a DC-3 strapped to his ass is where Joe is in his element. The metamorphosis that occurs in his personality at every Sunday–Friday afternoon is remarkable. Here is a man who carries the weight of running an airline on his shoulders for most of his waking hours. He worries about the safety of his aircraft and the people he calls upon to fly them. He worries about the employees who depend upon Buffalo Airways to pay their mortgages and put food on their tables. He worries about remote northern communities that would be stuck without essential food, products, and services if his planes missed their deliveries. But at his core, Joe McBryan is a pilot, and he is never more comfortable than when he sits down early every morning and late every afternoon (except Saturday) in the cockpit of C-GPNR, C-GWIR, or C-GWZS, the three DC-3s that ply the skies between Yellowknife on the north-central coast of Great Slave Lake and Hay River on its southwestern shore. “It’s like night and day,” Mikey says, “a complete change of personality. He’ll yell and scream all day, and once he gets that over with and gets on that plane, he’s happy.”
It doesn’t take long for even the newest arrival to the Buffalo family to see it. By day, Joe is a hardened businessman, one with exceptionally high demands for the people around him, no matter what position they hold in the business’s hierarchy. He rarely cracks a smile, and he prowls around the hangar and adjoining offices like a lion on the hunt. If there’s something going on in the business, Joe knows about it, is likely worried about it, and will probably find something about it that needs to be improved. Walk across the tarmac of the Yellowknife or Hay River airports to the stairs of the DC-3, however, and there’s a different person waiting for you. Sure, he looks like the Joe McBryan you’ve been scared to bump into in the hangar, but this Joe McBryan is busy greeting passengers as they board the plane. He chats with old friends, welcomes them aboard, laughs and smiles as they offer their stories of the day. He is, in a word, charming.
And the more I came to know this man, the more I realized that he needs to do this. He needs to fly, needs to be behind the controls of the aging World War II beauties to which his name is so closely linked. But he also needs this kind of relaxed, gentle human interaction that he seems to find so difficult at other times during the day. Because while he is loath to show it to the outside world, Joe McBryan is really an ol’ softie at heart.
You certainly couldn’t tell by his work ethic, though. Buffalo has been offering its scheduled Yellowknife–Hay River service continuously since 1982. Joe flies each one-hour (200-kilometre) leg across the belly of the great lake, leaving Hay River at 7:30 every morning and returning home at 5:00 every evening. That’s twelve flights each week, or 624 flights a year. So between 1982 and 2010—give or take the odd missed flight for weather—Buffalo Airways’ daily DC-3 airline passenger service flew 17,472 times. Joe McBryan was at the helm for almost all of them.
It makes me wonder if he ever looks forward to a day off or (God forbid!) a vacation. “Why would I go on holiday?” he snapped at me when I asked him when he’d last taken a break for a little R & R. “So I could sit on my ass?”
The Buffalo Airways Fleet
Buffalo Airways is the proud owner of fifty-two aircraft, forty-nine of which are registered to the airline and three to the Buffalo School of Aviation, which hasn’t run courses in several years.
1 Aeronca Champion: C-FNPJ
2 Beechcraft Baron: C-FULX, C-GBAU
3 Beechcraft King Air: C-FCGE, C-FCGH, C-FCGI
3 Beechcraft Travel Air: C-GIWJ, C-GWCB, C-GYFM
7 Canadair CL-215: C-FAYN, C-GBPD, C-GBYU, C-GCSX, C-GDHN, C-GDKW, C-GNCS
1 Cessna 185: C-FUPT
2 Consolidated Vultee (Canso): C-FNJE, C-FPQM
1 Consolidated Vultee (Convair): C-GTFC
3 Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando: C-FAVO, C-GTPO, C-GTXW
1 Douglas C-47 Skytrain (a military variant of the DC-3): C-FCUE
13 Douglas C-54 Skymaster (a variant of the DC-4): C-FBAA, C-FBAJ, C-FBAK, C-FBAM, C-FBAP, C-FIQM, C-GBAJ, C-GBNV, C-GBSK, C-GCTF, C-GPSH, C-GQIC, C-GXKN
9 Douglas DC-3: C-FDTB, C-FDTH, C-FFAY, C-FFTR, C-FLFR, C-GJKM, C-GPNR, C-GWIR, C-GWZS
1 Fleet Canuck: C-FDQJ
3 Lockheed L-188 Electra: C-FIJX, C-GLBA, C-FIJV
1 Noorduyn Norseman: C-FSAN
1 Robinson R22 helicopter: C-FNEO
Douglas DC-3 Facts & Figures
· Capacity: 2 flight crew and 21–32 passengers, depending on seat configuration
· Production: 16,079; 10,655 in the United States
· Length: 19.7 metres (64 feet, 5 inches)
· Wingspan: 29 metres (95 feet)
· Height: 5.2 metres (16 feet, 11 inches)
· Maximum speed: 346 km/h (215 mph)
· Cruise speed: 240 km/h (150 mph)
· Range: 1,650 kilometres (1,025 miles)
· Empty weight: 8,300 kilograms (18,300 pounds)
· Maximum takeoff weight: 12,700 kilograms (28,000 pounds)
THE KNIFE
Taking Joe’s words to heart, I made it a point not to sit on my ass, particularly when I was in his presence. Even when I was on my own, I relished the opportunity to explore Yellowknife.
Set on the northern shore of Great Slave Lake some 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of the Arctic Circle, Yellowknife is as colourful as it is cosmopolitan. For every government bureaucrat walking its streets in a suit and tie, there’s a miner, prospector, drunk, or raconteur (sometimes all wrapped up in the same body) regaling some newcomer with derring-do stories of gold hunted, fortunes made, loves lost, and blizzards survived. Aboriginals have called the lands around Yellowknife home for thousands of years (the city gets its name from the local Yellowknives Dene peoples, who made tools from copper deposits in the area), but the city’s modern era began in the 1930s, when gold mining became its primary commercial focus.
The discovery of gold in Yellowknife is widely attributed to a prospector named B.A. Blakeney, who was on his way to the Klondike gold rush around Dawson City, Yukon, in the late 1890s. With the frenzy surrounding the riches being unearthed in the Klondike, people paid little or no attention to Blakeney’s Yellowknife discovery. Little wonder: since 1896, when Skookum Jim made his serendipitous discovery of gold along Rabbit (Bonanza) Creek, more than 385,000 kilograms (850,000 pounds) of gold have been taken from the Klondike. There may have been gold around Yellowknife, but nobody seemed to care.
Flying changed the face of prospecting—and of Yellowknife—forever when, in the
