Thompson
The Hub of the North
Heavier-than-air flight has been a dream of all humankind for almost as long as there have been humans. In fact, about the first thing early humans did was invent flight, in the form of spears. That a spear was flying would be immediately apparent to anyone attempting to throw a curvy one at a Mastodon. They had to be dead straight so as not to fly around in a big circle and jab you in the bum. But the distance a spear can fly is limited by the length and strength of the thrower's arm.
Early hominids had pretty robust arms, just not so long. So the atlatl was developed, a kind of an extension for your arm. With such a device you can be 120 meters away from your mastodon and still hit him (or her). But with a javelin style of spear you always run the risk of it forgetting which is the pointy end and tumbling mid-flight. So fletching (tail feathers) were developed to turn the spear into more of a dart, so the pointy end always leads. This led to the development of the bow and arrow, a flight system using stored energy and a much smaller spear to greatly increase takeoff speed and so therefore flight time and distance.
Later on, on this side of things, devices like the trebuchet increased the takeoff power available to early flight pioneers to the point that ordinarily non-flying objects, such as 300 pound boulders, could fly upwards of 1,000 feet before landing on a castle. On the other side of things, the aboriginal people of a land that would become Australia were carving sticks into a clever shape that flew so well the exact physics of it continue to defy explanation. So while the science of flight was making impressive strides, none of the early flying devices could be said to be taking off under its own power.
For that, we need to fast forward to the 16th century and Ming Dynasty China, when Wan Hu, an official and therefore a wealthy person, had forty-seven rockets strapped to a wicker chair which was itself attached to two kites. He then had forty-seven servants light the wicks, blasting Hu into Chinese folklore. While there is no question that this was the first heavier-than-air vehicle to take off under its own power, there has never been any direct evidence of a subsequent landing, at least on Earth (there is an impact crater on the moon named after him). So those who worry about such things decided that there must be some rules concerning what could be considered heavier-than-air flight. Otherwise, since the development of any technology such as flight is somewhat of a continuum with no particular end, anyone could arbitrarily say that their particular point on the continuum was "it" and claim that they invented flight. So while, if he were ever found, Hu might claim to have invented flight, we have a framework to dispute his claim. The rules.
Rule # 1: The flight must end in a landing of some sort.
Many years later, in India, Shivkar Bāpuji Talpade considered the problem of heavier-than-air flight and designed a craft which he called Marutsakhā, based on the vimānas (flying castles) of ancient Sanskrit epics. His craft was a hollow bamboo tube powered by urine (or possibly mercury, the exact recipe he kept secret) and it flew to the impressive height of 1,500 feet. But Shivkar himself wisely stayed on the ground.
Rule # 2: There has to be a pilot.
Meanwhile, everyone was working on the problem. In 1874 France, Félix du Temple talked a sailor into trying his steam-powered contraption which is credited as the first powered takeoff in history with a followup landing, although, to be fair, the takeoff was on a downhill ramp so gravity was doing most of the work.
Rule # 3: The takeoff must be on the level.
Ten years later, Alexander Mozhaysky in Russia managed a takeoff and sustained flight of over thirty meters followed by a successful landing.
Rule # 4: Russians are not allowed to participate.
A few years later, again in France, Clément Ader managed to takeoff from level ground in his Éole and fly for a ways, but this was considered more of a hop than a flight as there was no way of controlling the vehicle.
Rule # 5: The craft must be controllable.
Shortly after the turn of the century, technology was progressing to the point where it seemed likely that powered and practical heavier-than-air flight was going to become a reality. There were several players: starting in 1901 Gustave Whitehead built and flew several craft in the States. In New Zealand, in early 1903, Richard Pearse also managed to fly his vehicle. His successes led him to experiment with wing flaps, variable-pitch propellers, and tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel. But both he and Gustave didn't understand the most important element of powered flight: the ability to prove it.
Rule # 6: Have witnesses.
So on December 17, 1903, a little ways south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew their Wright Flyer. This was, in fact, a powered, heavier-than-air machine capable of controlled, sustained flight followed by a landing. Once. It took off from a rail. So unless you were really, really good at landing on rails you would not be able to take off again without some kind of assist getting back on said rail.
Rule # 7: The takeoff must not be assisted.
Which brings us to the next point on the continuum, 23 October 1906. It was on this date that Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his 14-Bis at the Bagatelle Gamefield in Paris, taking off unassisted, and flying around in front of a huge crowd including officials from the Aeroclub de France, before a safe landing. Also his craft was the first powered craft to use ailerons for roll control, rather than warping the wings, a highly impractical method of control. So outside of the U.S., a lot of people consider Alberto's efforts to be the winner.
But as we've already established, there's no finish line, and so therefore no winner. Anyhow, the technology of powered flight was improving at an exponential pace, especially anywhere but the U.S. where Orville and Wilbur held several patents and were using them to stifle the creativity of other inventors. That patent war disappeared quickly enough when a real war broke out, but did tend to make the next few years of breakthroughs happen in Europe. Nonetheless, whether it was the Wright Brothers, or Dumont, or Blériot, or any of a number of others, someone had taken the concept of powered, heavier-than-air piloted flying from a dream to a practical reality.
Now that the practicality of the aéroplane had been demonstrated the world wanted to know how to turn it into a weapon. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who held the patent on the telephone, had been experimenting with flying heavier-than-air craft since 1891 in Hammondsport, New York, and Baddeck, Nova Scotia. His Aerial Experiment Association had many successes, including the June Bug, which won a trophy for the first one mile flight in North America. Their fourth effort, the Silver Dart, was built and test flown at the Hammondsport facility before being shipped to Baddeck Bay where they continued to refine the design, taking off from the ice. These flights were the first controlled powered flights in Canada. The Silver Dart went on to fly a twenty-two mile course, and was even the first aeroplane (they called it an aerodrome) to fly a passenger in Canada in 1909. It was quite the success.
So they decided to demonstrate it to the Military and see if they could get any orders. It turns out that runway science was in its infancy at the time, and the field they had at Camp Petawawa had a sand strip, very different from the ice of Baddeck Bay. The aeroplane struggled to get airborne, and then crashed trying to land. It never flew again, and the military surmised that aeroplanes would not amount to much in a war.
But, of course, they were dead wrong. Canada got drawn into the Great War as part of its obligations as a British Dominion. The Germans, on the opposing team, had two devastating technologies: zeppelins and submarines. Zeppelins could drop bombs on Britain, and submarines could sink boats all across the Atlantic. To counter the former, the British were building aircraft such as the Avro 504, a two seat biplane well suited to general reconnaissance and anti-zeppelin patrols. And to counter the latter, the Americans were mass producing the Curtiss HS, a flying boat well suited to patrolling the coast for submarines (though not so well suited to doing anything about them; the only confrontation between an HS and a submarine in American waters resulted in the dropping of two bombs which likely scared the submarine, but did not actually explode).
All of these airplanes required pilots, which were understandably in short supply, the first practical aeroplane being five years old at the time. So pilots were being trained at a blistering pace. At the beginning of the war there were essentially no Canadian pilots; at the end of the war there were more than 5,000. This in spite of the fact that a fighter pilot at the time could look forward to maybe 17 flights before being shot down. And there were no parachutes.
Following Armistice on November 11th, 1918, there were a great number of 504Ks and HS-2Ls laying about and they were either sold at very reasonable prices to places such as the Azores or Australia, or just plain given to places such as Canada, who then didn't know what to do with them so they were sold off for cheap. And of course there were also a great number of pilots returning from overseas. Since there was never going to be another war, Canada had no need of an airforce, so the short lived Canadian Air Force was disbanded (to be formed again two years later). And there were no airlines. But with a very modest investment, literally anyone could start up an air service.
It would be a year and a half before the Air Board was formed, with the Certificate Board overseeing civilian aviation and the Flying Operations Board overseeing that of Government. So in the meantime, flying in Canada was the wild west. There were no AMEs (Aircraft Maintenance Engineers, fancy talk for mechanics) and airplanes were basically free, so as airplanes broke down they pretty much stayed where they broke. Early airstrips resembled a large game of lawn darts.
But nonetheless the working airplanes were being put to good use. The paper companies, such as Laurentide Paper in Grand-Mère, near Trois-Rivières, Québec, had a vested interest in the health of the forests that fed their mills. So they hired Stuart Graham, recently of the Royal Naval Air Service, and with two surplus HS-2L flying boats he started patrolling la Mauricie surveying the forest and spotting forest fires. This was later expanded to become Laurentide Air Service Ltd., and their arboreal reconnaissance encompassed a vast region of forest all the way west to Lake of the Woods and north to James Bay, also delivering mail, people, and stuff. The early use of these flights to survey the health of forests gave rise to the term "bush flying" to differentiate it from inter-city flying, which was also in its infancy, but more rightly belonging to a different story. This story is about bush flying.
The efforts of such companies as Laurentide were for sure the first bush flying done in the country, but they weren't commercial in the sense that they were being privately done for one company. The nod for first commercial bush flight (indeed, the first paid passenger flight) in the country has to go to Canadian Aircraft, which had some surplus 504Ks from the British and an office in downtown Winnipeg. At the time, if you were a fur buyer needing to get from Winnipeg, where you were, to The Pas, where the furs were, you could either paddle or dog sled the 390 miles, or, more likely, a little of both since the lakes would be open at the beginning of your journey and iced over towards the end. So essentially you couldn't do it until the dead of winter when everything would be iced over, and then you could dog sled the whole way. Or, as of very recently, you could fly. Such a fur buyer and his associate walked into the office of Canadian Aircraft one day in October of 1920, doubled-up on the front passenger seat of a 504K for the chilly ride north and the previously untried landing on ice, and the rest is, as they say, a minor footnote in history.
But all of the aircraft in use in the early days of bush flying were foreign, and built for purposes other than flying in the Canadian bush. So Robert B.C. Noorduyn, who had a great deal of experience and success working with such pioneering aircraft manufacturers as Sopwith, Fokker and Bellanca, decided to design and build the first truly purpose-built Canadian bush plane. He opened Noorduyn Aircraft Ltd. in Montréal in 1933 and began designing and building the Noorduyn Norseman.
The Norseman was a high wing monoplane, making it easy to load and unload cargo and passengers. Being a high wing, it was also possible to look down whilst landing, extremely important when what you're landing on is sketchy. The rugged landing struts could accommodate "tundra tires", skis or floats. It seated up to eight passengers and two crew, or it could carry up to 3,000 pounds of whatever. The new aircraft was such an instant icon that the very first one off the line, "Arcturus", was leased by Hollywood to feature in the Cagney film "Captains of the Clouds".
Even though the design was a huge success, only 17 of them were actually built and sold by 1940, and that may have been it. But the Second World War came along, and with it the need to patrol and defend not just the northern bit of North America, but all across the top of the Atlantic to England as well. The RCAF ordered 38 Norseman aircraft, and the U.S. ordered 749. Throughout the war, modifications were requested and more orders were placed. Even after the war, and with a glut of war-surplus models available, production continued into 1959, with a total of 903 being produced, 51 of them still flying in North America and who knows how many worldwide.
But Noorduyn was not the only player in the Canadian bush plane market. De Havilland was a British company that had its start with "de Havilland Biplane No. 1" before going on to produce the Moths - highly successful warplanes such as the Gypsy Moth. Their World War II success story was the Mosquito, a general purpose fighting machine fast enough to chase other planes around the sky yet big enough to carry bombs. But their Canadian arm, founded in 1928, became devoted to developing aircraft for the harsh conditions of the Canadian bush.
Their iconic Beaver, which is probably the first thing that springs to mind when you think of bush planes, was designed and built in Downsview, just north of Toronto, and the first one flew in 1947. Approximately the same size as a Norseman, and using similar engines, the Beaver weighs in at close to a ton less, being made of metal instead of wood and fabric. So while the Norseman, "the fastest boat on the lake", was the first true bushplane, the Beaver was undoubtedly the best, and hands down the winner at STOL (short takeoff and landing) operations. That is still largely the case today. While your operator might fly you into your hunt camp in something like a more modern 185, when it comes time to fly you and your moose out, it's more likely to be in one of the more than 800 Beavers still flying, out of the 1,600 or so that were built before main production ended in 1967.
De Havilland went on to produce more iconic bush planes, such as the Otter, a larger version of the Beaver, and then the Twin Otter, a twin-engined bush plane capable of long flights and some degree of comfort for its two crew and up to twenty passengers. But these larger aircraft required a more powerful engine than the Wasp radial in use at the time. So Pratt & Whitney Canada designed the PT6 series of turboprops - powerful, light-weight, and above all, reliable horsepower that was designed for the Twin Otter but so hugely successfull that it was retrofitted into a large number of existing Otters and Beavers. The reason that the PT6es were so reliable is that they were built back to front. The air intake was at the back and the exhaust was at the front, just the opposite of what you'd expect in a jet engine driving a propeller. This means that the hot parts, those at the end of the combustion chamber, were at the front. The hot parts are the ones most prone to breaking, and if you can get at them without removing the engine, you can swap them out, even in the bush. But I'm getting a little ahead of the timeline of the story; back to the early days.
The Norseman and Beaver may have been the best, but they were still only two of the many, perhaps dozens of other types of aircraft that were flying bush. All of the different designs brought their own unique strengths and weaknesses. But no matter the design, all bush planes shared one common element: they required a certain breed of pilot. Early bush pilots were likely to be fighter aces from the great war; pretty much all pilots at the time got their start in the war, and you didn't really get to the end of the war unless you showed some promise. So if you flew into the bush, your pilot might have been someone like Punch Dickens. He was actually a bomber pilot in the war, but he was such a skilled one, and worked so well with his gunner, Jock Adam, that by the end of their 73 missions together they had been credited with seven kills, making Punch highly unusual in that he was a bomber pilot who was also an ace. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for completing his aerial assignments with persistence and gallantry. After the war, when he began his career in the bush, he boasted "put your pencil on any point on the map of Canada and we'll get you there - if you can afford it." He flew one of the first aerial surveys of Canada, delivered the first airmail to the Northwest Territories, and in 1930, flew the prospecting team that discovered uranium on the Great Bear Lake, which made the Manhattan Project feasible.
Or your pilot may have been someone like Wop May. When Woppie was a brand new fighter pilot on April 21st, 1918, he was told to circle above the action and simply observe. There he found Wolfram von Richtofen, cousin of the Red Baron, also a brand new pilot, and also observing. When Wop engaged Wolfram he found himself answering to Manfred who had come to his cousin's defense. Wop later stated that the only thing that saved him was his poor flying - "I do not suppose that Richtofen could figure out what I was going to do." Others joined in the fracas, chasing after the Red Baron who was himself chasing after a terrified Wop May who never quite managed to crash or take a bullet. No one really knows who actually shot down the Bloody Red Baron, but Wop certainly gets the assist. He went on to achieve 15 confirmed kills and 5 probables. He also received the Distinguished Flying Cross. In his bush career he had many firsts and bests - he was one of the best barnstormers, the first to fly in the Northwest Territories and the pilot of the first aerial manhunt. He flew "The Race Against Death" when he delivered Diphtheria inoculations to a lonely Hudson's Bay outpost, and in 1932 he was instrumental in the hunt for the Mad Trapper of Rat River. May found the trapper's tracks from the air and guided the RCMP to a shootout, and even flew one of the injured officers to a doctor, thereby saving his life.
There were dozens of other notable pilots whose stories are known, and likely hundreds and hundreds of others whose stories never came to light, but one more Distinguished Flying Cross recipient does need to be mentioned - Doc Oaks. Doc had a storied career in the war. His first two kills were on the same day, shortly after becoming a fighter pilot. He was especially good at "driving down" wounded aircraft and even managed to capture one fairly intact. But it was his career in the bush flying industry that is more significant to today's story. He was quite a clever lad and invented the portable nose hangar - a structure to cover the nose of an aircraft and keep the engine, and more importantly, its oil, warm enough that the engine could be started in extreme cold. This opened up the high arctic (and the low antarctic) sufficiently that when18 prospectors went missing away up north, a large-scale search and rescue operation could be mounted. Doc also went back to school and graduated with a degree as a mining engineer, which he put to good use prospecting in Québec and Ontario. When the newly formed Western Canada Airways, based out of Winnipeg, was formed in 1926, Doc became its first manager. Under his leadership, WCA flew a massive airlift, the largest ever at the time, to Fort Churchill in northern Manitoba to help build the northern terminus of the Hudson Bay Railroad, a new way of getting prairie grain onto boats. It ran from The Pas to Hudson's Bay, to exploit the navigable sub-arctic maritime route from there to markets hungry for grain. This construction would not have been possible without bush planes, which transported men, machinery, and even eight hundred pounds of dynamite for the effort.
Now that there was a rail connection in the north of Manitoba, it made the large scale mining of minerals there viable. So in 1946, Inco started looking for nickel deposits in the area around the Burntwood River at Mystery Lake, a little more than four hundred miles north of Winnipeg, but only thirty or so miles north of the HBR. This prospecting would have been pretty difficult even fifteen years earlier, but with a proliferation of bush planes (most of them being run by WCA, which was buying up all of the competition) it was relatively easy. Within ten years a large deposit was found near Moak Lake, and Inco began the development of a branch line north from the HBR and a new mining town, to be called Thompson, after Inco's chairman at the time.
In 2008, as a tribute to the town's debt to the bush plane, volunteers in Thompson restored a 1946 Norseman float plane and mounted it at the main entrance into the city, where visitors would be sure to see it. Unfortunately, many of the visitors to Thompson, who have to pass beneath the mounted float plane, are people of First Nations heritage. And many of them have memories of being wrestled onto planes very much like the one on display and being sent screaming and crying far away to residential schools. Over the years there has been a controversy over whether the monument should stay or whether it should go. But in the aftermath of Kamloops the current feeling seems to be that, good or bad, the bush plane and bush pilot represent the history of Canada's north, and so the monument should stay.
A little bit of snow enroute today.
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Quite a bit in fact.
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That power line is probably going to Nelson.
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The Nelson River definitely is.
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Landing Lake. We're getting close.
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And there's the little city of Thompson.
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So that's it for today. Tomorrow we're off to where polar bears hang out.
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