, here's the link to a piece from Canadian bush pilot Dominique Prinet, who flew for Gateway Aviation in the late 60's and early 70's. He has a new book titled Flying to Extremes: Memories of a Northern Bush Pilot, an excellent pilot memoir about his years working in the Arctic flying Otters and big Cessnas.He gave me three unpublished stories to assemble into an article for BCP, but the chapters of the actual book are the best stories of the bunch.
Prinet is a super interesting guy. He later went on to lead some Canadian airlines and got into sailing the oceans of the world.
Anyway, pick up a copy of his book. It's worth it for the great old film photography of the people and aircraft of the Arctic from the era.
Amazon link for the book
And perhaps this photo of him at work will spark some discussion:
His description from emailing with him:
[in regard to the photo]...the reaction was instantaneous and unanimous : "this is crazy! You need to have the pointed end up front" I had to explain that, if I had done that, the plane would not have flown at all: the drag from a flat surface in the back would have been enormous. And I pointed out that fish and whales have the large section up front and the pointy end at the back. I added "so does the Otter itself: just look at it along the boat: big flat area up front, pointy end to the back".
The other point is that this Otter [pictured] carried TWO boats, which most people don't notice. This, I think, had never been done before, and I don't think any pilot thought it could be done. The plane couldn't get enough speed to fly properly (notice that its nose is up), had take-off power for climbing, took 10 minutes to reach 500 feet and to be able to finally turn back 180 degrees towards where it was supposed to go, and required climb power all across. I had to do that half a dozen times to move boats for the fishermen to a place for the summer, some 50 or 75 miles from the lodge.
