way he'd come.
Looping in float planes is not exactly recommended, but Jim McAvoy always knew what his plane could do, and he always survived. His keen eyesight proved to be no blessing a few years ago, though.
McAvoy was flying a single-engined Maule on skis, heading for Fort Simpson after a trip into the Nahanni, when he saw a man waiving frantically on the breaking ice of Little Doctor Lake. There was a lot of open water along the shore and the remaining ice looked shaky. But McAvoy wasn't going to leave someone in serious danger, if he could help it.
One section of the ice near the man seemed fairly good. McAvoy set the Maule down and slid about 60 metres before the ice collapsed. His plane hung up by its wings long enough for him to scramble out.
The man came running, vastly relieved to find McAvoy soaked, but alive. "thought you were going to try to land," he gasped," and I was trying to waive you off. This ice is in terrible shape!" So was the Maule, resting on the lake bottom. Jim loved that little plane, but he settled for the insurance.
McAvoy had his share of closer calls.
In 1967 he and Betty flew to the Cadillac silver mine's landing strip, near Nahanni National Park. He'd discovered that property, too, landing on wheels on a sandbar at the bottom of deep Prairie Creek Canyon, where turbulence is often fierce. Just before touchdown, the throttle cable of the Helio Courier Jim was flying broke, leaving him without power.
The radio operator at the strip, unable to see around a bend that masked approaching aircraft until the last seconds, was just about to panic when Jim's voice came over the radio.
"You'd better come and get me," Jim said. "I'm about 350 feet short of the runway."
He'd come down on the boulder-strewn bank of the creek, but neither he, Betty nor the Helio Courier had sustained serious damage.
Jim McAvoy's closest call came a year later, when he landed near the east end of Great Slave Lake to pick up prospector Gus Weyrowitz. They'd just lifted off the water when McAvoy's controls froze. The Helio Courier stood on its tail and climbed to 400 feet before stalling. Then it fell back into the frigid lake.
"It didn't seem that hard on impact," he remembers today. "We landed right-side up. But the impact wrecked the undercarriage, and smashed one float."
The aircraft remained afloat long enough for McAvoy to get off a Mayday call, which no one heard. Then, as the Helio Courier slowly rolled over and began to sink, McAvoy and Weyrowitz jumped clear and dragged themselves up on the one intact float, still attached to the now-sunken fuselage.
The date was June 9, 1968--four years to the day after Chuck McAvoy's disappearance.
Much of Great Slave was still ice-choked, and the water was only a degree or two above freezing. McAvoy and Weyrowitz had been able to grab life jackets and a sleeping bag before the fuselage went under, but small, ice-cold waves kept splashing over the float to which they clung.
They'd crashed just before 1:00 p.m. By late afternoon, when McAvoy should have been back in Yellowknife, a search was being organized. One of the search planes flew right over them around 9:00 p.m. but didn't see them, and another came fairly close around midnight. By then the wind was picking up and currents were carrying the submerged aircraft father away from shore.
"That was a miserable night, " McAvoy recalls. "It got cold when the sun went down (around midnight) and the waves started breaking over us. There were three foot swells."
They'd had nothing to eat, and sleep was impossible; they had to stay awake to avoid being swept off the float. "All we could do was sit there and hang on."
Two more aircraft flew over them as daylight returned, says Jim. "But it's hard to spot something as small as we were. After that, I guess Gus just gave up hope. He started slipping off the float. The first couple of times I helped him get back on, but the third time he didn't even try. I managed to pull him up, but he died half an hour later.
It was 3 p.m. on Monday when pilot Brock "Rocky" Parsons of Northwest Territorial Airways spotted the wreckage, landed and plucked shivering Jim McAvoy and his dead passenger's body from the float.
Three hours later, a Department of Transport investigative team flew down the East Arm to examine the wrecked aircraft. It had completely disappeared.
The water tower that once stood on the rocky hilltop in Old Town where Yellowknife's Bush Pilots' Monument now points skyward is long gone now. Nor is it likely that Jim McAvoy, today, would still use it to check his vision and reflexes, as he did in the early years.
Back then, Jim would see how close to the tank he could come with his wingtip every time he took off. He'd be in a bad mood all day if he missed it by more than a foot.
Jim McAvoy doesn't need to prove himself to himself any more, nor to anyone else. And Salty doesn't care. All he wants to do is get one more flight behind him as the Otter's floats slice through the sparkling water of Yellowknife Bay and then lift into the Northern sky Jim McAvoy knows and loves so well.
*Jim passed away on November 25, 2009
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*CAMPSITE MEMORIES is long out-of-print. It is available as an e-book on my website.
My flagship book, CANOEING WILD RIVERS, 5th Edition, contains a wealth of advice on how to safely canoe difficult rivers. A special section is devoted to charter airplanes (wheels and floats).
*My teen book, JUSTIN CODY'S RACE TO SURVIVAL! mixes a fictional wilderness survival tale with practical outdoor tips everyone should know--a first for books of this type. Adults love it too! Now available as an audio book!
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