High inside the Arctic Circle. 1966.
The captain taxied the immense, majestic Canso flying boat into the frigid Foxe Basin arctic waters. We were leaving Igloolic, a fragile-looking settlement perched tenuously, like a tern’s egg, on a rocky island between the giant Baffin Island and the mainland Melville Peninsula. I would most likely never be back. The crowd, seeing us off, waved. In return, I waved goodbye to the native Eskimo onlookers watching from the pebbled beach. None saw me sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, propped up by several flotation cushions. They were waving goodbye to their children. As we taxied out, the red roof of the Hudson Bay Company store grew smaller as the moment drew nearer.
The captain read off the checklist for take-off. I followed suit and did what I could within my limited reach. After all, I was only eleven years old. The co-pilot, Chuck Waters, stood behind us, mildly amused. I remember him as being kind and easygoing. He must have also been trusting because he was about to stand by as an eleven-year-old boy took the controls of a 28,000 lb aircraft powered by two Pratt & Whitney 1830 radial engines firing up 1,200 horsepower each.
I attempted to turn the PBY 5A Canso, or Catalina as the Americans called it, into the wind by sliding down to use both feet on the left rudder. The captain adjusted the throttles to get differential thrust between the wing-mounted engines. More throttle is required on the starboard engine and less on the port engine, enabling the left turn. He neglected to tell me that. We lined up into the northwest wind.
The sky was clear and blue, the wind cold and brisk, and the water icy green. Brilliant white ice floes lined the shores and dotted the horizon. The freshening northwest breeze was blowing the waves higher, with distinct white caps pushing over the tops of the mounting waves. A low but powerful swell ran parallel to the waves but in the opposite direction. We were bucking the works.
At taxi speed, the Canso gently bobbed and pitched with the swell. At take-off speeds, however, we would impact the waves head-on while hitting the backside of the swells. The further and faster we travelled in the water, the heavier the impact on the hull. A seaplane needs speed to create lift over the wings, to lighten the impact of oncoming waves, and to get airborne. Even small waves generate significantly more impact forces at the bow at higher speeds. So, seaplane pilots have to learn take-off and landing techniques that neither apply to runways nor boats. Seaplane handling is a highly specialized skill.
In my father’s early days on the Canso, a weather-worn Norwegian flying boat captain had shown him how to take off in ocean swells and windborne waves. On this day, my father wasn’t worried, but I was. He had the uncanny ability to always pick the worst moment to let me try my hand at anything. There were calmer waters and better days to teach me the same.
This flight, however, was destined to be my moment, my eleventh hour. And the entire settlement of Igloolic had turned out to watch. At least in my mind.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
I nodded yes, thinking, “No, not now, not ever.” My stomach churned; my knees grew weak. I ran over and over in my mind and under my breath the procedures he had drilled me with. Like memorizing the Cub Scout’s oath, I told myself. Just like we had practiced on the 65-hp Aeronca 7AC Champion floatplane down south – one thousand two hundred and twenty-one nautical miles south. Back home.
My mind was racing: Think now! Stick back. Power on. Right rudder. Wait for the nose to stop rising. Relax stick. Push forward. Allow to climb on step…
“Ok, go for it,” he gave the command.
Even at a stretch, I could hardly move the overhead throttles. I touched the throttles with my fingertips, and my father pushed them steadily ahead. The engines roared a deafening roar. The props picked up water as they surged ahead and threw back a vortex of white spray. Even with the control column back, held with all my might and a little help from the left seat, the nose plowed through the first set of swells, splashing green water over the windshield. My heart pounded as the hull pounded, and I felt a crippling weakness of fear creeping through my muscles and into my bones, as water dripped down all around us.
“I can’t reach the rudders!” I yelled to no one, as no one could hear me anyway. Like the throttles, I could touch them, but with no actual effect. 2,400 horsepower worth of torque slowly pulled us left until the left seat driver adjusted the throttles and kicked in some much-needed help on the opposite rudder.
As the big “Pigboat” sped up, the hull began to plane, becoming more buoyant. When the water stopped breaking across the windshield, that was my cue to push the yoke forward. We pounded across the tops of the first few swells, but with a medium load and a brisk, cool breeze, we were soon light on the water.
My actions took on a blurry dream sequence where every colour glowed pastel, and every slow-motion movement smudged across my vision. After an eternity of rattling over the wave tops, I pulled the control column back, and we were airborne. My heart flew as I realized we were free from the surface. I was flying! My hands trembled, and my knees shook, but the thrill of that heart-pounding take-off would last a lifetime. That arctic trip was my eleventh hour, that precious, irrevocable moment on the precipice of manhood pivotal to the rest of my life.
In the Summer of ’66: Crisscrossing the Arctic in a Flying Boat
My summer of ’66 was spent in Churchill and points north, joining my father in late June after school let out. In my memory, I exist primarily through the photographs we took during that time: lean and wiry, with hair short enough to have a brush cut if I had let my father have his way. I wouldn’t have it, though. No brush cut for me.
My father, Lorne Goulet, was assigned to captain the amphibious Flying Boat CF-IEE for Transair out of the airstrip in Fort Churchill. When he first flew to Churchill in 1960 with a Noorduyn Norseman on straight floats, he had to land on a small lake near the town called, ironically, Landing Lake. When he went up as a co-pilot on the amphibian Canso in 1962, he had the luxury of an all-weather airstrip courtesy of the United States Air Force. The runway in Fort Churchill, built in 1942, was constructed along the Crimson Route to ferry aircraft to Europe during World War II. The route was to include Churchill, Frobisher Bay, Sondrestrom, Keflavik and Prestwick, but it was never used as the Bluie West and Mid-Atlantic routes proved safer.
The five-and-a-half-hour flight to Churchill was a long, arduous journey for a kid who, at the time, thought the 90-minute drive from our hometown of Lac du Bonnet to the big city of Winnipeg was endless torture. It didn’t help that I was growing much too fast at the time and that my brain was coursing with the hormones of emerging manhood. I loved the adventure of being outdoors, but I hated flying. I loved being in the bush canoeing and fishing, but I hated getting there. In most bush planes, the deadly combination of droning vibrating engines, nonstop rocking and bobbing, and the forehead-pounding smell of avgas left me in a constant state of motion sickness. Flying in the Canso, however, had exceptions.
The aircraft was so big compared to the Norseman and Bellanca Air Bus I had grown up in. Nearly 64 feet long with a wingspan of 104 feet and a gross payload of 30,500 lbs, the Consolidated PBY-5A could carry up to 28 passengers as well as two pilots, a navigator, and an engineer. We didn’t have a navigator—the pilots did that—but we had a mechanic.
Cansos served with eleven RCAF Squadrons in WW II. They operated from both coasts and were employed in coastal patrols, convoy protection and submarine hunting. RCAF No. 162 Squadron, when stationed in Iceland and Scotland in 1944, accounted for the six German U-boat sinkings made by RCAF Cansos. https://www.warplane.com/aircraft/collection/details.aspx?aircraftId=11
If I started getting nauseous, I would get up and roam around to clear my head. My favourite place was the flight engineer’s tower, technically called the Mechanic’s Compartment, located in the pylon between the fuselage and the wings. The aircraft mechanic, nicknamed “Avro Joe,” would readily relinquish his station to me for an excuse to snooze below. From there, I could see the horizons on both sides and beyond.
The sight of the Churchill WWII-era airport and the grain shipping terminal was always welcome. Turning to base leg, the pilots loved to wing over the area where the shipwrecked M/V Ithaca lay rusting on a reef. Once, I spotted a lonely male polar bear sauntering down the beach, looking for scraps of washup whale carcasses.
Not far inland was a no-fly zone protecting the Churchill Rocket Research Facility, where Black Brant rockets blasted off regularly. The airport was busy with American and Royal Canadian Air Force jets, a Department of Transport DC-3 (C-FDTD of D-Day fame) and Lamb Air Otters with fat tundra tires coming and going. Churchill was buzzing in 1966.
The trailer motel we stayed in had a bed to lie on, and the food, I remember, was a relief from the moose meat sausage, black bread, and hard-baked pilot’s biscuits that were my father’s standard fare during our long flights in the bush. For an eleven-year-old, the tar-black coffee the crew drank was untouchable, so during the flights, I used to make up my liquids from “accidentally opened” cases of soft drinks destined for the numerous Hudson Bay Company stores or drilling camps in the North. Coke, especially, was my favourite. The sugar and caffeine helped fight motion sickness and fatigue. The next best cure was Coffee Crisp chocolate bars or Wrigley’s Doublemint chewing gum. I learned at an early age how to survive as a bush pilot.
During the days we spent in Churchill, waiting on dispatch or weather delays, I explored the area on a borrowed Honda Cub 50cc motorcycle. Obviously underage, I would burn around the town and up and down the substantial shipping docks, waving to dock workers, Russian sailors, and the ever-friendly Royal Canadian Mounted Police with impunity. I hung around the blood-soaked Churchill Whale Products canning factory and tried beluga whale blubber. I climbed the rusty masts of the Russian grain freighters and, at high tide, rode out with the tug W.N. Twolan to tow a grain ship, the Warkworth, out to the mouth of the Churchill River.
My favourite boat was the RCMP’s Belcher. Her hull was a beautiful mallard green with yellow trim. At some point, my father and I caught a ride across the river in the Belcher, and I climbed on top of the stone ramparts of Fort Prince of Wales, which the English built in 1771. There, I found a rusty cannonball. I have no idea how I got it home, but it took up a special place in my bedroom.
I rode my motorcycle from the airport in Fort Churchill through the town of Churchill to the northern end of the town’s only road and climbed to the top of the Cape Merry monument.
In one magical moment in Churchill, when I was off exploring some rocky shore by myself, a lone harp seal surfaced beside where I was standing. We stared eye-to-eye for several moments until she seemed to turn away in embarrassment and slip silently under the waters. Behind those big, round, moist eyes, I sensed an intelligence and awareness that mirrored my own. I could never understand how anybody could kill one of these gentle creatures for profit. I have no arguments against those who hunt animals for food or survival, but I could never condone hunting for profit or pleasure—not after looking into those eyes.
I enjoyed near-total freedom, except I couldn’t ride to the garbage dump. The Polar Bears owned the dump, and I could only go there with an armed escort.
In Churchill, the polar bears, although fascinating to me, were generally considered a nuisance. My father, the copilot, the mechanic and I would go to the dump to scavenge electronics that the U.S. Air Force had thrown away. Avro Joe found a complete HF radio that only missed a burnt-out vacuum tube. We carefully worked our way around the bears that frequented the dump. Bears accustomed to the garbage handouts tried to make the dumps their homes. The Natural Resource Officers would paint large red numbers on their sides, so we got to know some of them as #9 or #3. The numbers were significant because if they tranquillized the bear and slung him out of the area with a helicopter, the rangers would know if and when he returned. And they would. Any bear that got aggressive would be shot.
Bears were known to come into town, and fire trucks would be called in to hose them out. We always checked around corners before leaving our trailer. That summer, while we were away flying, an Eskimo boy was eaten on the streets of Churchill.
Today, Churchill is considered the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Tourists come from all over the world to watch the polar bears. However, Natural Resource Officers can no longer paint the bears red.
