BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE by Jim Griffith

best seat in the house

BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE

Canadian Aviator Publishing Ltd

To my wife, Joyce. For her unfailing optimism and a lifetime of constant support.

best seat in the house

best seat in the house

Copyright © 2018 by J. E. (Jim) Griffith Paperback edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www. accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Canadian Aviator Publishing Ltd.

4758 Gulch Road Armstrong, B.C. V0E 1B4 www.aviatorsbookshelf.com

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Griffith, Jim Best Seat in the House—Flying for Canada's National Air Line

i SBN 978-1-7753533-0-0 (paper)

1. Griffith, Jim 2. Airlines—Canada —Biography. 3. Trans Canada Air Lines— Air Canada. i Title.

Library of Congress information is available upon request.

Editing, Layout and Design by Jack Schofield COAST DOG PRESS

Printed and bound in Canada by Hillside Printing Ltd and printed on acid-free paper

Published by:

CANADiAN AViATOR PUBLiSHiNG LTD

Graphic for interior title page painted under contract to Trans Canada Airlines by Grant Tigner. Approval for use granted by the estate of Grant Tigner .

Digital painting of TCA poster by Graham Ward Jetliner photo and Lockheed 14 photo courtesy S.R. (Rick) Found

All TCA and Air Canada photos courtesy Air Canada archives.

Front cover graphic from a painting copyright © by George Pendlebury

FOREWORD

parallel histories

An account of an individual's lifetime devotion to his craft can be a compelling story. in particular, the anecdotes recorded on these pages of one man's total commitment to becoming an airline pilot, the diversity of his accomplishments along the way and the political awareness and candor with which Jim Griffith relives these excerpts from his pilot's log proves to be a great adventure for his readers be they aviation buffs or otherwise.

Often such narratives forget the thread of history that has gone before and accompany these records of personal events and become compositions recognized as family treasures but not too suited for public attention. Not so for this adventure that includes pages from Canada's recent history of the story of Trans Canada Air Lines, the very airline our author flew with for the length of his amazing career.

The story of Trans Canada Air Lines, the air line's history from an act of the Canadian parliament, to its emergence under the more comprehensive name of Air Canada into the deregulated airspace of this century parallels our author's story as it does the very history of Canada's world acclaimed aviation heritage — told, as the author states, from an amazing vantage point—from the Best Seat in the House.

Jack Schofield

best seat in the house

moments from history

Highlights from the history of Trans Canada Air Lines and its evolution into Air Canada are depicted on these pages by descriptions of the airline's fleet as the changes in aviation technology took place over the years previous to and along with the author's experiences.

best seat in the house

INTRODUCTION -

This little collection of short stories records the emergence of Trans Canada Air Lines/Air Canada into a sophisticated world-class airline, circa 1960-2000. The cultural changes of the airline viewed from the best seat in the house, the cockpit, are through the somewhat cynical eyes of this now retired pilot. The language used while not strictly politically correct by today’s standard is contemporary to the era involved. No need for anyone to run to his or her safe place, however, i apologize in advance if i offend anyone. it is not intentional. i am merely trying to add ethos to the tales. i have woven my whimsical yarns together with skeins of autobiographical nonsense. These events are from my personal recollections and are true within the constraints of my aging memory. Other people may have a different view of the events and i certainly welcome anyone’s comments on how my experience may have differed from theirs. They are most certainly entitled to their own version of the saga.

No one walks off the street to submit a pilot application to an airline without first learning to fly, therefore, i have added my own stumbling path to that door.

Today’s airline pilot is a male or female educated professional, likely to be the graduate of a college or even a university that includes aviation as a bona fide study. in the early sixties airline pilots were a different breed, an eclectic mix of quasi middle class, mostly high school graduates, sons of the greatest generation who ever lived. it was most certainly a man’s world in 1960. Even by the year 2000 while the majority of the gentler sex, although integral important crew members, were relegated to customer service in the back of the bus, but some ladies were starting to appear in cockpits as pilots.

included in the stories are quips of world geopolitical events including the major players who, due to the need to get where they had to go, had to fly? We were sometimes front row spectators to great events and witnessed also that sometimes our heroes have feet of clay. At the end, are bits of stuff i wrote just for the fun of it...Enjoy.

The author receiving his wings from his mother. Jim Griffith was a top ranking Air Cadet holding the rank of Warrant Offier first class (WO1). He received flying training under a special RCAF program extended to the Royal Canadian Air Cadet League. He would later receive his Air Force Wings following regular flight training in the RCAF

best seat in the house

in the beginning

it all started in the spring of 1947 when my parents took my brother, Owen, and i to the annual Air Force day at RCAF Station Winnipeg. Dad was about to be de-mobbed after having served in the RCAF City of Winnipeg auxiliary squadron, the 112th. He was overseas during the blitz with the Squadron when it renumbered to 402 Squadron.

Mom was giving him hell because he did not want to bug his pals in the squadron to add Owen and me to the list of civilians being taken up on a squadron DC-3 courtesy flight. Dad in his quaint oldfashioned way did not think it was proper to use his undue influence to get us a ride. Mom won and big brother and i went for a thirty-minute flight.

To be honest, i was not thrilled.

in fact i was scared witless being in this hollow metal tube experiencing weird feelings i had only felt in Eaton’s department store elevators in downtown Winnipeg. Those were like metal cages operated by ladies in military style smart uniforms. They clanged and rattled and when they started lift-off, they made your stomach feel funny, even funnier when they started down.

it was unique to be a pilot back then but railroad engineers made the big bucks in our blue-collar neighbourhood of west end Winnipeg. Being a train engineer was my first choice but in the meantime, to keep me off the streets, my parents enrolled me in Air Cadets. Actually, i had to admit that the uniform had more panache than the stripped railway cap i wore as i blun-

The North American Mustang was developed late in WWii to provide a long range fighter capable of accompanying the B17 daylight raids on enemy targets deep in eastern Germany— targets like Berlin. The P51 Mustang proved to be a capable fighter against the Me 109s. Not often mentioned is the fact that it was a British design built in the USA by North American Aviation.

Any Air Cadet worth his salt would want to fly this great aircraft.

dered, hormones raging, out of puberty. By some miracle known only to the gods of flight i won an Air Cadet scholarship and hence a private licence introducing me to a lifelong love of flying not to mention a rich and rewarding forty year career as an airline pilot.

My cadet CO, a TCA North Star captain, was my idol and mentor. it may not have been the wisest choice since he and all seventy-two of his passengers and crew perished when his aircraft, loaded with 18000 lbs. of high-octane aviation fuel, flew into a vertical cliff. The fireball could be seen for fifty miles in spite of thick cloud cover and heavy rain.

i became a member of the RCAF reserve in their high school trades training

summer for something you loved seemed outrageous. it was here that i developed my fascination with the North American Mustang fighter plane. i hoped and prayed that i would someday fly it.

i was accepted by my Dad’s Alma matter, The RCAF City of Winnipeg Auxiliary Squadron for wings flight training. i finished my basic flying training on the Harvard aircraft at RCAF stations Moose Jaw SK and Penhold AB and oh yeah, got married against regulations. Nothing happened. i began to think that maybe things were going a little too smoothly. it didn’t take long for the other shoe to drop at RCAF station Gimli MB.

Our course of NATO students finished T bird ground school, completed

plan... the cold war was peaking and the government wanted a cadre of trained disciplined youngsters for cannon fodder in case the balloon of WWiii went up. For a teenager the money they paid that

best seat in the house

our fixed simulator and impatiently waited for our first flight. Continuous bouts of freezing rain for three days in March threw the training schedule

into chaos. The resulting ice coating turned sidewalks, roads and aircraft movement areas into a skating rink.

THE TOW BAR INCIDENT

On the third afternoon of the ice storm, the station adjutant, a non-pilot and coincidently the officer responsible for snow removal on all station paved surfaces, had an inspiration. He thought we could de-ice the tarmac and runways by trailing a bulldozer with its blade up behind the jet pipe of a T-bird. The idea being the dozer blade would deflect the hot jet blast downward and melt the ice. if successful, it would boost his chances of obtaining a prized permanent commission in the shrinking peace-time RCAF with its attendant lifetime pension. After all what could go wrong?

Officer instructors electing to stay on base during the storm, after three days of sitting on their hands, were hors de combat in the officer’s mess doing what one does on an afternoon free of duty. Being flight cadets, we were not allowed adult beverages till after dinner. i was sitting chain smoking Turkish cigarettes with two

course mates, a Sergeant of the Royal Norwegian Airforce and a Lieutenant from the Turkish Airforce, when the adjutant stormed into our Mess.

He shouted, “Right. i need three volunteers” and pointing at us continued, “you, you and you … outside! i’ve got a job for ya”.

Being a groundling, he wrongly assumed we had already logged some T-Bird flight time. Sitting closest to the door, we had just been a convenient target of opportunity for him.

“Now,” he said, “We will have you connected to the tractor tug with a tow bar on the nosewheel and the dozer trailing along behind. The tug driver will set his brakes hold up his fist indicating for you to hold the TBird’s brakes full on … not the parking brake use the foot pedals. Then when he is satisfied, he will wave his hand over his head in a circular motion indicating to you to advance the throttle to 60%. Understood? … Good. Now let’s get out there and melt some ice!” Not one of us wanted to miss the opportunity of scooping our classmates by being the first to start the engine of a T Bird … so we kept our mouths shut.

i was the guinea pig and we would try it first on a taxiway. if it worked, three of us would do a NATO alliance, echelon left, formation down the runway. Our mission; strike at the heart of Mother Nature where she lived. i had my handy pocket sized T-33 checklist in my hand and for the first time in my life, i started a Rolls Royce Nene jet engine. Little did i know then that later in my career i would start many RR Nenes four at a time modified with reduction gears stuck on the front attached to a prop a.k.a. R R Dart Turbo prop engines. They hung on the wings of Vickers Viscounts. That, however, is another story for another day.

Coordinating all the hand signals was going to be a bit confusing. The tractor driver in front gave the signal that he had set the tractor brake. i replied by giving the signal that the T-Bird’s brakes were set, and since i couldn’t see behind, i guessed the bulldozer guy was doing what he was supposed to be doing. i advanced the power slowly, and everything was going well but on this day 60% was way too much power and the laws of physics would not be denied. At 60% the engine produced more than enough thrust to overcome the locked brakes and the combined weight of

the tractor, aircraft, and tow bar, and the ice, unsurprisingly, was slippery. What the hell was the tug driver doing? He and the tractor were moving sideways. He seemed to be violently trying to slash his own throat. Finally, it dawned on me. He wants me to shut down. i sheepishly did. The tow bar was bent, the tug driver was scared witless, the dozer guy was bewildered and i was sure my air force career was prematurely ended.

No one involved wanted to admit it was not the brightest of ideas. Luckily, for me the adjutant controlled the flow of documentation in and out of RCAF station Gimli. He quickly quashed all the paperwork associated with the incident including the names of the guilty. He hoped the file would disappear into the maw of military bureaucratic red tape and not dim his chances of a cushy permanent RCAF commission. indeed it must have; i never heard another word about it.

MORE T33 DRAMA

Usually a pilot’s first solo or the first time solo after being checked out on a different airplane results in a feeling of unadulterated elation. We had finished a couple of circuits and were waiting just short of the button for another one.

The T33 was one of the early jet fighters that soon became relegated to the role of a training aircraft. Canadair built the T33A for the RCAF under contract from Lockheed Aircraft Company. .

The instructor sighed and said, “Okay she’s all yours”

He raised the canopy, baled out over the side, slung his parachute over his shoulder and started to amble across the infield. Wow was i excited? i called tower and was cleared to position and hold.

i waited for what seemed an inordinately long time before hearing the magic words, “Airforce 222 cleared for takeoff.”

i applied full throttle ... the Tbird didn’t move...what the? Check; parking brakes off ...yes. The engine roared at a 100% and airplane shook but it did not move.

i throttled back and told the tower, “i have a problem”.

They replied, “Yes you do and he is walking back toward you. ... Remain in position”.

i looked over and my instructor was walking back toward the plane. He looked disgusted and signaled me to set the brakes then disappeared under the nose. i felt a couple of thumps through my feet. Taxieing onto the runway, i had cocked the nosewheel. it was locked at 90 degrees to the runway and the T-bird would not budge. My instructor had to put his shoulder under the nose...heave up...take the weight off the nose wheel and kick it

straight to line it up with the runway. it kind of took the shine off of what should have been my Olympic moment. Unprompted the tower called:

“Okay triple two you are cleared for Takeoff”, and added “AGAiN”.

i blasted off, my ego completely shattered.

Awarded my wings by the Turkish air attaché to Ottawa at a Gimli wings parade i headed the 50 miles down the highway next morning to Winnipeg to report to the squadron and to my wife.

Arriving at the flight line, i expected to see sleek V-12 Merlin powered Mustangs. To my horror now sat eight squat, beetle-like, twin engine Beech-18’s. The squadron’s task had changed from fighter interceptor to communications whatever that meant. i soon found out. it meant an immediate posting for me to Saskatoon in, of all places, Saskatchewan.

Saskatoon at the time was a conversion unit where single-engine RCAF pilots converted to multiengine aircraft. it included those of limited flying experience who had just finished basic training along withsword pilots returning from Europe. As it happened a fresh faced, newly winged, novice was paired up with a

best seat in the house

sardonic F-86 Sabre driver who looked upon his conversion to the lowly twin piston-engine military version of the civilian Beechcraft-18 with considerable disdain. The Beech-18 was known in the RCAF as the C-45 or ironically, as the Expeditor or less kindly as the Exploder, Wichita Rattler and especially to navigation students as the Vomit Comet. Nevertheless, if the jet jock wished to snare the prized, pension rich, permanent commission in Canada’s peacetime Air Force it was something he would have to endure. The sprog on the other hand had his own aspiration—to be an airline pilot.

beech 18 versus north star

it was a beautiful warm prairie evening with no moon, light winds and endless prairie dusk with our two heroes assigned to Expeditor #1412 for their night training. After sunset and going around and around the airport for two hours of endless circuits to gain the necessary night endorsement for a multi-night rating, our lads thought they were finished for the night. Little did they know the

Dubbed, "the Vomit Comet" and other derogatory names, the Beech 18 was powered by two Pratt & Whitney 450 hp R985s and was a popular civilian aircraft used for light transport work. An RCAF pilot hoping to fly fighters would find this aircraft somewhat underwhelming.

painting by Art Cox

Commanding Officer observing them with his beady eyes on his way to the officer’s mess, would order them back into the sky for two more hours of the same monotony.

“What did they think,” the old Wing Commander demanded of their instructor? “Did they really believe that flying in prairie twilight was night?”

The young lad finished off the extended mission in the left seat giving him captain’s authority and coincidently the accountability. After requesting the control tower for the lowest intensity setting of the approach and runway lights to authenticate a genuine dark night for their last landing, they did a wide circuit

a few miles south of town and set up for what turned out to be a flawless airline-like approach.

The controller cleared them to land then as an afterthought added, “Air Force 412 be advised an eastbound TCA North Star flight 804 is estimating overhead in twenty minutes”.

The lone midnight-shift controller then shifted his gaze from the pretty white and blue runway and taxi lights to focus his attention on his lunch box patiently waiting for him on a stool behind him. He was already salivating, anticipating the thick kubasa and garlic sandwich contained malodorously within.

in the North Star, 90 miles out, the crew requested and received initial descent clearance from Edmonton ATC. The captain eased back the throttles on the four mighty Rolls Royce Merlin engines. The passengers came to life and began chattering with their seat mates realizing that with the Merlins at idle they were able to talk without shouting at the top of their lungs to make themselves heard. Meanwhile, back in the Beech 18, the sprog was easing back ever so gently on the controls for a perfect three point landing. He could feel the extended landing lights nibbling gently at the ailerons through the control column. Both pilots sensed the gentle settling of the aircraft anticipating the satisfying squeak of rubber on concrete. They focused so intently on this... the last landing of the night ... that they didn’t hear the bleating of the undercarriage warning horn. Suddenly a queasy feeling in their stomachs as the tickety, tick..tick of the prop tips tickling the runaway gave way to a sudden sharp drop accompanied by scraping, screeching and lots and lots of dust, signaled their unforgiving blunder.

The pilots had completed the memorized emergency landing

checklist almost before the defiled Beechcraft had stopped its belly slide. Their hasty egress was hampered by a, “Laurel and Hardy”, convergent struggle at the back of the fuselage as two grown men tried to squeeze through the single small exit door at the same time. Thus they abandoned the crippled hulk with its wheels tucked up on their up-locks. They stood in the dark soberly surveying the sad wreck as the dust settled, the sound of hot and rapidly cooling engine metal snapping in their ears with the smell of spilled high-octane gas in their nostrils. Confident that in moments they would hear the sirens of the station fire trucks, puzzled ... they instead heard only eerie silence.

What to do? There were no navigation or anti-collision lights from the a/c; they and every other electronic device including the radios had been switched off when they had turned off the master switch as part of the drill. it suddenly simultaneously dawned on them that:

(a) The control tower operator for some unexplained reason didn’t see what had happened and had not hit the crash button:

(b) The eastbound North Star would without doubt be landing on

the same runway on which their unlighted wreck now stood and:

(c) The danger of re-entering the aircraft to use the radios could ignite the spilled gas and be suicidal.

They had to get to the tower and the only way was overland through the ankle busting gopher hole cratered infield to the new terminal.

in the North Star the Captain at 10,000 ft switched the four super chargers to low blower and called for the in-range check to prepare for the landing.

At the main terminal doors our two neophytes found the doors tightly locked so one went around the building one way and the other went the other way and met breathlessly at the back. All windows and doors were locked tighter than an airline captain’s wallet.

“Wait a minute,” said the sprog. “i saw a steel ladder attached to the building” and running back, up he went.

The ladder opened onto the catwalk surrounding the tower cab and inside the controller was staring blankly through the glass out over the airfield, the half-eaten sandwich now

forgotten in his hand. The youngster started banging on the glass and the controller finally seeing the dustcovered pilot dropped the sandwich stunned at the sight not knowing if the ghostly figure was human or some kind of space alien.

He opened the door to the control tower and before our lad could explain what happened the control tower radio speaker barked into life, “Trans Canada 804 Edmonton Centre. You are cleared to the Saskatoon airport for an approach: wind calm: altimeter 30.11: change tower 118.3”.

“Roger cleared for the approach we have the field in sight looks like we’ll do a straight in visual on 08,changing tower,” replied 804 and the North Star captain called, “Before landing check!”

The controller still hadn’t moved. “Saskatoon Tower Trans Canada 804 three miles out, field in sight, canceling iFR for a straight in visual on 08” Blared the speaker.

“Shit!” screamed the sprog, “Our Beech-18 is sitting in the middle of 08 wheels up with no lights!”

Startled into action the controller hit the crash button and simultaneous-

ly cried into the mic, “Negative, negative, negative, 804, there’s a crashed airplane on the runway - use runway 34 - repeat do not land! Overshoot, overshoot!”…and at the same time the field exploded with the sights and sounds of three fire trucks and an ambulance breaking the silence of the prairie night. But they weren’t sure where to go.

“Where the hell is your plane?” the controller screamed at the bedraggled sprog.

“Right in the middle of the runway,” replied the sprog calmer now that the controller seemed more excited than he.

“Crash One the wreck is in the middle of 08 straight across from the tower - it has no lights showing but it’s well clear of the 34/29 intersection.”

“Roger” squawked the disembodied voice of the station crash truck over the tower speaker. “i see it now, there’s no fire but we’ll foam it down anyway.”

Meanwhile flight 804 joined downwind for runway 34 and landed smoothly.

An uneasy calm settled on the

two protagonists in the tense tower. The station ops officer appeared on the scene. He took statements then marched off our laddies first to the hospital then the barracks and ordered them to get some sleep.

it seemed only seconds after falling into an uneasy sleep that a loud thumping on his door awoke our young warrior. A corporal of the service police, decked out in the formal white webbing of his authority, announced in a voice much louder than it needed to be, “Right sir,” he said, stressing sarcastically the word sir, “i’ll be back in thirty minutes to escort you to the CO’s office.”

The meeting went way better for the sprog but not so much for his partner. After all the ceremonial boot stomping and saluting the beady eyed old wing commander for some reason known only to the god of the military hierarchy took pity on the hopeful airline pilot. He sentenced him to a reproof which would go on his file and expire in a year. The sprog didn’t ask his expectant permanent commission partner about his punishment nor did the hopeful pensioner reveal it to the sprog. Rumor had it that the jet jock’s next posting would be behind

the desk of the RCAF’s recruiting office in the nation’s primary naval base, Dartmouth Nova Scotia.

Yet the sprogs humiliation was not over. His older brother on his way to the new Edmonton airport at Leduc for the contracting company he flew for would be landing the company plane that afternoon in Saskatoon. The wreck was gone at first light but would his brother notice the dual black skid marks and scrapped concrete? He did.

Reflecting on his air force career thus far the young lad wondered why he had not been thrown out. First, he broke the rules by getting married

on his initial course. Then there was the unfortunate bent T-33 tow bar incident at Gimli and now, barely two weeks as a new father, the unforgivable crime of landing with the wheels up. He began to wonder if it bode well for his airline hopes. He thought that if only he became a Trans Canada Airl Lines pilot everything would be smooth sailing. No more missteps for him he promised himself. Alas it would not be so.

The sprog grew old and in the last few years of his life as he pondered his career he marveled at the insight of whichever course mate wrote his entry in the course 5701 yearbook way back when. it was the predictor of his life:

Would you touch a nettle and not be stung? Jim Griffith arrived at QF about a month late and embraced the questionable state of matrimony. The powers, as Jim described them frowned - Jim smiled, but he escaped until the next time and the next time. Who or what comes under your next fire, Jim?

the trans canada airline act

and c.d.howe the minister of everything

The gentleman perched precariously on a stool about to board a Lockheed 10A is C.D. Howe. it is April of 1937 and the then prime minister of Canada, MacKenzie King, had recently appointed Howe as Minister of Transport with a mandate to create a national airline. King openly rejoiced that Howe was an American believing that Americans had a better understanding of the new burgeoning aviation industry. King ignored the fact that Canadian businessman, James Richardson, had already created what could be regarded as the core operation of a domestic air service by uniting numerous small operators across the country under the one flag of his company, Canadian Airways Limited. Richardson had big shoulders and was a Canadian patriot, so he continued to advise the government on important issues regarding the establishment of a domestic air service to cover the vast landmass of Canada. Howe, for his part,

was merciless and rather than creating the proposed airline around Richardson's Canadian Airways, arranged instead to force that airline's closure by withdrawing the mail services contract and passing an act of parliament called the Trans Canada Air Line Act, forbidding any other airline to parallel the routes to be served by the proposed new national carrier. They also made sure if you owned a railway you couldn't own an airline aiming this barb at Canadian Pacific Railway who were launching Canadian Pacific Airlines (CPAir) at the time. This component of the act proved to be a shot in the foot because the government itself owned the Canadian National Railway.

One night in April of 1937, Maurice McGregor, landed a newly acquired Lockheed 10 aircraft at Vancouver airport. Maurice had picked the plane up in Seattle for his employer, James Richardson's Western Canada Airways, for whom he was chief pilot. As McGregor stepped from the plane he was advised by the base manager that he was now flying for an outfit called Trans Canada Air Lines.

"it's owned by the government," he was told, "you'll will probably get paid for a change," this was added with a laugh.

Maurice McGregor was TCA's first pilot — the previously mentioned 'sprog' and author, Jim Griffith, would come aboard much later.

in the right seat

It was a depressing time what with a new baby and all but at least I had a day job. I was working for TCA as a learner mechanic on DC-3 overhaul then on Viscounts. It never entered my head that someday I would fly one of these Viscounts as a captain.

Eureka! Suddenly there was a rumour TCA might be hiring pilots. As I read the application form, one question trying my conscience was, "Had I ever had an aircraft accident?" What to do? I left it blank justifying it by thinking an omission, after all, is not really a lie; is it? In the event no one ever questioned it and viola, I was accepted.

iArrived at Dorval for North Star ground school and like the rest of my course lived in a Lachine boarding house. Ground school was tough with your class standing determining your seniority for the rest of your airline life. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride i came second. it also meant number one, Earl and i would be the first to check out on the mighty plane. i was worried, Earl was an ex-Sabre pilot with bags of time it made my 500hrs look skimpy.

By now everyone knew who the check pilots would be. Only one was known as a Bully, and Earl and i got him. On our last training flight before

our Department of Transport inspector’s certification ride it was my turn to do circuits. i didn’t seem to know where the sky finished and the ground began. Finally, Captain Bully said, "This is your last landing. if you don’t get it right you are finished." Talk about pressure. At the last minute on final a heavy shower moved over the field. it was raining so hard, even with the wipers on full, everything was a blur. i closed my eyes, checked back and didn’t even feel the wheels touch the runway—sometimes a little hydroplaning can come in handy.

Captain Bully turned out to be my new best friend on the final ride. The DOT inspector didn’t want to give

Griffith scored high in the ground school training class on the North Star airliner and was assigned to a check pilot he feared would be a tyrant, but Captain "Bully" turned out to be Jim's new best friend standing up for the 'sprog' against the Department of Transport inspector's incorrect judgements.

me a class one ticket even though i had done a class one job. He thought i didn’t have enough flying time. A screaming match broke out between him and Captain Bully. There was so much shouting Earl and i got off the airplane. Captain Bully won. He wasn’t a bully after all. He knew

to all the professional gravitas that it entails.

Back in the days of props some of the escapades that flight and ground crews inflicted on each other, in today’s straightjacket of political correctness, could be seen as being cruel and insensitive. indeed, there is no

intuitively that some learners just need an allegorical kick in the keister, administered at just the right moment, to be inspirational in fostering critical thinking. Back then no one worried about crushed egos. There was no room for fractured feelings in the pilot business—we just sucked it up and got on with it. Suddenly i was not just a pilot but an airline pilot; it said so on my license committing me

doubt some of those so-called practical jokes were. Mostly though, they were innocent, quite harmless stress relievers and if judged in the context of aviation cultural traditions back then, were accepted as a rite of passage; an initiation into the close-knit community of aviation. Aside from the well-worn request for some junior neophyte whether pilot, mechanic or flight attendant to go get a bucket of prop wash here are some of the more

innocuous recollections of the fun and games indulged in by flight crews during the heydays of the late sixties and early seventies. it was an era when it was considered more important to have a sense of humour than to have the latest hand held electronic device for amusement.

The mighty, “North Star” called by their pilots the “North Stone” for its maligned performance shortcomings mandated brawny arms. Anyone who ever flew in one would call it the “Noisy Star”. it presented an opportunity to initiate new flight attendants. The hydraulic system for wheels, flaps and brakes included a standby system in case of primary system failure. Unlike modern airplanes where faults are computer detected and rectified, or so the manufacturers would have you believe, North Star emergency procedures incorporated a manually operated hand pump. The operating lever for the pump was located on the cockpit floor and to add mechanical advantage it had a telescoping handle tipped by a shiny chromed knob. it was four feet long when extended. Whenever a passenger bailed out of the washroom, the newbie flight attendant was to go immediately to the flight deck, extend the handle of

the standby hydraulic pump and pump it once to supposedly flush the toilet. Then she would collapse the handle, stow it and return to the cabin. She was then to watch the washroom and be ready to flush the toilet with the cockpit floor flusher anytime a passenger used the toilet. After three flushes they usually caught on! The ultimate irony…neither the North Star nor its successor, the Vickers Viscount had proper flushing toilets just recycled blue fluid swishing the nasty stuff into a bucket.

first flight

The main North Star stomping grounds for Montreal crews were west via Toronto to Winnipeg and east into the Maritimes notorious for its capricious weather. The crew-pairing east was a three-day adventure. Day one entailed leaving Montreal at midnight with stops at Moncton, Halifax and a layover in Sydney. Stops the following day included Stephenville and Gander, which ended with a 24-hour layover in Torbay, (St. Johns NF). My first line trip was east.

All my previous flying had been on the prairies and if i was hoping to

get a concept of Maritime topography, i would be disappointed. All i saw that first morning were runway approach lights. Day two saw us heading for Stephenville between cloud layers. A thousand feet below us an Aer Lingus Super Constellation, coming off the Atlantic bound for New York, passed us in the opposite direction. in my wildest dreams, i never imagined that in less than two years i’d be sporting a Shamrock on my hat badge.

Our arrival in Stephenville was at the same time as a squadron of F-102 Delta dagger, jet interceptors, returning from a Strategic Air Command mission to harass snooping Soviet bombers. We had to hold while the planes, low on fuel, were recovered. TCA Flight Ops brass had visited the base commander to complain about flight delays. They just couldn’t get it through their heads that although the air base on Bay St. George was geographically in Canada sovereignty over it rested in Washington. Britain had ceded the land for the base to the United States for 99 years during WWii as part of the lend-lease deal for American destroyers.

The base commander via his adjutant told The TCA Montreal chief pi-

lot; “if a TCA plane becomes disabled on the runway during an operational mission...bulldozers will scrape it off to the infield,”

The runway was over 10,000 feet long and ended on a rocky beach. it had an iLS with a steep glide slope threaded between two high hills. When the weather was at iLS limits, we depended on being talked down by the USAF GCA (Ground Control Approach). The civilian terminal was a single lonely building at the west end of the runway. One of TCA’s ramp-rats had a boat with a small outboard. He fished for Atlantic salmon just off shore. We could order some from him at 25 cents a pound and pick it up the following afternoon on our return from Torbay, if we weren’t fogged in. When was the last time you had fresh Atlantic salmon that wasn’t farmed?

We snuck out of Stephenville minutes before the air-to-air KC-97 Strato tankers returned from their part in the Russian deterrent mission. The flight to Gander was on instruments right down to 500feet. i couldn’t see too much because of the fog but the array of runways, Quonset huts and a tank farm nearby confirmed it as a

strategic link in Trans-Atlantic aviation. Thousands of bombers built in the US had been ferried from Gander to Britain during WWii. Gander was an ideal jump off and return alternate in case anything didn’t go to plan, for trans-Atlantic flights. it was 40 nautical miles northeast of here that in 1941 Sir Fredrick Banting, co-founder of insulin, was killed in a Hudson bomber. He was on his way to Britain to continue his work with Dr. Wilbur Franks in development of the G-suit, a garment for fighter pilots and astronauts to overcome high gravitational forces.

i barely had time to catch my breath and we were off to Torbay, The RCAF base at St. Johns Newfoundland. Our arrival in Torbay was an iLS over the cliffs in a rough 55K wind, and at limits in fog. The captain told me it would take both hands on the wheel for him to handle the brute so i should handle the throttles, watch the airspeed and adjust them to maintain 135Knots. i was expecting small adjustments not the full range from near idle to full power. Together, we were virtually a verbally actuated of what would later become a computerized Flight Management System including

auto throttles, namely me. How was rough was it? Coupled with the subsidence it was like falling down a flight of stairs.

The short taxi ride to down town St. Johns was a blur in more ways than one or as the Newfies would say, “Da fog was so tick you could lean on it.”

Our Home away from home— we were often stranded for days by the advection fog in St. Johns—was the draughty old Newfoundland hotel. it was in the era when the captain and F/O shared a room. This led to the inevitable marital arguments of...who should get to use the bathroom first in the morning... who is staying too long in the bathroom?...and, what on earth did you eat last night? With the veto power always resting with to the captain you can guess who always won the argument.

We were way ahead of current environmentalists in saving the earth’s supply of fresh water. Since we always had the same rooms every trip, it was an unwritten rule that the outgoing crew should leave bottles of beer in the toilet tank so that the incoming crew would have some cool refreshment after a harrowing flight. This ensured that each low-flow flush would use less of that precious water.

The life in St. Johns reminded me of growing up in food-rationed Winnipeg in WWii. While it’s true there certainly wasn’t rationing in Newfoundland there was a shortage of fresh produce and other products due to limited agriculture and inter island transportation. Most people had to put up with powdered eggs and milk. The locals spoke English with an irish accent and like the irish had the enviable quality of a self-deprecating humour that enabled them to laugh at themselves rather than taking offense at personal slights real or imagined.

Transportation to and from the island was limited to a ferry service and by air, largely TCA. On the island there were few good roads and a single narrow gauge railway not compatible with the mainland rail system. it would be fair to say that in the ten years since Newfoundland joined our confederation ten years earlier in 1949 TCA contributed greatly to the island economy and way of life.

My favourite haunt in St. Johns was The Crow’s Nest officers Club. it

had been a haven for seamen, both navy and merchant, from Atlantic Convoys during WWii; in 1959 it sported both a periscope from a German U-Boat and a scale model of a TCA North Star allegedly stolen from TCA’s downtown ticket office. The smoky bar was more often than not peopled by veterans, current ships officers from visiting freighters from all over the world and TCA layover crews at almost any time of the day. Drinking in the funky ambiance of the Crow’s Nest was like a magical visit to Frank Baum’s Land of OZ.

Both Sydney’s Press Club and Torbay’s Crow’s Nest offered many opportunities for extracurricular North Star High jinks on the three day pairing. Best of all was the cheap beer and delicious steaks at the officer’s club at the American forces Headquarters, Fort Pepperell, at Quidi Vidi. Torbay lay overs would be best described by a paraphrased quote from Tom Wolfe’s novel the “Right Stuff”... flying and drinking and drinking and flying...and every eligible female in Newfoundland harboured the dream to snaffle a TCA pilot for a husband.

George Pendlebury's magnificent painting of CF-TCC aptly titled, Generation Gap, was created by the artist as an obvious labour of love reminiscent of his father's service with TCA from 1938 to 1952. The painting joins the now beautifully restored aircraft to live on for future generations.

best seat in the house

On September 1st, 1937 Air Canada's forerunner, Trans Canada Air Lines (TCA), launched its first commercial passenger flight; a fifty-minute trip from Vancouver to Seattle. TCA had acquired the route plus two Lockheed L‐10A aircraft from Canadian Airways.

in that same month, TCA bought three additional Lockheed L‐10A aircraft, brand new, from the Lockheed factory for $73,000 each. These aircraft were dubbed the "Three Sisters" and carried the registrations CF‐TCA, CF‐TCB, and CF‐TCC. The first aircraft, CF‐TCA can now be found in the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa. CF‐TCC is the silver aircraft flying across Canada and is only one of two Lockheed L‐10A Electra aircraft flying in the world.

The History of CF-TCC After being operated by Trans Canada Air Lines from 1937 to 1939, CF‐-TCC was sold to the Canadian Government and operated by the RCAF as part of the War Effort during World War ii. During the next 40 years, the aircraft was sold several times to various private corporations and individuals. in 1975, a retired Air Canada employee recognized the faded old registration marks on the aircraft while attending an air show in Texas. Air Canada kept track of the aircraft until 1983, at which point the company purchased the aircraft back, restored it, and flew it during Air Canada's 50th Anniversary celebrations in 1986. At the end of the Fifty stop Canadian tour, CF‐TCC was featured in the Air Canada pavilion during Expo 86 in Vancouver.

Since 1986, CF-TCC has been maintained in flying condition. Air Canada employee and retiree volunteers from Air Canada Maintenance and Flight Operations have put thousands of hours of personal time into keeping CF‐TCC, our Air Canada heritage, flying for future generations to enjoy.

encounter over the hudson

We were grinding along at twelve thousand feet in cloud minding our own business halfway between Ottawa and New York City in a North Star freighter. it was the gutted version of the passenger variant named, The Flying Merchant, stripped of everything including windows except thankfully, the toilet which was located not very cockpit convenient at the rear of the cabin.

Just before Albany there was a sudden clear break and there below us bathed in a stray shaft of bright sunlight, cruised an unmarked all black World War ii fighter plane backlit by the Hudson River. it was a twin-engine Lockheed Lightning, an American fighter built near the end of the war otherwise known as a P-38 or to the Luftwaffe as, der Gabelschwanz-

Teufel “fork-tailed devil”. its graceful design was a marriage of aesthetics and function making it perhaps the most beautiful yet terrifying killing machine the Americans had ever produced.

But hang on! Maybe i had better go back to the beginning of this silly serendipitous little adventure. in July, 1959, i was a twenty one year old, 500 hour, new-hire First Officer with Canada’s national airline, Trans Canada Air Lines. Being on reserve, i’d been called out early that morning to ferry a freighter from Montreal’s Dorval airport, YUL to Ottawa Uplands, YOW to upload a cargo and deliver it to New York City’s idyllwild airport, iDL then ferry back to Dorval.

As a newbie, during flight planning with my newly met captain, i never questioned the iffy weather

forecast for the New York area nor linked it to our fuel load which left us with no alternate airport. Neither the dispatcher nor the Captain mentioned what our cargo was to be and i never asked. The dispatcher did emphasize that our New York arrival time must absolutely be no later than 2 PM. i blithely signed my name on the flight plan and we sauntered out to the aircraft.

The flight to Ottawa was uneventful and although the Captain seemed friendly, he was quiet and seemed preoccupied? As soon as we stopped on the OW ramp, a convoy of Brinks trucks pulled up and a TCA ramp crew began to load small but hefty packages sewn in canvas sacks from the trucks. The sacks about the size of a two pound package of Velveeta cheese were watched warily by the Brinks guards. A man in a suit stood at the door noting on a clipboard each piece of cheese as it was loaded. it suddenly dawned on me, “thar was gold in them thar hills.”, and we would be hauling it.

Each of those 363 cheese packages in fact weighed 27.5lbs of 99.99% pure gold valued at a pegged value of $35.00 American an ounce. Our

load was worth $7 million American and thanks to a favourable exchange rate, $7.4 million Canadian. i was not to know that the gold had to get to downtown Manhattan and inside the New York Federal Reserve Bank by 4PM sharp at which time the vault doors slammed automatically and irrevocably shut. That fact explained the dispatcher’s apprehension about meeting our strict arrival time.

More sinister was the minimum fuel load with no alternate. With so little fuel we could not possibly land somewhere else thus eliminating any chance that we might have been compromised into some criminal plot to steal the gold. Not that as a $250 a month reserve First Officer it didn’t seem like such a bad idea but how i would ever spend such a huge amount of gold was beyond my wildest fantasies. i did a preflight cabin check to ensure the cargo was secure and was surprised by its empty appearance. All the Velveeta had been neatly laid out end to end and side by side in rows flat on the cargo deck covered over and tied down by large tarpaulins. i guessed this was meant to spread the 10,000lbs of bullion over a wide area so as not to collapse the floor.

The Lockheed Lightning or P38 was a twin engine fighter that was developed late in WWii. While it did see action in the European theatre it was employed mainly in the Pacific war. During the war with Japan, the famed, Charles Lindbergh, flew a P38 fitted out as a photo reconnaissance aircraft. Being a pacifist he refused to carry weapons. He was also proNazi, which was rather awkward for him at the time— too bad—it was to become even more awkward for Hitler.

These thoughts were far from my mind now as i daydreamed absently looking down at the beautiful P-38

“Jeez” i said to the captain “there’s a Lightening down there”

“What? Where’s the lightening? ” exclaimed the Captain, craning his neck to look outside.

North Stars had no weather radar and lightening seen day or night signaled nearby thunderstorms. He was right to be concerned about thunderstorms they could swallow even a large airliner, chew it up and spit the bits out below.

“Down at 9 o’clock…Oh wait a minute looks like he’s sliding back to six o’clock.” i casually replied.

Even i knew the six o’clock position was the favoured position for a fighter attack explaining why the Captain seemed a little edgy. He virtually had seven million bucks’ cash in his back pocket for which he was personally and totally responsible. As for me i hadn’t considered the audacious risks criminals sometimes take for much less loot than we were carrying, including murder, to abscond with such an easily fenced commodity as gold. in other words i was too

“No! No!” i said, “it’s a “Lockheed” Lightning. You know; a P-38, a fighter plane.”

“Where is it?” he asked, worriedly squirming to try and see out my side window.

dumb to be worried.

He could not see it so asked again, “What’s it doing now?”

“i can’t see it anymore.” Said i

“Call ATC and ask if there’s any traffic in our area” he curtly ordered.

So i did. “New York Centre Trans Canada Charter 15 have you got anybody else around Albany?”

“Negative Trans Canada yours is the only target i’m painting in the Albany area. Turn right 30 degrees for radar identification.” replied the controller. No transponders in those good old days.

Following ATC’s instructions the captain quickly cranked the cantankerous old bird into a 30 degree bank right turn which safely engulfed us in grey woolly cloud again making us invisible… or so we thought but it got real dark and i knew we’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Suddenly… a bright flash and a simultaneous loud, “Whump!”, followed closely by another flash “Whump!”. The “Whumps” were loud enough to be heard over the clamorous din of the four Merlin engines. We got hit twice, not by canon fire from the Lockheed Lightning but by shafts of angry lightening from Thor, the thunder god. So instead of being skyjacked by a war-surplus WWii fighter we’d blundered into a thunderstorm.

For the thirty minutes of watching the captain heroically wrangling this cranky bucking bronco bouncing around in the violent air currents of the storm i was silently praying that the restraining tarps were tough enough to make the bullion stay put. i had visions of 363, twenty seven and half pound gold bricks becoming misguided missiles ricocheting around the inside of the cabin.

Finally we broke out into smooth air. i went back to check the cheese and was relieved to see nothing had stirred not even a mouse. i could not wait to get on the ground and get this stuff off and head home but alas our troubles were not over.

Upon arrival in marginal weather at noon, we were unloaded in the reverse of the procedure in OW except this time the minders, unlike the dowdily dressed Brinks guards, were Wells Fargo Express agents in smart fatigue jackets complete with Stetsons and carrying pearl- handled Colt 45’s in open holsters. The only difference between these guys and the express riders of the old west was that these cowboys drove armoured vans instead of stage coaches.

Gold bullion was pegged at $35.00 a Troy ounce by the then equivalent of the iMF when the gold standard was in use, it now trades for around $1,380.00 per ounce and gains value when the economy is in bad shape.

Velveeta cheese used to sell for a buck a pound, but now sells for $4.99

A smiling man in a neatly tailored suit who was all business rushed us into a small windowless hangar office and offered us coffee. The captain and i thought it would be half an hour and we’d be on our way.

Mr. Suit stopped smiling and said in his polite but menacing voice, “Relax boys you aren’t going anywhere until every single one of the 363 bars of gold is safely inside the vault and accounted for by the Federal Reserve Bank. The vault doors close automatically at 4 o’clock sharp, no exceptions, whether all the gold is there or not. The vault does not open till 8AM tomorrow morning. You could be in for a long wait but don’t worry we’ve never had a problem yet.”

Taking into account travel time from iDL to downtown we figured at worst we would be away by 4:15 meaning at most a two hour wait. We were not exactly being held in custody in that airless little office but

when we started to head out the door to have a look around the airport Mr. Suit told us to sit tight and there was no mistaking what the bulge on the chest of the well-tailored suit was. So we waited and sweated in the summer heat.

At 2:45, the phone rang. Mr. Suit studied our faces as he frowned and picked up the receiver. “Yes,” he said without taking his eyes off us. “i understand and what are you going to do about it now?”

After a slight pause he continued, “Okay i’ll see that these guys are taken care of.”

i did not like the sound of that. He slammed down the phone, scowled and grunted, “There are only 362 bars of gold, one is missing. Those Wells Fargo cowboys have had their Colt 45’ put on ice and they are in special cells at the bank. Their vans are being taken apart piece by piece.”

i stole a glance over his shoulder through the open door and i noticed that young men in black overalls were swarming over our Flying Merchant like roaches on spoiled meat. i hoped they were not going to take our plane apart as well. i began to wonder where exactly on the airport might the special cells be. We took comfort in knowing we were not the only suspects.

At 3:50 the phone rang again. Our custodian gave us a strange look, and answered it. He grimaced and listened for what seemed a long time but was in fact only about a minute. His stern face suddenly broke into a broad grin and he hung up.

“Boys.” he said, “You’re off the hook. The prodigal gold bar was found down in the wheel well of one of the Vans. You are free to go any time you like but the Wells Fargo fellas are in for a long night. My colleagues down at the bank are wondering how that piece of Velveeta just happened to slip down into the wheel well.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were cranking up the four Merlins. Fifteen minutes after that the wheels of The Flying Merchant clunked up onto their up-locks, the wheel well doors slammed shut and we were heading home after a long and memorable day to the land of the truly free none the worse for wear.

it used to be that Wells Fargo were the ones that got robbed.

MOONY'S and other escapades 4

in the late fifties TCA employees sensed they were part of one big happy family. Like any family, there were tiny filial disputes. The cracks in the family relationship between the company and its employees were beginning to show especially the pilots. When we were hired by TCA we were told it would be temporary. The airline needed pilots to bridge the change from props to jets. Nevertheless when i opened my company mail box in early November 1960 and saw the pink slip i knew the axe was about to fall. Not that i hadn’t dreaded a pink slip more than once before for my antics. Along with 245 other TCA pilots including those that had not been forewarned i was furloughed for an indefinite period. TCA was downsizing or as management adroitly put it right sizing. This was where i started to lose my faith in our union, CALPA, (The Canadian Airline Pilots Association). i’m afraid i had romantic

ideas about the brotherhood of aviators as expressed in Ernest K. Gann’s book “The Band of Brothers”. CALPA failed to support a Captain involved in an accident with a Super Constellation at Toronto, and had handled the layoff badly.

Meanwhile European carriers were also right sizing but in the opposite direction. i was lucky enough to be picked with 12 other TCA pilots by Aer Lingus. Three of us, because we’d flown North Stars, had to go to Dublin two weeks before the others who’d flown Viscounts. We three would fly Fokker F-27’s. So because those Fokker’s had RR Dart engines we had to take a course on the engine which really just a Rolls Royce Nene engine with reduction gearing for a prop. it was off to Dublin and Aer Lingus for me on New Year’s Eve 1960.

Our ground school was in an old building in downtown Dublin. What

a culture shock. Two little kids were hanging around the front door; they looked about 12 and 10 years old respectively. The temperature was near zero yet they were dressed in shorts clinging to a battered baby carriage full of, now don’t freak out... faggots, (pieces of tree branches). They were both smoking cigarettes as they kept pleading, “Got a penny mister?”

Our instructor was a huge Yorkshireman and at 10:00 AM on the first morning, he said, “Right it’s time for our tea”.

We assumed it was irish for, coffee break, and that somehow we’d make our own tea somewhere in the building.

instead, our man said, “We’re going to Moony's”

Moony's turned out to be an irish Tavern three blocks away. Our two weeks of ground school passed far too quickly. We were disappointed to see our TCA Viscount Pilots turn up to destroy our daily ritual of Moony's for AM tea, noontime lunch and PM tea break.

Soon my tribe of now two daughters and my soulmate wife followed and we rented a house overlooking Dublin Bay. in ireland and England,

houses have names, ours was Slieve Bloom and it soon became a magnet for many Expat Canadians and subject to many pranks. One day i found my car on the front porch.

it was maybe too much of a culture shock. Something was eating away at me that i could not define. in retrospect, i was behaving like a homesick puppy.

i have only one story from ireland:

HAM-FISTED HAMMIE

Hammie was known to be blunt and crude. The airline had just hired some German flight attendants. We were over Liverpool at 15000 ft when one of these new flight attendant came up to offer coffee. After taking our order, she disappeared behind the cockpit door.

Hammie turned and said to me in his usual loud voice, “Did you notice that girl’s bad breath?”

i replied that i didn’t notice anything.

He said, “She has really got bad breath i’m going to call her up and tell her to do something about it”.

i didn’t think it was good idea but he went ahead anyway.

She stuck her head in the door and Hammie said, “There is something wrong with your breath”.

She answered, “i’m sorry captain Vot did you say?”

He said, “it’s your breath ... your breath”.

She replied, “Vots wrong captain are Zey too beeg?”

Aer Lingus Fokker F-27’s had Rolls Royce Dart engines.

"We had to take a course on the engine which was really just a Rolls Royce Nene engine with reduction gearing for a prop. "

best seat in the house

history

Themodel 14 Lockheed Super Electra adopted by Trans Canada Air Lines carried 14 passengers — 4 more than the airline's earlier Lockheed 10A. The Lockheed Aircraft Company were competing with the Boeing 247 and the then early appearance of the Douglas DC-2 soon to become the indomitable DC-3. The Electra didn't fare well in this competitive battle but became very successful during WWii when the military version was renamed the Lockheed Hudson. TCA's original 14s were powered by the Pratt & Whitney "Hornet" radial engine, but later models with the Wright 1820 installed proved to be more dependable.

*Chisel Chartering is the term describing the illegal use of a private aircraft to carry passengers for hire. it has long been the method pilots use to build time or to keep their hand in. The Piper Apache is a light twin engine transport.

back home again tragedy and

change

So after a year in ireland we all headed back home. in my case to a job as assistant flight dispatcher for TCA in Halifax. it was now November of 1961, and i was able to keep flying by doing *chisel charter work on the side in a Piper Apache. Unfortunately, i just missed out on a trip to Sable island to see the fabled horses. A landing on the beach would have been a challenge. A chance to transfer to Montreal came up and since it would allow me to become a 'weekend warrior' again for 401 City of Westmount Squadron, i jumped at it. Like the characters from, The Grapes of Wrath, we headed west in a 1951 chevy coupe with two daughters, and now a baby son, my mother in law, her teen-age daughter and my wife. We camped our way across New Brunswick, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont thence to Montreal. Don’t even ask how we all managed to fit in that car or how we shared a nine by nine tent because i don’t know. i settled into a monotonous life as a

shift worker but at least i managed to maintain my qualifications by flying with 401 Squadron.

i still vividly remember the evening of Friday, November 29th, 1963 when flight 831 went down. My wife and i were at a house party in Pointe Claire not far from the button of runway 06 at Dorval. We heard a number of jets taking off but we could not possibly have known which one was 831. The drive in the cold rain from our house on ile Perrot to Pointe Claire was as dark as the pits of hell. The moment when our host got the sobering phone call that sent a chill down our spines is as clear in my mind today as it was then. Virtually all the guests at the party were furloughed TCA pilots working in flight dispatch at Dorval, impatiently awaiting recall to flying duties. Every one of us knew well the pilots on board. As soon as we were told the news a sudden hush fell over the group and we all just got our coats and headed home. i think for our

The DC8 was the first jet airliner to come on strength with TCA. These were the early days of transition from propeller-driven aircraft to pure jets. The tragedy of Flight 831, a DC8 that crashed immediately after takeoff from Montreal's Dorval airport had a major impact on the author and TCA's "band of brothers" during this transition period from propeller-driven to pure jet-driven aircraft.

wives it was distressing because we all knew that sooner or later we would be recalled and would most likely be flying DC-8s.

As stated in the abstract for the book, Voices from a Forgotten Tragedy, our lives as airline employees were buffeted by the winds of change not only in

the industry but also in local, provincial, national and indeed international politics. it was a week to the day since the President Kennedy assassination. it was a truly upsetting yet extremely exciting time to be alive.

i had the next two days, Saturday and Sunday, off and as a reserv-

ist in 401 city of Westmount Auxilliary Squadron at RCAF station St. Hubert i planned to fly over the crash site as soon as i could. The weather on Saturday was terrible and too stormy to fly visually but first thing Sunday morning when the weather cleared i signed out Expeditor, 1386, and flew solo over the scene.

My emotions were an uneasy jumble on the short hop from St. Hubert to St. Therese as i dreaded what i might see. From three thousand feet it was easy to spot, a small, perfectly circular water filled hole in the ground. it was what i imag-

ined a bomb crater would look like. i fumbled with my camera trying to control the C-45 with one hand and take the pictures with the other in the bumpy aftermath of the gusty cold front. Fortunately, manipulating the camera settings took my mind off the horrors of what the ground crews must be witnessing below now a scant 36 hours after that horrifying night.

i did get two photos that were not blurred, but now with many years and long-distance moves i am afraid they are gone. To me that is a good thing. i have often wondered since what it was that unrelentingly motivated me to see that crash site from the air. Was it some ghoulish instinct? Was it curiosity or was it guilt over why them and not me? i do not know but to be honest i regret doing it and to this day it has left me with a disturbing feeling of somehow desecrating the whole tragic event whose victims must be included in the human cost of tallying one of aviation’s most momentous moves, props—to pure jets, in the 1960s.

Out of the Clear Blue Sky

The change in the dynamics of the airline industry when it came in 1964 caught TCA and other North American airlines by surprise or so we

line pilots thought. Suddenly, planes previously ordered by TCA started arriving from manufacturers and there were not enough trained pilots to fill cockpit seats. it would be easy to say, and many did, that management did not plan for this. After all, they ordered the planes and knew when they would be delivered. The facts were that the airlines and manufacturers of both engines and airframes were in a serious financial meltdown. Whatever the real reasons were, suddenly with very short notice, all the pilots on furlough were recalled. Almost all came back from the far corners of the world. Distant pastures always look greener but as every Canadian who has been forced to emigrate for work knows intuitively there is no place in the world better than our frost bitten homeland. So it was back to work as a pilot...well not quite as a pilot.

Back in the day when props were changing to jets, the Canadian Ministry of Transport, in collusion with Air Canada and Canadian Pacific Airlines, in an effort to save training costs for the airlines, contemplated a newly required third crew position on the huge DC-8’s coming on line. At the same time new regulations would nip in the bud potential labour action from the

Three-man crew in the cockpit of a DC-8. The Flight Engineer was referred to as many things, but "Flying sideways" was the accepted title. The 10 to 10 rule in Canada forbade the second officer from flying the airplane, but many captains, indignantly, ignored that ruling.

pilot’s union. The McDonnell Douglas Corporation designed the plane to operate with a flight engineer, was so licensed, and operated that way in the USA as well as in practically every other country globally. The change in Canadian regulations would mean that the third crew member would be neither a fully endorsed DC-8 pilot nor a fully endorsed DC-8 flight engineer. instead, a bastardized or to put it more kindly, a hybridized addition to the cockpit hierarchy was envisioned. The person occupying the third sideways facing seat would be a licensed pilot but only partially trained and as such, his pilot licence

would not be endorsed to operate a DC-8. it meant that legally this hybrid pilot would only be allowed to handle the flight controls above 10,000 feet on the climb and would have to relinquish the controls on descent at 10,000 feet—'ten to ten' as it was then called. This pilot wouldn’t be allowed to either take off or land the airplane and further, even the ten to ten was at the combined discretion of the captain and first officer. This hybrid would also be unable to log flying hours to his pilot curriculum vitae towards attaining a higher class of licence. The 'bastard' was called a Second Officer.

6 Second Officer Tales

flying sideways with tca

Some of the junior DC-8 captains and first officers, imbued by the spirit of aviation writer Ernest K. Gann's, band of aviator brothers, chose to spit in the face of these illconceived regulations not permitting second officers to fly the airplane, and did allow some of us to land and take off these lumbering hulks. Some senior second officers who could have chosen overseas trips at higher pay chose to fly with junior captains domestically for less money. This must have vexed the company, but for junior people like me it did not make any difference—i was on a flat payscale

i remember my first trip as a second officer with Ralph Leek. i was not looking forward to it. He had a reputation with the second officers as a cigar chomping gruff bully with an abusive manner. i had been drafted, as we all had been, on a crappy freezing rainy day in November 1965, to go to Kingston Jamaica and back. i cannot

remember who the first officer was. Anyway, it was Ralph’s birthday and i rightfully assumed he would be in a bad mood. He grumped about it all the way to Kingston. On the ground, after i monitored the refuelling, i thought i would go inside the terminal and since i had never been there before, buy a small chintzy souvenir to take home. While i was there i spotted some cigars so i thought, what the heck as a second officer with a wife and three kids i didn’t have much spare cash but i’ll buy the boss a cigar for his birthday and try to cheer him up. When we were all seated in the cockpit, i wished Ralph Happy Birthday and handed him the cigar. it was a cheap one but he graciously accepted my small offering and after punching the First officer playfully in the left shoulder—i was happy to be out of punching range—he bestowed upon us a great big grin.

Climbing out of 10,000 he yelled, “Come on up here young fella and let’s see if you can fly this thing.” i guess the first officer had flown with him before because without question he gave up his seat and off i went

i hand flew that big DC-8 all the way back to Toronto at 33000 feet never relinquishing control to the auto pilot even for a moment. i was in my glory. Then we started down. The freezing rain had stopped and turned to straight rain with a slight crosswind. Approaching 10,000 feet i started to get antsy.

i thought, “i guess i better get ready to get out of the seat.”

Ralph must have sensed my fussing anxiety— he leaned over and growled in his gravelly voice, ”You stay put young fella."

i do not think once during the flight i had looked back to see what the first officer was doing in my seat. i was too busy having fun so i did not look at him but in retrospect, i think there was a conspiracy—no, an understanding between him and Ralph. it’s

hard to define that kind of relationship where two pilots without saying a word completely understand each other’s thoughts. There was no need for Ralph to discuss with the first officer that he was going to let me land the DC-8 nor seek a consensus from him for that decision. i didn’t understand it then but it became clear to me later that the first officer had complete faith in Ralph’s judgement. it didn’t dawn on me till Ralph called for the in-range check that i was actually going to land the thing. Anyway, i landed it—not a bad landing i must say, and during the whole episode, gone was Ralph's gruff hazing as he calmly coached me through it.

it’s funny, once we were on the ground and taxiing in, Ralph reverted seamlessly to his contrived blustering banter as he boomed at the first officer and i, “ Okay you boneheads, let’s play musical chairs.”

That was the day Ralph became my new BFF, (Best Friend Forever)

Some people are like badly wrapped Christmas presents that give no inkling of the gem that might be hidden inside.

history tca and the jetliner

This photo of the Avro

on

its

was snapped

Bud

who built the Bush Hawk

at the same time as the Avro Arrow and Jetliner program was being disassembled by Prime Minister John Diefenbacker's not so progressive Conservative government. While taxpayers paid little attention to the events at the time, the issue now rages as one of the biggest blunders in Canada's political history. The Jetliner story also escaped notice at the time and the plane was quietly sold to a scrap merchant.

That's it on the page to the left, the Avro Canada Jetliner on final approach to land on its maiden flight on August 10, 1949. Canada would be the first country in the world to put a jet powered transport aircraft into operation—whoops! that's not true. Thirteen days before the Jetliner flew, deHavilland over in the UK, rushed its nearly completed Comet airliner out onto the runway and did a quick circuit even though pieces were still missing from their plane. it then went back into the factory to be completed—"Take that Canada!" was what they were saying. Nevertheless, Avro Canada put the Jetliner in the air nine (9) years ahead of Boeing's 707—nine years before Boeing would build it's first pure jet. Canada, of all countries, was biting off a big corner of what would become a huge world market?

But hold on—what really happened: Trans Canada Air Lines gave Avro Canada a set of specifications for a jet powered transport aircraft and said build us this and we will buy a fleet of them. Avro designed it and built it with the jet engines meeting TCA's specifications to be supplied by Rolls Royce who called that new engine design the Avon. TCA applied outrageous conditions to their requirements to prevent Avro from selling the aircraft to other airlines and imposing demands outside any normal parameters applying to plane-builders When Avro said no to some of these terms TCA backed out of the deal completely leaving Avro holding the bag. Rolls Royce also had problems and Avon wasn't calling. A tandem set-up of two RR Nene engines per side under a common nacelle, acting like a twin engine aircraft powered the prototype but in reality it became a 4 engine plane. "Oh, not for us," said TCA, and returned to manage its then new North Star modified DC4 program denying any involvement in the Jetliner. Meanwhile back at Avro, Howard Hughes was knocking—he wanted 47 of the Jetliners for TWA his world class airline. it was PM John Diefenbacker's turn to say , "No way," so Hughes offered to buy the Avro factory and build them himself, but Dief still had his head in a grain elevator and refused to allow the sale—he was much too busy destroying the Avro Arrow to play ball with a funny guy like Hughes and the rest is, as they say in the House of Commons—history.

Jetliner

final for

very first landing

by

Found, the famous member of the Found family

aircraft

flying a PM called 'Mik e'

it was a typically cold Montreal winter’s morning, January 7th, 1966, when i got a call from Montreal crew scheduling. There was either a four day DC-8 layover charter to what i thought i heard the scheduler say was a four day trip to Las Vegas, or a dead head on that very charter with an eight hour crew rest lay-over in Vegas then bring the aircraft back to Montreal. Either way they only had two second officers on reserve and i’d have to take one of them. Since i was the more senior of the two i’d have a choice.

“Hmm” i thought, four days in Las Vegas in January would certainly be better than a turnaround, and besides, the four day expense money would come in handy. it was a time when flight

attendants made more money than second officers on flat pay. By juggling what expense money i got with what i actually spent could seriously affect my take home pay in a positive way. They did not call me "Diamond Jim" for nothing, and besides, the expense money was tax free.

in the background i heard a gruff voice bark, “Tell him to bring lots of money and make sure he has a passport.”

i immediately recognized the snarl of that growled warning as that of my new BFF, Captain Ralph Leek now Air Canada’s DC-8 Chief Pilot. The money would be problematic all right—i didn't have any. As to the passport—yes i had one.

i hung up the phone, put on my sad face and to the wife sniveled,

Lester "Mike" Pearson was a Canadian scholar, statesman, soldier, prime minister and diplomat, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for organizing the United Nations Emergency Force to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis. He was the 14th Prime Minister of Canada from 22 April 1963 to 20 April 1968. He was also a Toronto Maple Leafs fan.

“Geez i have to go to Los Vegas for four days—they don’t have anybody else.”

Then i thought, “Wait a minute, why do i need a passport?” *Flying airplanes into tall buildings by terrorists hadn't happened yet—back then passports were not required for entry into the USA. i scratched my head then called crew sked right back to ask, "Why the passport for a Vegas trip?"

“Vegas… i didn’t say Las Vegas you idiot i said Lagos…i think it’s in Africa or somewhere and it’s to take Prime Minister Pearson for some international conference or other,” the exasperated crew scheduler blurted out.

Yikes! Then i thought, “i have a passport alright but is it up to date?” i ran upstairs, looked at it and… crap... it had expired.

What to do… but wait… it was only 08:30 a.m. All at once, the tiny little synapses in my brain began to nudge the neurons excitedly and i thought, “i won’t need it till tomorrow morning… i know… i’ll go to the nation’s main passport office in Ottawa a scant 100 miles or so from our isle Perrot home on the outskirts of Mon-

treal… a two hour drive at most… and try to BS them into giving me a rush job on renewing my passport.”

We piled the three kids into the car and off we all went. Much to my amazement when i told the sour looking passport lady i had to take the Prime Minister to Africa the next day she smiled kindly and set some secret… only known to entitled elites… bureaucratic wheels in motion and voila thanks to her, just three hours later i was holding a renewed passport in my hot little hand. We were back home in time for a late supper.

This welcoming sight at Ghana's airport did not suggest the civil unrest that prevailed.

“Wow” i thought, “This must be a very important trip indeed.”

The author apologizes for the quality of the photos. Every technical means of improving their display has been made, but they are not Press quality. They are included because of their historic importance and for the continuity of this article

As it turned out it was the first Commonwealth Prime Minister’s Conference ever held outside of Great Britain and was meant to settle the Rhodesian problem…and we all know how well that turned out…forty nine years later and the former Zimbabwe National African Union, (ZANU)

as i usually did…for that would set the tone as to whether the trip would be drudgery or a jaunt. i had assumed it would be Ralph Leek and was looking forward to it. imagine my chagrin when i got to the airport and learned that Ralph was going to act as first officer while the designated captain would be Captain Bill Bell, Ralph’s boss and Director of Flight Operations

terrorist leader, a de fact dictator, was still in power until November 2017… Robert Mugabe.

Late the next morning i headed off to Dorval, Montreal’s international Airport, for my big African adventure. i had not bothered to ask crew scheduling who the captain was going to be

best seat in the house

for the Montreal Base. i had flown with Bell on my very first trip on North Stars and was intimidated by his quiet taciturn nature. Ralph was the perfect antithesis of Bell…i could sense trouble ahead there’d be no fun and games this trip…or would there?

The airport at Accra was our alternate when Lagos reported zero viz in fog. The Prime Minister's aids were quick to inform Ghana officials of the unexpected arrival of the Canadian Prime Minister and despite the early hour Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's president pulled up alongside the TCA DC8 in a big black limo and the two leaders had a quick meeting. A few months later Nkrumah was deposed in a coup d'état and forced into exile for the rest of his life.

Our Navigator would be unobtrusive, Don Willis, Chief Navigator Montreal base while the flight attendants were from Toronto and were supervisors of some sort. it was back in the day when Anglo WASPS dominated Air Canada’s management hierarchy. i felt a little underwhelmed being the only non-chief something or other in the crew. What surprised me most was the lack of a protocol for the flight deck crew to interact with the ViPs that would be on board…that was going to be left to the cabin crew, the public relations minions and other

with me on edge trying not to make any faux pas or false moves while performing for my two big bosses, Bell and Leek, or the on board dead heading crew. The deadheads were to bring the DC-8 back to Ottawa after minimum crew rest in Lagos. My friend, Johnny Weir, was the Second officer who had been stuck with my second choice for the trips on offer. The fueling and other preparations for the enplanement of the Prime Minister, his retinue of political hacks, and the inevitable media pariahs, went off without a hitch and while night

company hangers-on each vying for their own personal limelight.

The flight preparations were normal for the ferry flight to Ottawa

descended on Ottawa we were off to see the wonders of West Africa.

Everything ran smoothly until it was time to call Santa Maria in the

Nkrumah and Lester Pearson were close allies from a friendship developed during previous Commonwealth Prime Minister's Conferences. Pictured here in a photo taken by then Second Officer Griffith who snapped this from the airstairs of the DC8.

Azores for a position report on HF, (High Frequency) radio. Ralph tried several times and each time he called Santa Maria his gruff voice got louder and louder until he was shouting and spitting into the microphone. Nobody answered.

Finally Bell quietly said,” Look Ralph, how about letting Jim try… your voice is a little too rough and loud…you might be distorting the signal”. With that, he looked back at me and winked. So i picked up the mike and took up Ralph’s quasi liturgical

Just after we made landfall i remember seeing my first sunrise over Africa.

i thought, “i’ve somehow got to put this magnificent sunrise into words”…but words failed me…sorry you’ll just have to picture it yourself. My thoughts were interrupted when Lagos radioed that they were fogged in and we would have to land at our alternate, which was Accra, in Ghana, until Lagos cleared out. There was a flurry of exchanged messages between ATC, (Air Traffic Control),

chant, “Santa Maria… Santa Maria… Santa Maria!”…nobody answered me either.

the PM’s aide in the cabin, us, flight dispatch and so on. The delay was

expected to be two or three hours at least. After we landed, we were directed to a semi-deserted part of the airport, a set of airstairs were attached and the door was opened to let in our first breath of African air. it was like opening the door to a sweat scented sauna. Moments later an unescorted black Limousine drew up to the bottom of the stairs and even though it was only 7:00 a.m., out stepped the President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Lester Pearson descended the steps alone; the two embraced and shook hands. That both leaders had a genuine affection for each other was clearly evident. Off they disappeared in the limo in a cloud of African dust. it did not take long before a string of hacks... taxis, not the political kind... arrived and began hauling the various groups of the entourage to destinations unknown.

Unbeknownst to us, just days later, Nkrumah would open the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa, and just months after that he would be overthrown and forced into exile until he died. Also unbeknownst to me at least, either by design or pure ignorance, i wasn’t to know that many African countries including Nigeria were in political turmoil and on the brink of civil war.

The weather cleared in Lagos and the scramble was on to locate all the passengers and get them back to the plane. Again, many messages passed from Bell to the PM’s aide and vice versa with me in the middle as the round up became quite hectic. At last everyone was onboard… or so we thought.

An iconic TV presenter and political news commentator of the day was missing. Bell kept urging the PM’s aide that we needed to get going as we were all well over our duty day and the DC-8 was urgently required back in Canada. The PM apparently was just as adamant that we wait for the errant reporter. Finally, a beat up taxi pulled up screeching to a halt at the bottom of the airstairs in a cloud of unrelenting African dust and out rolled the newsman drunk as a skunk. He could barely stagger up the stairs and as it was my assigned duty to close the main cabin door i was there when he reached the top step.

As he flicked his cigarette butt over the side he leered at me and said in a loud voice, “See sonny! Even the Prime minister of Canada waits for me”.

My first impulse was to grab him by the scruff of the neck and kick his sorry derriere back down the stairs, but i was dog tired after being up all night well into noon. instead, i said nothing while shutting and latching the door after him. i was losing my naiveté fast about respected public icons and was beginning to realize many of them had feet of clay.

The short routine flight to Lagos took only 40 minutes and about the only thing that i noted was, as i looked out the captain’s side window on the landing roll, there were some excavations going on beside the runway.

i thought, “Hmm, they must be putting in some new runway lighting”.

i was later to learn that these were in fact trenches being built to defend the airport’s perimeter in case of attack.

The first person to bounce through the door as i opened it was Arnie Sorensen, an extraverted lanky Yankee from St Paul Minnesota, and the Lagos Station Manager for Pan American Airways. Arnie would be the genial host for our crew layover for the next four days and we babes

in the woods came to rely on his wisdom of the local colour and culture.

At the ramp, the formalities for greeting Pearson were short and sweet... an absolute minimum of welcoming ceremonies. instead, the ViPs were quickly whisked off in limousines with the usual camp followers trailing behind in grubby cabs. The prime ministers of Australia and Britain were about to land while the others had already arrived. Bell rounded up our crew and the deadheads then scampered off to the nearby airport hotel for some 'zees' leaving second officer, Johnny Weir, to monitor the re-fueling for the DC-8’s return to Montreal. i decided to stick around and keep John company.

The refueling job done, we sat around the ViP lounge with Nigerian cabinet ministers and their lackeys who were robed in garishly coloured tribal dress. They were joshing each other and laughing while they sat with their bare feet up on the coffee tables quaffing cocktails, awaiting the arrival of Prime Minister Wilson from Britain. We were hoping someone had thought to order us a cab to take us to the hotel… in vain as it turned out… nobody had.

Lester Pearson travelled with an entourage of aids along with Canadian Press representatives. One particular high profile press person proved to be less than popular for holding up the flight from Ghana to Lagos, declaring to the author that even prime ministers waited for him. Pictured here Pearson with an aid at the airport in Lagos.

Six days later some of these guys wouldn’t be laughing…they’d be dead.

Johnny and i felt a little conspicuous... two pale faced Caucasians in drab navy blue uniforms lost in a sea of brilliant colour and being completely ignored. At last, the only person in the lounge wearing western clothing, a natty middle aged African in a Saville Row business suit, seemed to sense our plight, came over and in accented British upper class English introduced himself. He gave us a warm welcome,

the Nigerian Minister of Education was, along with the Prime Minister, among the first victims of the Nigerian government to be executed by the military junta whose coup d’état had taken place the day after we left.

it was on the short cab ride to the hotel that certain inconvenient truths about African realities dawned on me. Burnt-out overturned vehicles on the side of the road and Nigerian soldiers with WWii Lee Enfield 303 rifles at the ready on every street corner were

got us a cab and sent us off to join the two crews already snoozing in bed at the hotel. We later learned that this soft-spoken gentleman who was

a bit of a clue…that and the ever increasing stench of raw sewage and human sweat the closer we got to the city. it sort of dashed my romantic il-

lusions of what i thought Africa would be like. Although, if anybody had said that four years later i’d see Canadian troops on Montreal streets i’d have called them a liar.

What was left of my first day in the Dark Continent was spent trying to snatch some sleep in the unaccustomed humidity of the hotel, which was on par with any second rate American motel and included a cranky air conditioning system. Later that evening, i hooked up with a couple of crew members for supper then hit the sack again.

Bright and early next morning

Ralph called with the news that the DC-8 had made it back to Canada. He wanted to know what was i going to do for the day? Arnie, the Pan-Am guy, had told Ralph the best way to do any sightseeing would be to rent a cab for the day, but warned that there were places we should definitely avoid for our own safety. He gave us the name of the cab company used by Pan Am’s visiting executives and added that if we were interested he’d take the whole crew to a night club to show us the local bar scene after supper. Bell and Willis begged off the sightseeing venture saying that they had some

work to do…what that might be since our only means of escape, the DC-8, had left us stranded. i couldn’t imagine nor did i care what they were up to although, later, i had cause to ponder on just what it was.

in fact, it took two cabs to get us all on the road. A couple of flight attendants stayed behind although i couldn’t for the life of me see why anyone would want to miss the opportunity to share the sights, sounds and in the case of Africa, the smells of a distant culture. We did the Zoo, the beach, the local country side and a quick drive-by of the downtown without seeing any more evidence of political unrest. i’m pretty sure Arnie had briefed the cabbies to steer us clear of any danger. i realized that given the trenches beside the runway, the burned out vehicles and the heavy military presence near the airport it kind of indicated that the rebels had considered the airport a significant strategically important piece of real estate to capture if trouble started. i began to miss that lovely allegorical chunk of our homeland… the newly branded but now distant Air Canada DC-8

Arnie Sorenson's Austin was not only underpowered but had been vandalized with a slashed tire, making it a questionable means of escape from the bar where we encounteredsome extremely dangerous events unfolding in a country on the brink of civil war.

Night fell abruptly like the final act curtain at the end of a stage play. Without the extended twilight we so much enjoy in our northern climes, i was truly amazed at just how fast it happened. it was the closest i’d

ever been to the equator, and sadly, i didn’t know at the time that i would never be destined to venture into the southern hemisphere in my sixty years of flying. in fact, Lagos was as close as i ever got to it.

True to his word, Arnie showed up with his car and two cabs. We all pushed off to the nightclub including our illustrious leader, Captain Bell and navigator Willis. The place resembled

a bar like any Montreal bar… bare tables, dim lighting, surly waiters and dirty floors… except that there was no roof over the thing and the floors were actually dirt. We were literally al fresco under the stars. The evening passed in the usual bonhomie that exists amongst airline crews thrown together on a layover. When everyone was getting ready to leave, Arnie, Ralph and i stayed behind for the infamous, one more beer, while the others toddled off to the hotel in cabs. Arnie said he would drive us home in his circa 1955 Austin.

We were just into our beer when suddenly a striking looking, tall African strode into the bar dressed in what i now recognized as the standard attire of a local tribal chief… brightly coloured sweeping robes. What set this guy apart though was the beaded Muslim Taliyah or skull cap he wore and the two hefty guerillas that shadowed him...obvi-

best seat in the house

ous bodyguards. The bar babble went suddenly and ominously quiet as 'beanie boy' snapped his fingers at the headwaiter for a table. Arnie gulped and silently mouthed,

“We gotta get outa here…NOW.”

At the time, i did not appreciate the urgency of Arnie’s mimed message.

We slipped out a side door and jumped into Arnie’s car. For some reason Arnie insisted i drive. Maybe he thought that with my recent stint in ireland i’d be comfortable driving on the left side of the road or maybe he thought i’d had less to drink. Either way he was mistaken. For a moment i dithered with the four- on-the-floor gear shift lever of the shaky old Austin. Thinking i was putting the thing into first gear i’d actually put it in reverse. i stepped on the gas. Backwards we shot stopping only when the back wheels lodged themselves into an open sewer. Now Arnie was in a real state of anxiety and ordered Ralph out to help him push us out of the ditch. As we finally pulled away, i sensed that even this antique relic was more underpowered than it ought to be. Now on our way, i had time to do a quick instrument scan and to my

dismay, the needle on the gas gauge was bobbing on empty. i spotted a gas station and pulled in only to discover why the car was under performing … one of the tires was slashed.

i stayed in the driver’s seat with the engine running while Arnie ran inside to palaver with the gas station attendants. Ralph jumped out and began to fill the tank. There was a lot of yelling coming from where Arnie was when one of the attendants charged out screaming at Ralph, “Stop! Stop!”

“Oh Yeah? Watch this!” Ralph bellowed like a wounded bull as he took the cigar he’d been smoking out of his mouth. He poised it menacingly over the pump nozzle stuck into the open gas tank. it was an unmistakable gesture that if the guy approached further he’d drop the cigar into the tank. No one knew it wasn’t lit…not even me. it meant Ralph was now, metaphorically speaking, holding an unloaded gun to hold off an angry mob. it was enough to stop them, momentarily at least. Arnie appeared at a dead run from what was now a crowd of very excited onlookers…Ralph just dropped the nozzle on the ground still spewing fuel as

he and Arnie jumped into the car shouting in unison. “Go Go Go!”

i stomped on the gas. This time i had it properly in first gear. The steering was hampered by the slashed tire of the sluggish car. i side swiped the air compressor for inflating tires beside the gas pumps and knocked it off its pedestal sending a huge geyser of dust and small stones into the night sky. i’ll never forget the image of that bunch of gyrating Africans yelling, cursing and wildly gesticulating with their arms like some primeval tribal ritual. The entire dance macabre was back lit by the gas station lights reflected in the rear view mirror of that old Austin.

Back at Arnie’s house, now that his car was hors de combat, he ordered a cab to take us back to the hotel, but the adventure was not quite over. As we headed home, Ralph decided to take an interest in the local upcoming national election, quizzing the cab driver on the finer points of voting procedure. The driver absolutely insisted we go to his house for a drink. By now i was getting a little worried but Ralph seemed to feel it would be

discourteous and offensive to the driver if we didn’t accept his invitation…that and the fact we could both use another drink…so we went. Although i was very nervous it turned out the driver was quite an interesting and obviously educated guy. it wasn’t till sunup that we finally got home to the hotel after spending a few hours learning the ins and outs of what was really going on in Nigerian politics.

i can’t speak for Ralph but needless to say my third day in Africa was pretty much a dead loss although i did manage to buy a few trinkets with my limited resources to take home. Tomorrow, if the DC-8 made it back, we’d head home to dear old Canada a little older, a little wiser, and for me personally, a little less naive.

Next morning, i was relieved when Arnie called to say there were no apparent repercussions from our nocturnal escapades, that the DC-8 was due to arrive soon and he would drive me to meet it. The rest of the crew would come to the airport later in cabs. He helped me refuel the plane then carried on with the other duties

he had to preform to prepare for the airport arrival of the many ViPs but not before he told me that part of his Pan Am duties was to warn incoming flights about any imminent security threats. He did this by slipping a secret code word into the normal arrival radio messages. Hearing this word an incoming flight would automatically divert to a predetermined safe alternate. Thankfully he’d been advised by local authorities… he carefully omitted to name them…that for the next few hours at least there were no immediate threats. if Bell, Ralph or Willis knew about this procedure they certainly hadn’t told me. in fact, there was a lot that i had not been informed

of… and by the way, Arnie never did tell me the secret word.

The Prime Minister and his entourage arrived as did the other commonwealth heads of state at about the same time. They seemed like stampeding horses bolting from a burning barn trampling each other to get out as quickly as possible. Maybe they knew something i didn’t. We left around noon and because of the short runway at Lagos it meant we’d not be able to go non-stop to Ottawa. Flight Dispatch had pre-planned a re-fueling stop in the French colony of Senegal at Dakar, the most westerly city in continental Africa and the only one with a long enough runway. it took

Greeted on the ramp at Dakar to honour Canada's Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, a Zouhave colour guard performing a fantastic precision drill.

about four hours to reach Dakar in clear weather and while at both Accra and Lagos inbound the receptions were rather muted making the Zouhave colour guard that greeted us on the ramp at Dakar all the more magnificent. it was a scene straight out of Arabian Nights.

The Zouhave were an elite unit of the French colonial armies recruited from Algeria. The scene was perfection with the late afternoon sun setting off their uniforms of bright red voluminous silk trousers billowing in the gentle sea breeze, gold braided navy blue jackets, topped by tasselled red fezzes known as 'chichi' while they presented arms with gleaming scimitars. The Zouhave were also known for their precision drill and on this afternoon they did not disappoint.

The meticulously dressed French Governor of the colony greeted the PM and perhaps because of Canada’s special relationship with France the two were heavily engaged in urgent conversation as they went about the usual diplomatic protocol of inspecting the Zouhave colour guard. Pearson,

as anxious as he was to get home, was hurriedly briefing the Governor on the results of the Lagos conference.

We finished the refueling at the same time as Pearson took his leave and on the taxi out for take-off Ralph and i had our heads buried in the DC-8 performance charts. We were right on the max take-off weight for the runway length and temperature limitations but to be legal we had to fudge the headwind component from the fast dying sea breeze as the sun rapidly set. The initial climb would be over the ocean and we hoped some adiabatic cooling from the Atlantic would waft in over the runway. With Bell’s approval of our numbers off we went.

We rolled and rolled… and rolled. Bell rotated but the main gear stayed firmly on the runway. i had my sideways second officer’s seat swiveled forward but of course i couldn’t see over the nose so had no idea how much runway lay ahead. Finally, the main gear lurched off at the same moment as i saw out of Ralph’s side window the sea sliding by beneath us. i have often thought, since that day, how cavalier we were in calculating those take off numbers with the life of

highly respected global peacemaker, Lester Pearson, Canada’s greatest Prime Minister, in our hands.

The night was black as pitch; the air was silky smooth, and we were homeward bound. it had been an hour since the hot, heavy, runway limited take off from Dakar’s Yoff airport. Now, at top of climb with the takeoff adrenalin rush well behind us, we four, the Bell, Leek, Willis and me, the lowly, second officer, were settling in for the long dreary eight hours of flight ahead of us.

The cockpit lighting had been dimmed and now ensconced in my little sidesaddle cocoon heading home i was reflecting on my audacious Nigerian antics, when suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by a message from the cabin. The Prime Minister would like to know the score in the hockey game. i shouldn’t have been surprised knowing the PM’s well documented love of hockey, particularly the Toronto Maple Laughs, his favourite team. This was after all, Hockey Night in Canada.

Always anxious to please, i twiddled the dial of my radio compass repeater, got lucky and picked up a clear skip signal of the CBC and Foster Hewitt’s unmistakable funky

twang. The rest of the cockpit crew seemed totally absorbed in trying to establish contact on HF with the Azores for further clearance. i boldly told the PM’s aide that if he wanted to go ahead and invite the great man to come up and listen to the game on the radio i was sure he would be welcome. i knew i was usurping Bell’s prerogative but what the…all he could do was fire me. Moments later a very tired PM, sans his trade mark bow tie, inconspicuously stole into the cockpit. Without a word i motioned him to my seat, passed him an extra headset then together we listened to the end of the game. Once it was over i tried to steer the conversation to ask him, pilot to pilot, about his flying experiences. All i knew about him was that i had heard he had been a pilot during the First World War.

What i did not know then was that shortly after his first solo he crashed while landing a Grahame White trainer, writing it off and injuring himself enough to be shipped to London to recuperate. While there, on a night outing from the hospital he had been whacked by a double decker bus on the Edgeware Road in a blackout during a Zeppelin bomb raid. it aggravated his injury enough

to be invalided back to Canada ending any hope he had of being a pilot. That might explain why he was reluctant to discuss his short-lived flying career. in any case as soon as he recovered at home the plucky fella volunteered to go right back into the fray where he had formerly served as a stretcher bearer for two years in the Balkans prior to his being selected for flying training.

Over the years i’ve always treasured my few minutes of sharing the simple pleasure of listening to a hockey game with a truly great Canadian even more so since the setting was in the confined darkened cockpit of a DC-8 in flight over the Atlantic. in the crowded cockpit, there were five us, but i felt like there was only just him and me. What struck me most was his modest dignity and unassuming manner. in spite of our age difference, he spoke to me as an equal in his quiet voice. i’ve always marveled at how this soft spoken, lispy, middle class son of a preacher became such a giant in global geopolitics not to mention his celebrated achievements as Canadian Prime Minister. As for the game… do you believe it??? The Leafs actually won!!!

The rest of the trip was routine except me fretting about whether my few souvenirs would exceed my customs limit. i did not see how they could be with the small amount of cash i’d taken with me. That was just one more thing i had not been told… on arrival the aircraft would have diplomatic immunity thus would have no customs inspection… so i needn’t have worried. i watched incredulously on our arrival in Ottawa at the unloading of sacks of pineapple and god knows what else from the DC-8’s belly cargo holds that the PM’s hangers-on had brought with them from Nigeria. No wonder we had just squeaked off the runway at Dakar we were probably at least five thousand pounds overweight.

The ferry flight to Montreal went by in the blink of an eye and soon i was heading home bleary eyed to ile Perrot. The kids were asleep and i spent the next hour or so trying to stay awake while telling my wife about the exciting trip. At the time, my biggest take-away was the flight deck interlude with the PM but later in life i reflected long and hard about how so many of the illusions i’d had of religion, racism and politics that

i’d been brought up with in Winnipeg might have been dashed forever by my experiences on the trip

Epilogue

in the context of today’s overwhelming security, it is hard to imagine what the people who organized this conference were thinking. Who, what, and where did they get their military intelligence…and yes i know, military intelligence is an oxymoron. They must have known how precarious the Nigerian situation was. Further, i would have to wonder why they would leave Canada’s political elite stranded in a country on the brink of civil war with no means of escape. We never went back to the Lagos airport during our stay so i cannot say whether Prime Ministers from the other Commonwealth Countries or the British PM were left without lifeboats of either military or civilian aircraft. interestingly enough the British newspaper, The Guardian, quoted on January 10th that Pearson had offered to send an RCAF plane to pick up the Zambian African delegates to attend the conference one of whom was Robert Mugabe. They also reported that British PM Harold Wilson did send a plane to Malawi for a delegate.

Therefore, their military must have been lurking around somewhere close by. We certainly never bumped into any other commonwealth military or civilian flight crews on our layover.

i cannot speak for the rest of the crew but i was told nothing about what to expect in Africa. Nobody had even asked if my inoculations for tropical diseases were up to date. i was struggling in a new job to bring up a young family in a new house and political affairs in Africa were not anywhere on my radar. i suspect Bill Bell and Don Willis might have known something which is why they may have seemed reticent, a little anti-social and kept themselves aloof on the lay over. i also have a funny feeling Ralph was kept out of loop for reasons i can only speculate on.

Lingering questions remain which will never be answered for me. Was Arnie doing double duty as Pan Am’s station manager and the American State department? The cab drivers English was not great but imbedded in his lexicon were phrases that did not match his profession as a cab driver. He was clearly punching above his weight. There was no wife or evidence of a family at his house which given

Hard to believe today but during TCA's start-up years they had to advertise the idea of taking an airplane rather than a train across the country. it soon became obvious to a doubting public that 9 hours in a North Star beat 4 days on a train to get from Vancouver to Montreal

what we could see would have been out of his financial league anyway. Was he sent to spy on us or was Arnie keeping us out of harm’s way? Although i am grateful that there were no consequences why was there not even a mention of our wild moonlight caper either from the police or the company? i guess i will just have to add some of my African adventures to the long list of events in my life that remain unexplained as i moved along in my aviation career.

As to the success or lack thereof of the conference, Britain's Prime

Minister Wilson stated in the Guardian newspaper that, “The conference ended in unity even euphoria.” While the Americans did not have a horse in the race this being a strictly Commonwealth gig, they did have a dog in the fight…their Rhodesian mining operations. The Financial Times quoted that unnamed American officials had quipped, “The Wilson solution was fanciful and irresponsible.” and dubbed it, “The Tar Baby option.”

So far, history seems to have swung to the American view. Still it ain’t over till it’s over.

best seat in the house

The Canadair North Star was a 1940s Canadian development, for TransCanada Air Lines of the Douglas DC-4. instead of radial engines used by the Douglas design, Canadair used Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 engines to achieve a higher cruising speed of 325 mph (523 km/h) compared with the 227 mph (365 km/h) of the standard DC-4. Ordered by TCA in 1944, the prototype flew on 15 July 1946. The type was used by various airlines and by the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). it proved to be reliable but noisy when in service through the 1950s and into the 1960s. The development of the North Star created much controversy in the House of Commons with many members voicing dissent for use of the Merlin engines. Not knowing what they were talking about never bothered politicians so the argument raged while the aircraft proved itself as a most reliable and profitable choice for TCA. it remains a question why a few years later the House did not give any consideration to the fate of Canada's Avro Jetliner, which would have put TCA into the history books as the first airline in the world to employ pure jet powered aircraft and would have bolstered rather than help destroy Canada's then burgeoning aircraft manufacturing industry.

that's me in the front lef t

Everything between April 1964 and August 1967 was a blur. Things at TCA flight Operations were happening fast. i found myself going from DC-8 Second Officer to Vanguard First officer to Viscount First officer to Viscount Captain in a little over two and a half years plus a base change. My conversion in the spring of 1965 to F/O on the Vickers Vanguard went swiftly and

smoothly. My time on that airplane was way too short. it had the largest cockpit of any plane i have ever flown. i had four powerful engines and big fuel tanks that ensured plenty of gas even fully loaded for long alternates... perfect for the Maritimes, the only area in which i flew the thing. it was so short a time that i never had time for any Vanguard adventures.

in the fall of 1966 a chance for promotion to Captain on the Vickers Viscount came up. it would mean a move to the Winnipeg base. Wintery Winnipeg was the least popular flight Operations base of the four company bases of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Because of my insatiable ambition to be first a captain then fly the biggest, fastest airplane the company had—even if it meant being the junior pilot on the equipment—i bid it. Such was my inflated ego. On the other hand, Winnipeg was our hometown and after seven years we would be back with all our relatives. Now, with an additional daughter, there were six of us and like many other Anglos made uncomfortable by Quebec politics we headed west by car...again.

i turned up in Winnipeg January 1, 1967, a very cliquey base with a strange flight operations management team that treated its pilots with a weird filial nepotistic bent. i soon found out that outsiders, who might upset the apple cart, were not welcome. The line pilots on the other hand, while timidly accepting this treatment, were a great bunch of guys. Everything was suddenly new to me. All my flying had been in the east now it would go from coast to coast.

Then there was the holiday problem:

Because the bids had come up and happened so quickly, i was awarded holidays in March, which was not in line with my entitled seniority. To add insult to injury my original reserve squadron 402, had disallowed my transfer from Westmount’s 401. They didn’t want airline pilots in their parochial bivouac or maybe they had learned about me feathering both engines at once on one of the squadron's C-45’s during a test flight.

With little money left from the move to Winnipeg a temporary vacation foray to sunny southern climes was out of the question. i needed to find a means for some quick cash.

My brother told me about a local operator who was looking for a Beech-18 pilot but did add... get the money up front first.My mission: take a Beech-18, CF-RVR, to the hydro dam construction site on the Nelson River at Gillam MB. Once established there set up charters to bring sex starved construction workers to Winnipeg on weekends or any other time they felt the need. But first fly a tractor train tow bar up to Raminski’s fishing camp at God’s Lake Narrows on God’s lake northern Manitoba,

Griffith was no stranger to the Beech 18. He had experienced his early flying days with the RCAF on this aircraft type. The undercarriage had always been an item of consideration and in this case skis would have been the landing gear of choice.

then back to Winnipeg. i would have a Transair co-pilot for this trip only. He was supposed to know where he was going.

in the days before ice Road Truckers, supplies were brought to northern communities on tractor trains consisting of a caterpillar tractor towing several heavily laden sleighs. in our

skiing but not for a wheel equipped Beech. A Mountie came out to meet us on a ski-doo to tell us we were at the wrong place.

He pushed back the hood of his parka and asked. “How the hell did you land that thing in all this snow without skis?”

i answered, “i’m more concerned

case, the tow bar weighed about two hundred pounds and fit neatly in the aisle of the Beech. We landed at two wrong airports on God’s Lake on one of which we nearly nosed over. The ice strip on that lake was marked with the customary small pine trees but hadn’t been rolled. We landed in two feet of powder snow...perfect for ski

about how we are going to take off again.”

We did, though it was dicey.

Finally, we got to Raminski’s. On start up at our previous wrong destination, the right engine was hard to start. it was hovering around minus 30C so i suspected a weak battery. Taking

The Vickers Vanguard was a British short/mediumrange turboprop airliner introduced in 1959 by VickersArmstrongs, a successor of their successful Viscount design with considerably more internal room. The Vanguard was introduced just before the first of the large jet-powered airliners, and was largely ignored by the market. Only 44 were built, ordered by TransCanada Air Lines (TCA) and British European Airways (BEA).

After only about 10 years service TCA experimentally converted one of theirs to a freighter configuration, calling it the Cargoliner.-a very successful conversion copied by other airlines.

no chances, i set the brakes, shutting down only the left engine, and leaving the right one at idle. That done, we sat down for a much-needed hot lunch in Raminski’s dining room with ten or so of his workers. it was a weird scene.

kind of do-si-do to get aboard. Luckily, it was pirouetting slowly enough for me to run up just between the left wing and the tail as it swung by...grab the door handle...open it and get inside. We didn’t even say thanks for the

No one spoke. They just munched on their moose stew. Suddenly they all got up and ran to the window.

“WOW...look at that”, one of them said.

Even before i looked out i knew what had happened. in the cold the left brake had had let go. The plane was doing a good imitation of a merrygo-round.

i ran outside knowing i was going to have to square dance the thing... a

lunch to Raminski or adios... we just taxied out and took off for Winnipeg.

For the next two weeks, at least that was the plan, i’d be solo, staying at the Gillam Hotel owned by the Hudson Bay Railroad. Gillam was a railway section head on the railway line. Most of the few inhabitants were either railway workers or indigenous people. The Manitoba Hydro construction workers stayed in barracks at the construction site beside the dam.

The hydro operation was run with military precision...that is to say...very authoritarian with little or no regard for common sense. They had tightfisted control on the airport. So i had to keep my nose clean so to speak. i did manage to trade a short check out on the Beech with a helicopter pilot for a trip in his Bell 47. i was going to simulate an engine failure on takeoff. i didn’t have to. He opened the throttles a little too fast and in the cold air one of the Pratts on the Beech burped and i only just managed to keep the thing from going into the weeds with full rudder.

There wasn’t much to do at the hotel so the young manager allowed me free room and board if i did odd jobs and served beer. i learned a lot... a 24 of beer does not freeze at 20 below but even a slight jar and you’ve got 24 beersicles. The only other hotel guests in the old wooden firetrap were the ladies from the catering company, Crawley McCracken, up at the dam site. it was inevitable that they were called, the 'crawly dollies.' My charter business was a total failure. The first week i had nobody. in the second week the administrative manager for the hydro project came

in for a beer and offered that he would have six guys ready for Winnipeg the next weekend. He would collect the money from the workers and write me a cheque for whole amount on departure. i had befriended the local law, an RCMP Sergeant... free beer on the house never hurts. He said the guy could be trusted. What could go wrong? True to his word, hydro guy handed me a cheque as he and six other happy campers boarded my flight. i spent the weekend at home. Departure time came at the airport for Gillam and...surprise... surprise, hydro guy never showed up, stiffing my boss out of the entire charter money...i had been paid in advance...lucky me to have such good brotherly advice. Later, my brother-in-law, a deputy warden at Stonewall Penitentiary, told me hydro guy was an alumnus from that institution. His crime, fraud and embezzlement. So much for my bush flying days.

About this time i put aside my angst against the Canadian Airline Pilot's Association (CALPA) and our local chairman, Bill Gibson, said one day, “Look Jim, why don’t you quit whining about CALPA and do something constructive. i’m tired of having our local executive meetings in my

basement...we need a proper business office. Why don’t you prepare a cost analysis to set it up, make a presentation to the CALPA president and get us approval for funding?”

i did ...it was approved and CALPA council 7 Winnipeg finally had a brick and mortar office.

The Viscount part of the conversion course went smoothly...maybe too smoothly. The captain training was a check-out to fly in the left seat under the direction and at the option of the captain. it started well, but then two long-time, well-liked, Winnipeg based pilots senior to me failed their Captain’s check. in any case, during the final de-briefing by my instructor, who was by the way, Vancouver based, told me i had passed the ride with flying colours. But the Winnipeg powersthat-be wanted me to do another six months of left seat flying with a check pilot. i told him to go tell the base manager Air Canada wasn’t the only airline in the world and i would quit before doing any more left-seat time. God, what was i thinking?

Off he went returning in a matter of minutes. My heart stopped beating...my mouth went dry...i gulped as he said, “This is Friday... you do a line check tomorrow, Saturday, all stops Vancouver and back with a Winnipeg check pilot. Sunday morning you do the same flight as captain. Good job and good luck”.

That was that...i had to think, "Whew... another miraculous escape. Thank you Gods of Flight wherever you may be for watching over me and my big mouth— AGAiN."

it turns out the reason for the extra left seat time had more to do with the company’s insurance underwriters than anything else or so i was told. To be a captain mandated a certain minimum number of hours as pilot in command by the insurers and i was short by a few hours. The insurers lowered the time required. The reduction in time required didn’t hurt others with low time in my wake including the base manger’s son, Denis...Hmmm?.

The first North American airline to use turboprop aircraft was Trans-Canada Air Lines who were cautious of the Viscount due to the turboprop engine being a new technology. There had been a preference for acquiring the piston-engine Convair CV240 but praise of the Viscount from pilots and a promise from Vickers to make any design changes desired by TCA persuaded the airline to procure the Viscount instead. On December 6, 1954 the first Viscount was delivered to Canada heralding a large media event which included an improvised aerial display. TCA became a prolific operator of the type, placing multiple follow-up orders for additional Viscounts. By 1958 TCA had an operational fleet of 51 Viscounts. Jim Griffith gained his captain's rank on this aircraft.

history

the sprog, the dog whistle and insider hi-jinks

We called the turbo-prop Viscounts, ”Dog Whistles”, so named for their ability to convert jet fuel into noise; a high pitched, teeth gritting whine well above the audible frequency that drives dogs and cats and rats and even humans into frenzied acoustic shock. Pilots would often tell flight attendants that at least turbine engines unlike them, stopped whining at shut down. No need for flight attendants to get their knickers in a knot because truth be told it was usually the flight attendants that had the last laugh. They, after all, were the last people to handle the pilots’ food and drink before it went down their gullets. Woe betide any mean spirited pilots who thoughtlessly or otherwise humiliated their fellow shipmates for it provided means, motive and opportunity for ugly retaliation.

in the mid to late sixties on an upswing in the never-ending cycle of good years and bad in the industry there was

best seat in the house

Editor's note to the formal portrait: The young "sprog" became a full captain on the Vickers Viscount. We can't imagine him not being a participant in the various hi-jinks that went on between crew members.

a hiring frenzy. it produced a new youthful image to the airline. it also resulted in a plethora of pilot promotions from First Officer to Captain. Some of the, “older”, flight attendants now had a chance to harass some of the new front-end sprogs. The normal routine on short-haul Viscount flights was for the flight attendants to come up front to the cockpit, if they weren’t already standing there for the take-off, oops; to take coffee, tea or milk orders as soon as the wheels had safely thumped onto the up-locks. This was nothing in the way of deferential or preferential treatment for pilots, rather the flight attendants wisely learned to take care of the pilots first so that they would not be interrupted with a cockpit request half way through their meal service. Coffee was usually the beverage of choice as it was on this particular morning on a flight under the command of a particularly babyfaced newly promoted captain. Although lithe and slim he had cute little chubby cheeks that would have done the, Gerber baby food commercials proud. Much to the sprog Captain’s chagrin the flight attendant first handed the right-seater his coffee careful so as not to spill any on the radio console, then with much exaggerated aplomb

presented the Captain with a baby-bottle filled with milk, topped with a rubber nipple on a tray that also contained a diaper. These frivolities were not uncommon with flight crews and the back of the bus cabin attendants but such interplay was always performed beyond the view of passengers...well almost always. The authoritarian hierarchy of crew behaviour was changing for the better to a more vibrant sharing of mutual respect by pilots and flight attendants...a view not shared by management nor by some older pilots. The facts are that a couple of flight attendants known as Flash and Fumbles carried these pranks over to the passengers...just like Southwest airlines and later WestJet did in later years. it put passengers at ease, but Flash and Fumbles were nearly fired... passenger service management didn’t realize times were changing.

Back in the Viscount days flight crews got to know the air-side, ground staff on a first name basis, especially at the smaller stations that they regularly flew into. it’s a small wonder then, that ground crews were often co-opted into some of the high jinks. Sometimes the pilots, when boarding an originating flight, would find mini-skirted flight attendants tucked up in the overhead baggage racks. in the bad old days aircraft designers and operators for some reason failed to

understand that items of carry-on baggage could become deadly, misguided missiles in turbulence. So the baggage racks were built like the ones on buses, with no doors to keep the stuff contained. A Viscount baggage rack could hold several average sized flight attendants quite handily. imagine the surprise of the first boarding passenger when an elegant hand reached down from seemingly nowhere to take the boarding pass. The pilots, enthusiastically aroused with the thrill of having to get them down, never really concerned themselves about how the flight attendants got up there in the first place. it was never recorded if a male flight attendant was ever put in a Viscount overhead rack or if the pilots or indeed anyone else ever helped one down. Now, thinking about it, how did those ladies get up there anyway, who put them there, how and why?

Flying Viscounts in summer could be quite uncomfortable. The air conditioning system was not very efficient on short hops so some of the crews, once in the airplane, would doff their uniform pants, or trousers if you pre-

fer, don shorts and hang their pants on hangers stuck through the webbing of the forward cargo compartment opposite the hydraulic cupboard. Summer shorts for men in the late sixties were unusually tacky with brightly coloured patterns; a kind of fashion sense gone wild. Some were worn indecently short unlike the de rigueur droopy drawers of today. Naturally during short turn-a-rounds pilots togged out in shorts stayed on board out of public view. They would often open the cockpit windows, slouch in their seats, loll in the resulting cool breeze and after the fuel truck was disconnected, they might savour a relaxing cigarette, puff on a pipe or even a cheap cigar. These nerve calming devices were unceremoniously stubbed out and left to moulder in ashtrays conveniently located in the armrests along with discarded chewing gum and other disgusting stuff leaving a, “manly” gentleman’s club ambiance that lingered in the cockpit long after the windows had been closed for flight.

best seat in the house

A particularly young looking captain became the target for some serious spoofing by flight attendants. dog whis T le hi jinks

Digital Painting by Graham Ward

BASHED and GOOSED

with a sort of explanation for

SNARGE and ZOONOSIS

it was a dark and not so stormy night of September 16th, 1970 as Air Canada Viscount # 649, on a flight from Winnipeg and Windsor enroute to points east, descended into the circuit of London Ontario’s airport in the early darkness for a visual approach on runway 23. Captain John Trevor, as pilot flying, turned on the landing lights, was reducing airspeed to mitigate bird strikes and turned off the bright overhead cockpit

flood lighting leaving only the dim back-lit white instrument lights as the sole interior lighting. He called for the in-range check. Everything was smooth, calm and absolutely routine. First Officer Denis Hopkins, as pilot not flying, was just reaching up to the overhead panel to check that the pressurization was set for landing when…

No one with the experience of being inside a confined space when a firearm has been discharged will be surprised by the crew’s response to the acoustic shock.

it occurred so suddenly and ear shatteringly loud that neither pilot realized what had happened. Hopkins felt like he had been punched in his face and chest and instinctively groped a handful of something smelly, warm and slimy from his shirtfront. in the dimly lit cockpit, he held his hands closer to the only source of light, the backlit instrument lights…

it was viscera and blood!

His first thought was that someone had sneaked up behind him and shot him in the back.

Then he thought …

“Oh geez!... When does the pain start?”

Meanwhile Trevor, unscathed by the muck, quickly engaged the autopilot. The aircraft systems behaved normally with no discernible damage to any part of the aircraft including the windshield except for what were obviously birdie bits on the circuit breaker panel behind Hopkins. Covered in offal and feathers, Hopkins was

systematically groping himself looking like he’d been in a giant pillow fight to the death. Trevor turned the cockpit flood lighting to full- bright, eyeballed Hopkins and in the brighter light he seemed all in one piece but a bit confused so he hollered!

“Hoppy! Are you okay?”

“Yeah yeah…i guess so” Hopkins hesitatingly replied.

Realizing Hopkins was still rattled and to snap him out of it, Trevor sharply and loudly commanded:

“Well get on with the check then!”

Hopkins’s training finally kicked in and he quickly finished the check.

The landing, rollout and arrival at the gate were smooth and uneventful. Trevor quickly disappeared with a mechanic to examine the a/c exterior. Amazingly, nothing was damaged, dented or missing. The only evidence of a bird strike was a greasy smear on Hopkins’s sliding side window. Company flight dispatch just could not get it through their heads that the only damage from a direct hit on the windshield was to the First officer’s dignity. At Trevor’s insistence dispatch reluctantly agreed to forecast the re-

oosed

Bird Strikes have proven to be a major threat to airliners. The most recent deadstick landing into the Hudson River made famous by pilot Chesley Sullenberger was the result of the Airbus A320 inhaling a gaggle of Canada Geese a short time after take off from New York's laGuardia airport. There is proof of a total of 30 fatal accidents the destruction of at least 52 civil aircraft and 190 deaths attributed to bird strikes. Pictured is an example of a pilot's nightmare.

mainder of the flight routine with only a minor delay.

Meanwhile in the cockpit, Hopkins had been abandoned to his own devices. He didn’t relish running the gauntlet through enroute passengers lingering in the cabin blissfully unaware that anything was amiss. As is often the case, the Flight Attendants came to the rescue, wiped his face and gave him one of the red blankets boarded for passenger comfort to throw over his shoulders to cover his badly bloodied shirt. So with hat on head, looking like Chief Sitting Bull, he went through the cabin past the gaping passengers to the terminal operations room, changed his shirt, gave himself a quick splash of Old Spice after-shave and returned to the cockpit… good to go.

How did a BASH, (Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard), on the nose result in zero damage to the venerable Viscount when at the very least the windshield should have been cracked if not broken? And how was it that instead of being splattered on the windshield and or fuselage did the SNARGE, (an acronymic euphemism for bird strike bird remains composed of a mixture of the words snot and garbage), end up in the First Officer’s lap?

it was the angle the sliding window presented to the airstream and the energy produced by the bird's weight times the square of the aircraft’s speed that overcame both the locking over-centering mechanism of the small window and the five pounds per square inch pressure

differential of the cabin. it popped the triangular shaped window perpendicularly back onto its sliding rail, opening it for a split second. The opening was just wide enough, about an inch and a half around the circumference of the window, to admit the bird's body. The relatively small opening combined with the fierce energy of the collision completely sliced, diced and eviscerated the entire medium sized goose. A nanosecond later and…Viola! The cabin pressure differential and the spring loaded closing mechanism slammed the plug type window back into its proper slot.

The chances of a pilot being killed or even being injured resulting from a BASH are estimated to be one in a billion flying hours. Except for Hopkins’s badly bruised chest,

Trevor and Hopkins were physically uninjured.

in 2003, forensic DNA testing on SNARGE was introduced by an international agreement to study the $1.2 billion BASH damage caused annually to commercial aircraft globally. This to determine the species and gender of the birds involved. it was then that a more sinister danger to pilots and ground crew became evident. Unknown to both our heroes and the ground clean-up crew they could have contracted ZOONOSiS, (an infectious disease that is transmitted between human and animal species), with possible debilitating side effects or even death. in the words of the academia more study is needed to determine the health threat of those handling SNARGE.

JUST WATCH ME

it was October 20th, 1970, at the height of Canada`s Quiet Revolution. A group of disgruntled Palestinian trained separatists, Front de Libération du Québec, (FLQ), Quebec Liberation Front, attempted to secede Quebec from the Canadian federation by adopting typical terrorist strategies; bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings and murder. The Prime Minister invoked the War Measures Act. What few soldiers we had in the Canadian military were on the streets.

We came in from Winnipeg for a Montreal layover to do a turn-around flight from Montreal to Bagotville Quebec on the 20th. Being well outside the twelve hour bottle to throttle envelope,

best seat in the house

october crisis

we went down to boisterous St. Catherine Street, a rowdy night club mecca, to partake of a few adult beverages and gawk at the bizarre goings on. That evening however, it was as dead as Pierre Laporte himself, the kidnapped and accidentally murdered Quebec cabinet minister whose funeral was on the morrow. Even the hookers stayed indoors.

The morning of the funeral dawned a clear, bright, autumn day. Our flight took us northeast direct to La Toque radio beacon to avoid a military restricted area, and then a 40-degree right turn east to RCAF Station Bagotville. Cruising at 15,000 feet, halfway to La Toque, i was startled by a message from Air Traffic Control to change to our com-

.....Pierre Trudeau when invoking the War Measures Act

pany frequency for an important message. The 'click' from every airplane in the area, including Bagotville Radar, changing to our company frequency to eavesdrop could easily be imagined. The company had received a thirdparty phone message stating that some potential diabolical FLQ plot was to occur on our return flight from Bagotville . The dispatcher assured us not to take the threat seriously …but i wondered. Meanwhile, like me, the RCAF at Bagotville also wondered.

Bob, the first officer and i, so engrossed in our ongoing three-way radio chatter failed to notice we had strayed two or three or… could it possibly have been even as much as maybe… ten miles northeast of the La Toque beacon before turning towards the airport? Bagotville Terminal Approach Radar guessed we were purposely deviating to alert them that something onboard was amiss. What followed were a series of questions seemingly coded into radar vectors and Air Traffic Control jargon, strangely out of context from established procedures. Nevertheless, we ended up doing a straight in visual approach to runway 08. i noticed when we were two miles out, a Piasecki helicopter unique for its banana like

shape was hovering about a hundred yards to the left of the runway approach end…not unusual, we’d seen this pesky copter hovering around the airport on previous trips. Touchdown was normal and early in the landing roll something caught my peripheral vision off to the left. i turned my head and was staring down the gaping maw of a .50 calibre machine gun pointed right at the cockpit, mounted across the open side hatch of the helicopter formateing on us about ten feet off the left wing tip.

We switched to ground control frequency and …were not requested to…not directed to …but tersely ordered to follow the instructions of the military marshall on the ramp in front of the small civilian terminal building. All the while the chopper hovered overhead. He parked us directly in front of the control tower and signalled shut down. As the Viscount engines slowly whistled and whined their way down to a dead stop i noticed that the roof of the tower was actually a sand bagged heavy machine-gun nest including snipers and again their muzzles were all clearly pointed at the cockpit. it appeared that, unlike our company, the RCAF had taken the threat seriously.

They told us that a passenger ramp would be attached to the main cabin door at the rear of the aircraft and that no one would be allowed to deplane unless the Captain showed himself at the door standing well out from anyone behind him. i made a PA announcement explaining to our passengers the control tower’s weird demand and appealed for calm…by now the passengers noticed the helicopter and its menacing guns plus the sand bagged tower topped machine-gun nest… and were getting a little restless… i tried to wend my way to the rear main door. imagine the crowded cabin with all the agitated passengers milling about and muttering in both official languages in the narrow aisle pushing and shoving and trying to retrieve bags from the overhead bins. i finally made it to the door, stepped out and gave a regal wave to the control tower thus terminating this Gilbert and Sullivan episode in a dull anti-climax.

Security staff assigned a gun-toting sergeant from the Quebec Provin-

cial Police (QPP) a.k.a, La Sûreté du Québec (SQ), acting, as what later became known as a Sky Marshall for our return flight to Montreal. Given the scale of global terrorism’s audacious acts in subsequent years our little nonevent pales in significance. For Bob and i, just two naive hay-seed hicks from Winnipeg that somehow became swept up in the hysteria of the moment, it was quite memorable. Seeing armed, Trudeau neutered, Canadian soldiers on the streets for other than mopping up after ice storms, big city snow clearing and filling sand bags in spring floods, was an eye popper. Like most Canadians living outside Quebec we tended to blow off the Quiet Revolution. Unfortunately, as it turned out for the seven dead victims, their families, the twenty seven people collaterally injured…some seriously, the financial losses to businesses and the associated mass provincial exodus of Anglos caused by one hundred and sixty terrorist acts by a group of miscreant, misguided, bungling losers…it was not quite so quiet!

best seat in the house

Bristling with 50 calibre machine guns we were escorted by an RCAF Piasecki helicopter. A sandbagged control tower told me to get out first to ensure that we were all okay.

Digital painting by Graham Ward

best seat in the house

history

in 1954 TCA started to phase out the North Star and introduced the Lockheed Super Constellation. By 1961 all of the North Stars were gone and many of the world's cities were being served by this graceful airliner. Also on the minds of the airline's management, the government of Canada, was the need to change the airline's name to reflect the international scope of its service. Trans Canada Air Lines didn't quite do the trick painted on the side of aircraft now servicing the United States, the United Kingdom, France, italy, Germany and of all places Moscow as TCA became the first North American airline to offer flights to Russia.

Airline president Gordon McGregor had long advocated the name change to Air Canada and Jean Chrétien the then prime minister now agreed with him and the Air Canada moniker soon graced the fuselage of the entire fleet. As they must often say in the House of Commons— the rest is history.

the little viscount that coulda...woulda... shoulda... but didn't

We had just arrived in Calgary, 3550 ASL, after a short flight from Edmonton, 2370 ASL. The weather in Edmonton was -28C, clear and crisp while Calgary was being plastered by heavy wet snow at -7C with a ceiling of 300 ft and a mile. During the turnaround, i went into our radio room to check conditions further down the line. When i came out half an hour later, the snow had intensified leaving about three inches over the entire aircraft. There were two men standing on the wing of our Viscount sweeping the snow off with wide janitorial push brooms while at the tail a boom sprayer was washing the snow off with what appeared to be heated de-icing fluid. i thought it was odd, i had never seen anyone using a broom to clear the wings before.

We were late as it was and with the passengers onboard we taxied out the short distance for takeoff on runway 34, with the full length of 12,675 feet available. Tower told us the ploughs had just swept the runway and cleared us for a rolling take-off. When we approached the button we saw the visibility had dropped to a mile in S+ and as we rolled onto the runway heading there appeared to be half an inch of wet snow on the surface.

The F/O was doing the flying and just after V1 he shouted out, “Jim she won’t fly”.

i looked over and sure enough saw Jacques pulling back on the wheel… the speed was building but the nose didn’t lift. i grabbed the pole and together we continued to pull back…it moved all right but nothing was happening. i called reject, closed the throttles, the ground fine pitch lights came on and gingerly at first, i applied the brakes as the control tower passed unseen somewhere to our left in the cloying heavy snow. in my mind i could see the little maxaret pucks of the anti-skid system whirling dervishly around in their circular casings squirting little shots of brake fluid to stop the wheels from skidding. And yes in case you are wondering we’d done a full control check during the short taxi out and the Viscount incorporated a throttle gate on the control locks so that the throttles couldn’t be opened to full power while the control locks were on.

Straight ahead into the white blank wall of snow we could only see a few of the closest embedded centreline lights disappearing under the nose…the runway edge lighting was

just a blur while not surprisingly the braking action was poor but directional control was good. i kept my hands off the nosewheel steering. With no cross wind we stopped on the centre line and set in motion the inevitable litany of actions and communications with our cabin people that ATC and company required after a rejected take off. We were as unsure of our exact runway location as was the control tower because of the near zero visibility. What we did know was that we were about half way into the alternating red and white centre line lights, which left about 1500 feet to the end of the runway. Finally, i was able to use the nosewheel steering and with good steering control would take the next turn off as quickly as safety would allow. We had used about 11,000 feet of runway. interestingly, moments after we returned to the ramp a Chinook blew through raising the temperature to well above freezing.

Flight dispatch cancelled our outbound flight and protected our passengers on other flights. Leaving the Viscount in the hands of the mechanics we headed downtown for an unplanned Calgary layover. Maintenance considered it a flight control

problem meaning two maintenance signatures and a flight test were required which an airport layover crew did. They found nothing wrong…the flight controls worked properly.

One other mysterious thing, the incoming captain on the flight into Edmonton had left a note for us in the logbook that the aircraft had tended to drop out at the last second on the last three landings that they had done. Odd that he would have left a note rather than a proper logbook entry. it was too early to phone him at the hotel so i let it slide.

Next day we finished the rest of our pairing ending up back home in Winnipeg, the main company base for Viscount Overhaul. i found the incident rather bizarre. How could the flight controls not work for us yet a few hours later perform normally? i agonized over this strange conundrum. One thing was clear; had we been on a shorter runway the outcome could have been a disaster. Did ice or snow jam the flexible curtain between the elevator and stabilizer? Did the tail cone drain hole freeze up altering the Centre of Gravity? Where were our twelve passengers seated? How was the freight and

baggage distributed? Was the spring mechanism that keeps the elevators from drooping on the ground somehow temporarily compromised by the queer weather? Why were there no drain holes in the elevators?

Most vexing of all, why did the Viscount seem to drop out indicating a propensity for a premature stall on previous landings? i had even briefed Jacques that i would carry an extra ten knots for the approach and landing in Calgary which i did but i was so focused on the actual landing in the crappy weather and runway conditions that i wasn’t trying to finesse the touchdown. There was no drop out. Many questions…no answers. i turned in an incident report signed by Jacques the F/O and went home and that was that… or so i thought.

A couple of weeks later, summoned by the powers that be to discuss the incident at last, i thought… all will be revealed and the aforementioned mystery solved. if that was my expectation, i was to be sorely disappointed. As soon as i walked in the door and saw the sombre faces of the local flight operations hierarchy my heart sank. The words Kangaroo Court kept coming to mind.

it was clear from the outset that company managers were just as stymied as i was by the mysterious events yet for reasons known only to themselves they had not shared any of their findings with me. instead, the meeting took on an accusatorial tone. No one had yet had asked for my input. if a proper investigation had been done i was not made aware of the results.

Rather, they wanted to focus on why i had rejected the take-off. What would i have done, they wanted to know, if i had been taking off in Lethbridge 3100ASL, 100 nm to the south with its main runway half the length, (6000ft), of the one at Calgary? Never mind that the Lethbridge runway ended at a precipice that dropped into the Old Man River 300 ft below. i hoped the question was rhetorical. Otherwise, i would leave the meeting feeling very resentful wondering if the flight operations investigation team had gone beyond their best before date.

i expected the worst but no phone call came nor did even a note appear in my company mailbox when two days later i reported for work. The mystery remained unsolved and i was not about to go asking any more questions...at least not then.

The reason why the little Viscount did not fly when it shoulda has never been solved.

Yikes, another escape...i wondered how many more i could expect to get away with.

***

it was during my time on the Viscounts that my older brother caught up with me when he moved from being a S/O (Second Officer) on DC-8s in Montreal to Winnipeg. He had joined the airline six years after me having survived as an F/O on Avro Yorks on the DEW line, flying fish on Cansos and instructing for years at the Winnipeg Flying Club. He had many more hours and flying experience than me. Nevertheless, the vagaries of the seniority system meant he was junior to me. We saw a chance where the system would work in our favour for some fun. He bid to fly with me for a month and as the rights of seniority mandated we looked forward to flying together. i was beginning to realize that the upper echelon of Winnipeg’s flight operations department had some serious issues... they were indeed getting well beyond their sell by date. The base manager called me in to tell me he would not allow two brothers to fly together.

For a short time Mrs Griffith's boys were the front end crew of a TCA Vickers Viscount and occasionally a DC9.. initially, the airline balked at the idea of two brothers crewing the same airplane, but once assured that the boys wouldn't fight, allowed it to happen. Jim's brother, Owen (right seat) had a lot of experience from flying on the DEW line operation as well as instructing at the Winnipeg flying club. He joined TCA six years after Jim.

After asking why and him giving silly reasons he finally finished by saying, “i’m afraid you might fight.”

He may have been reflecting on his own family’s experience. Or to give him credit he might have been worried if we killed each other in some horrible accident, a double death in one family would be devastating for Mom and Dad.

i burst out laughing and told him i would grieve the award with the union. in the end we did have our month of fun teasing flight attendants and hotel managers. Naturally, even though my brother did not have a left seat check out we shared the Captain’s seat and did the same later on the DC-9. i already had a record of not playing by the rules.

Back in about 1963 the company analyzed various future products to replace the fuel thirsty aging DC-8’s, Vanguards and Viscounts. it was the first time the sales department was involved in the choice much to the consternation of Flight Operations. The choices were the British BAC111or Trident, the American Boeing 727 or Douglas DC-9 and the French Caravelle. it caused not only indigestion within the company but became

political heartburn for the Liberals. Naturally, Quebec wanted the French Caravelle and kicked up a fuss. Flight Ops had enough nonsense with British products over the engines on the Lockheed 1011’s. Happily they chose the DC-9 and later the B727 as the cross-border traffic picked up after airlines in North America deregulated. Happily, they had chosen my two favourite airplanes.

The Sud Aviation SE 210 Caravelle was a French short/medium-range jet airliner and the political choice of Quebec but not of TCA's president Gordon McGregor. The aircraft holds the distinction of being the world's first jet-powered airliner to be developed for the short/medium-range market. Significantly, it was powered with Rolls Royce Avon jet engines–the very engine Rolls Royce couldn't develop to power the Avro Jetliner, which TCA refused to purchase because the Jetliner had the wrong engines installed in the prototype.—4 Nenes instead of 2 Avons

best seat in the house

digital painting by Graham Ward

Flying

Viscounts Ecuadorian Styl e

Probably sometime around 1978 i had a call from a friend who knew that i had a Viscount endorsement on my license. Back in that day in Canada, an aircraft endorsement was valid for life just like the presidency of some third world countries. There was no recurrent or recency requirements to maintain it. To get on with the story...my friend was acting as a consultant for Beaver industries, a company that was disposing of Air Canada’s Viscounts.

“A pilot and engineer from a South American country”, he said, “were interested in buying a few and would like a demonstration flight. Would i do it?”

So even though i hadn’t flown one for ten years Eduardo, who said he was chief pilot for Ecuadorian Airlines and his chief engineer whose name eludes me at the moment and i went flying in one of Air Canada’s up-for-sale Viscounts that was sitting around Winnipeg gathering dust. What Eduardo wanted to do was go up to 10,000 feet, then configure the aircraft for an imaginary approach and landing down

to 9200feet ASL which was the elevation of Quito’s old Mariscal Sucre airport. At 9200feet our imaginary runway, level off, apply full power, raise the gear, simultaneously reduce the #3engine to 60lb torque to simulate a critical engine failure, climb away retract the flaps on schedule and take the timing from applying full power until reaching 10,000feet again.

He had the engineer take the timing and make notes on our go around performance from 9200feet. He wanted to know if Air Canada’s tired old Viscounts were up to the challenge of sufficient performance margins to clear obstacles within the geographical constraints of the daunting missed approach procedures in force at Muriscal Sucre. We did that three or four times and they both seemed satisfied. Back on landing at Winnipeg i gave my best effort at showing Eduardo my aviating finesse by doing a short field landing. i fancied myself as quite the Viscount hotshot pilot...i was wrong. Eduardo in turn then showed me a Viscount short field landing Ecuadorian style. it involved leaving the outboards at idle and enough power on the inboards to provide good airflow over the elevators. His demonstration left me sulking for several days.

photo courtesy Air Canada Archives

On January 5th 1960 TCA took delivery of its first DC8 jet airliner. The airline had insisted that Douglas Aircraft supply these planes with Rolls Royce Conway engines as the industry was experiencing problems with the Pratt & Whitney J75 at that time. TCA had ordered five DC8s at six million dollars a copy putting the airline in financial deficit for the first time in its history. There was also a lot of political jiggery-poke going on at the time with the then John Diefenbacker Progressive Conservative government effectively ignoring the Trans Canada Air Line Act by giving domestic and international route structures away to CP Air and foreign airlines all of which impacted TCA's bottom line. Further financial pressures resulted from the fact that Rolls Royce did not live up to their guarantee of the Conway engines as that British company was also undergoing some financial

problems. TCA , later under the Air Canada name flew the DC8 for 34 years, longer than any other airline, they retired the type in 1994. in 1964 Air Canada, ordered eight DC9s in the 72 seat configuration and later ordered the larger 115 passenger models. These orders inflamed Quebec who were keen on the Sud Aviation Caravelle as their preferred choice. Gordon McGregor, president of Air Canada, held to his better informed decision in spite of being cited as the enemy by French Canadian adversaries. McGregor's choice certainly proved to be to the company's financial advantage as the DC9 became the most popular aircraft with pilots and passengers alike for its many superb aerodynamic performance features and the craft's fast turn around capabilities with built-in airstairs on Canada's domestic services where many airports had only minimum facilities.

Previous page: (top) DC8 with Rolls Royce Conway engines. DC9's (bottom image) came first as a 72 passenger configuration but a later model DC9-32 carried 115 passengers.

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photo courtesy Air Canada Archives

A JOY TO FLY dc9

The DC-9 was an aircraft that matched it’s aesthetically pleasing lines with handling qualities that delighted the senses of the pilot’s mind. i lived close to the button of runway 18 in Winnipeg and every time it was in use i’d look up enviously at departing DC-9s. i was vexed by the fact that my squadron mate from cadets, Glen Downes, was already checked out on it. My turn came, however, and after ground school my dancing partner, Denis, and i,with our instructor, headed off on our first flight in this lovely thoroughbred along with our instructor who was a little cranky having encountered some recent marital difficulties. Having Denis as a fellow trainee was an advantage for me. His father had been base manager in Winnipeg and Denis was used to getting his own way. it meant he and i always travelled first class to and from training. The DC-9 for our first trip was scheduled as a ferry flight to do a charter out of Halifax so our instruc-

tor commandeered the plane. it would be a two-way trip. We would fly a different plane back to Montreal in time for supper. That was the plan.

We left Montreal with Moncton as our alternate. Halifax was near limits. When we arrived, a full-blown Nor Easter was under way. Denis did a GCA right down to limits in a cross wind while our instructor, in the jump seat, calmly smoked his pipe. in the right seat, i was sweating bullets. Considering it was Denis’s first landing in a jet he did a terrific job. instead of doing our training in Montreal we instead spent the next few days without so much as a toothbrush not to mention a clean shirt, cooling our heels in the Lord Nelson Hotel with three other crews 'till the blizzard was over.

The DC-9 was a joy to fly. it handled like a T-33. For the first time i was flying a plane with a climate control system that actually worked. it was so quiet that even on takeoff with full power you could hear the flight attendants discussing their previous night’s amorous exploits in detail.

The backs of their jump seats were on the opposite side of the cockpit -galley bulkhead. The acceleration on takeoff was noticeable especially on cold days with a light load such as it was on this particular day.

My brother, Owen, and i were paired together for the month. On our way to the plane to go to Toronto we ran into an old friend and mentor, Johnnie Ateah, We had both worked for him in our teens and Owen had married Johnnie's niece. i worked on Johnnie’s mink farm one summer where i fed the mink with a mixture of freshly caught Lake Winnipeg Rough fish, blood from the slaughterhouse and horse meat. Part of my job was also to clean the pens. That’s probably where i lost my sense of smell. Johnnie was a gruff, hard but fair taskmaster. As was my habit with people i knew, i invited him up front for the takeoff. Owen was in the left seat. At the peak of the acceleration his seat locking mechanism failed and he slid so far back he could no longer reach the control column with his short arms. i quickly took control and finished the takeoff. Once in the climb, Owen locked his seat and resumed control.

As soon as i switched off the seat belt signs on the climb Johnnie leapt off the jumpseat and in his usual sarcastic tone dismissed us saying, “i had enough of you two idiots when you were growing up. i’m going back to the cabin for a stiff drink”.

He never bothered waiting around for us at Toronto. i guess he was not impressed.

DC-9 Aerobatics

We had landed in JFK in a DC-9 just after a strong cold frontal passage. The winds were gusting to 45 Knots right down the runway. i was looking forward to our takeoff after a short turnaround. it would be my turn to fly. The noise abatement procedures for takeoff on Runway 31R at JFK called for an immediate 90 degree left turn after takeoff at max climb rate. Boy this is going to be exciting with that strong headwind...it will be like a fighter takeoff what with the lively aileron response of the DC-9. Sure enough, seconds after the gear clunked up i cranked the thing into the mandated left turn and with our light load the plane appeared to stand on its left wing. it wasn’t very professional i admit

but my ego could not resist the rare chance to showboat.

Sure enough a few days later the chief pilot requested my presence in his office. He said a passenger on the JFK flight had complained about our aerobatic departure. Airlines pay heavy fines if noise abatement procedures are violated and i knew i could justify my actions. i told him i would be glad to meet him in his office with my lawyer. He slammed the phone down in my ear and it was never mentioned again. i did not have a lawyer nor did i even know one but i was beginning to see a pattern emerging.

i wasn’t so much nearly fired over my remarks about the left seat requirement— it would have been more a parting of the ways. As for the Viscount that shoulda, if it hadn't been for the intervention of one of the more sane check pilots i would have been fired for poor judgement.

This time, i was sure i would be fired and probably should have been.

it was just before Christmas. We had already done one turnaround from Vancouver to Calgary and now we were setting off for an Edmonton turnaround. it was raining hard with a slight crosswind and at 60 knots the

DC-9 just started hydroplaning for the rhubarb in the soggy infield. i called reject and even with full reverse and max braking we slithered into the muck. i put the airstairs down and went to have a look. The wheels were up to the axles. We were not going anywhere soon. We got the passengers off... not much fun for them waltzing through the mud to the runway and a waiting bus. Their baggage and freight were removed and i could see the wheels had floated up a little so i thought i could probably taxi the thing to the nearest taxiway. My luck turned when the Vancouver duty pilot showed up at my side. it was big Jim Little. His name notwithstanding, he was a big man but a sort of cuffy giant and he agreed i should start up and try to taxi the plane up onto a nearby taxiway. if it had been any other check pilot than Jim i would have been in trouble. He was calm and reassuring. He plunked his big frame between me and the F/O on the DC-9’s small jumpseat. We started up and as i looked ahead, i could see a lake of muddy water right on our nose. We would have to plunge right through the thing to make it to the taxiway. i applied power ... nothing moved... more power... nothing... i

pictured myself like Joe Patroni from the movie, Airplane, but without the cigar and just like the movie i finally had the throttles almost to the firewall.

Jim said, “it’s not going to work we will have to try and get a tug to come and get us out”.

Although, how a tug would get to the plane without sinking out of sight, i was not sure.

“Come on Jim give me one more try” i urged. “i’m sure i can get it going”.

“Okay” he sighed. “One shot and that’s all. Then we will call for a tow.”

Now, i did firewall it. Suddenly first one wheel moved then the other and whaadya know we were going about 20 knots...would it be enough to get through the pond? We splashed through that thing like shit through a goose and with a thump up onto the taxiway.

Big Jim said,” Okay boys go to the hotel and get some rest i will call you in the morning ... he did... to tell me both of us were suspended pending investigation.

Within days, a meeting was set up with the Vancouver Director

of Flight Operations, My boss, his henchman and me. After my experience with the Viscount that shoulda i was expecting another inquisition. Again, the gods smiled. Fate was on my side. i took a direct flight to Vancouver while the inquisitors took an earlier flight to beat me to it. Unfortunately, it was not a direct flight and a weather delay in Regina denied their chance to beat me to the meeting.

A union rep was standing by if i needed him. As with the Viscount charade, i had my big boy pants on and declined.

As my mother told me, “in this world you have to fight your own battles Jimmie”.

i was ushered into the director’s office and faced a kindly looking white haired gentleman. He told me that the Douglas Aircraft Company was worried about my incident, as was the airline and Transport Canada. He hinted that both Douglas and Air Canada might be having ongoing issues with the plane’s nosewheel steering. He further reassured me that he only wanted to either confirm or deny their worries. He gave me a blank pad of foolscap and told me

Airplanes that look good usually are good as is the case for the DC9. Popular with crews and passengers alike the 9 was a good fit into Canada's airport system carrying its own airstairs for use at those small airports without full facilities.

to write down everything that happened in my own words. With that, he left saying he would be back in thirty minutes. As directed, i told my story. i thought to myself...now i get it. if i admitted, i had over or crosscontrolled the plane the heat would be off both Douglas, Air Canada and Transport Canada would not have its nose out of joint.

At about 60 knots, i perjured, the plane started a right hand drift, which i tried to correct with opposite rudder and aileron. it did not respond and we

hit the ditch. i thought i might have over controlled the rudder. it would be case closed for any Transport Canada investigation and Air Canada flight operations and Douglas could breathe a sigh of relief. it was the old pilot error catch-all.

How could i have been so naive?

The whole ugly thing made me question the integrity of aircraft accident investigations by manufacturers, the airline and Transport Canada. Especially since i was the union flight safety chairman for the Winnipeg Base.

photo courtesy Air Canada Archives

best seat in the house

14

seating plan dummies for

it was about this time, in 1974, that Yasser Arafat had the world's attention when he made his gun-toting address to the UN General Assembly.

My friend Kent Davis told me this story. He was the first officer on a DC-9 out of Winnipeg. The Captain, who was well known on the base as one who sometimes paid more attention than he should to the business of other departments in the airline, and less to his own business of aviating.

The routing of this flight was YWG-YYZ-JFK-YYZ (that's Winnipeg, Toronto, New York back to Toronto foryou groundlings) all with a layover in New York. As the crew sat in the cockpit in Toronto, a police officer arrived and asked them if he could check the cockpit for security.

The Captain asked why. The officer said that it was standard when they had a high profile political person on board.

The crew had not been informed of anything out of the ordinary about the flight but the Captain, not wanting to appear out of the loop, said “By all means”.

The officer asked Kent and the captain to get out of their seats and it was then that they spotted the dog. The cop took the dog into the cockpit and let him sniff around, then he left and continued with the dog throughout the entire aircraft. The Captain spotted a ground service agent and asked who the political passenger was.

The agent said, “Yasser Arafat.”

Arafat had been in Toronto and was on his way to New York to address the UN General Assembly for the first time and as history records, to brandish his pistol at that august body.

Those who knew the Captain could only begin to understand what happened next—he went ballistic, demanding to speak to anyone and everyone about why he was not in the loop. "it was a disgrace to leave the Captain out." On and on it went until he finally calmed down. The passengers boarded and the last person to be brought down was Arafat. Nothing more was said as they pushed back, taxied and took off. About 20 minutes into the flight there was a hell of a commotion in the back behind the cockpit door. Of course this Captain was flying the airplane as he always did when flying into JFK so he told Kent to go back and see what was happening.

Kent opened the door and when he got into first class, he saw the incharge had a passenger pinned to the

bulkhead with a trolley. There was a six-foot-six guy guarding Arafat with a gun in his hand.

The man being held against the bulkhead looked to be in his seventies and was very distraught. Kent assisted the in-charge and they seated the passenger at the back of the aircraft. They had the flight attendants keep an eye on him.

it was then they learned that he had been boarded at the last minute and was seated in first class across from Arafat but more importantly, this passenger was a Rabi.

Good old Air Canada.

When Kent went back to the cockpit and advised the Captain.... the Captain went nuts. it was a good thing they had another half an hour before landing as Kent didn’t think they would have been able to complete the task.

True to his form the Captain wrote 2000 letters to 4000 people over this.

STATIC IN THE AIR

in the summer of 1976, sparked by a small group of Quebec nationalistic pilots and some ATC controllers calling themselves Le Gen D'air, a demand was made that the French language be allowed in the operation of aircraft flying in Canada.

CALPA pilots went on strike for what they believed was a threat to safety. The use of French in what is de facto an English speaking industry was absurd and was against the language policies of iCAO (international Civil Aviation Organization) a UN organization to which Canada is a signatory. CALPA had the support of most commercial pilots in Canada even many of the French speaking pilots. The strike lasted nine days and severely impacted aviation in Canada causing financial losses for the airlines, their customers, their pilots and collaterally the ground employees. Personally, my faith in CALPA was restored...they supported something on moral rather than selfish grounds. As usual, the government of the day dithered and danced arriving at a solution that satisfied neither party. There is no doubt that the issue caused discord in the cockpit far longer than many admit to.

By international law the aviation industry is English speaking. A German pilot landing in Stutggart get's his clearance in English as does a Turkish pilot taking off from Istanbul. It isn't rocket science to understand why it has to be that way.

in the spring of 1977 the radio operators in Canada went on strike for higher pay. Not an aircraft moved in the Canadian federation just like in the USA after 9/11. They effectively paralyzed aviation movements in Canada stranding passengers and crews alike. Along with three other crews, we were stranded in Windsor, Ontario for three days before the company decided the strike was for real and would likely last a long time. They decided to bring crews stranded in the US and overseas home. Other Winnipeg crews were stranded in Vancouver. The plan was for us to take Northwest Airlines to Grand Forks (GFK) North Dakota sixty miles south of Winnipeg (WG). The crews stuck in Vancouver would motor down to Seattle and catch Northwest there and meet us in GFK. Two charter buses would take us all to Winnipeg. A third bus would bring passengers also stranded in GFK. There were a few extra civilians and they came on our bus. Our first stop was Happy Harry’s Bottle Shop. By the time we got to the border the Canadian Customs inspector got on the bus, took one look down the aisle, threw up his hands in disgust and sent us on our way without even a cursory glance. When the bus door opened

at the WG airport an empty gallon bottle of rotgut wine plopped out and rolled away down the street. The relatives of the stranded passengers meeting the buses were not impressed especially when one of the pilots hurled an expletive at one of the relatives. The next morning Flight Ops set the phones a buzzing. Nobody was fired even for smashing through the closed gate in the parking lot.

More labour Strife

The iAM, (international Association of Machinists) and flight attendants would strike in the seventies and eighties but aside from small losses of pay and a few unscheduled days off they were inconsequential to most pilots. Some members of CALPA married to flight attendants did complain we should have given the F/A’s more support citing safety. My solution as Council 7 Vice Chairman was to supply 24’s of beer to the F/A’s pep rallies. When the F/As’ went on strike the company called for volunteers from other department to take up the slack... a few accepted...making them scabs. On the other hand a few romances bloomed involving divorce and marriages.

history

The Lockheed Tristar or better known as the L1011 was Lockheed's last shot at the airliner market and while it was an outstanding airplane there were maintenance problems with the Rolls Royce RB211 engines that ultimately put Rolls Royce into bankruptcy. The British government would not allow the prestigious engine builder to fail and the company was nationalized and would later see the RB211 become the Rolls Royce Trent considered to be the most advanced turbine to be built and now powering, among others, the AirBus series of aircraft. Air Canada first put the type into service in 1973 and operated as many as 40 of them until 1992 when the last of the Tristars was retired.

rudderless in gimli the last flight of cf-ths air canada 637 13

Late August 1983 in Winnipeg proved hot and muggy. Stretched out on a lawn chair in my back yard i studied condensation droplets dribbling down the side of the tankard holding my first icecold beer of the day. The phone rang. it was my good friend Gerry Norberg.

“Jim” he said, “have you still got a Viscount endorsement on your licence?”

“Yes i do Gerry. What’s up?” i replied.

Gerry breathlessly explained. “The Western Canada Aviation Museum now owns the former Trans

best seat in the house

Canada Air Lines hangar at Winnipeg and will use it for the home of their historic aircraft. Their Vickers Viscount, the largest aircraft in the collection, is stored in a former RCAF hangar up at Gimli.

He continued catching his breath, “The plane was flown up there from Montreal last year but now two of the four engines are time expired and to make it airworthy for a flight to Winnipeg they need to swap two engines with Beaver industries.”

“And?” i interrupted.

“They need someone to fly it to Winnipeg.” He blurted out and added, “They don’t have the money to pay anybody.”

“Hmm.”, i mumbled stalling while i mulled over the possible unintended consequences of the oblique request.

Back in the days when cars had fins, an aircraft endorsement was not required to act as co- pilot and restrictions like recency and currency did not exist yet so i countered to Gerry, “How about coming along for the ride?”

Without hesitation, he answered, “Sure.”

“That settles it then. Let’s do it but when?” i enquired.

“ Oh but by the way,” he hesitated before adding “they had to take the rudder off to get it into the hangar so as soon as they finish changing the engines and put the tail back on … probably three weeks.”

Gerry and i drove up to Gimli to have a look. Seeing the aircraft, my heart sank. The forlorn scene looked hopeless. Sundry bits of airplane scattered over the hangar floor, two of the four engines missing and the silly looking Viscount with half its tail feathers missing. i had second thoughts.

We would have to test run the engines at full power so we would need to blast down the runway to take off speed, check the power, especially the two swapped ones, then stop before we rattled off the end. Two problems with that; if there was a wind it had to be right down the runway for without a rudder we would have insufficient directional control and after years of sitting how reliable were the brakes?

Two weeks later, we returned to find all the bits back in their proper places … except the tail. However,

the weather and maintenance gods smiled and the test run proved satisfactory at full power with no overheats. What a weird feeling rolling down a runway well beyond rotation speed fighting a pilot’s natural instinct to pull back on the control column and become airborne.

With the tail at last in place, the day of the big event, September 17th 1983, dawned bright and clear with a strong south wind that blew straight down the departure and arrival runways. Despite this, trouble lay ahead. Gerry arrived at my door at 10 am to drive up to Gimli. My Dad was lurking around the house, as he liked to do on Saturday mornings to hang out with our four kids. We had a problem. if we drove to Gimli in my car, we’d have to leave it there and drive back up to get it after the flight.

My wife, Joyce had things to do that day and said, “Don’t look at me. i don’t want any part of that airplane nonsense.”

Dad chirped in, “i’ll drive you up, drop you guys off and be back in Winnipeg in time to photograph your grand entrance.”

Gerry and i exchanged worried glances. We both knew driving to

best seat in the house

Gimli with Dad in his eighties was likely to be the riskiest part of the adventure. We did our best to appear grateful as we reluctantly accepted his offer. i noticed all four kids declined the outing.

The trip up was uneventful. Not one motorist noticed Dad had left a turn signal on for the entire journey or if they did, had suppressed the urge to blow their horns, give Dad the finger or wave their fists as they passed us at our sedate 45 mph speed.

We arrived early deciding to lunch at a popular café near Gimli’s waterfront. i can’t remember what Gerry or i ordered but i had good reason to remember that Dad ordered a salmon sandwich. He took the first bite and began to choke. He stood up. i stood up. Gerry sat immobilized. i felt every eye in the crowded place upon us. i quickly reached over Dad’s head from behind, clasped my hands together balled them into a fist and gave a tug. Nothing happened. Dad was still gasping for breath trying vainly to speak. Now desperate, i gave my mightiest possible heave. Out popped first the offending salmon bone then his dentures. Neither misguided missile struck other diners. Dad reached

The tail of the Viscount had been removed in order to get the plane into the hangar and the chief engineer said "the gear down locks are a bit dodgy." so we flew to Winnipeg with the gear down just in case.

down, picked up his teeth, sat back down and calmly resumed eating his sandwich while Gerry and i sat leaving our plates untouched and tried to look as if nothing had happened.

On the ride to the hangar Dad complained of a pain in his side but bravely said, “i’ll be okay i think you’ve only broken my rib. Don’t

hundred percent sure they will come down again for the landing at Winnipeg,” He grumbled. “i think the down locks are a bit dodgy”.

Disappointed, i graciously agreed to his request. i could not risk the hundreds of volunteer hours he and the museum team had done to restore this aircraft to flying condition for the

worry i’ll meet you in Winnipeg.”

Just before climbing aboard, the museum’s maintenance chief warned, “Look boys i`d rather you didn`t bring the gear up after take-off. i`m not one

sake of my ego to do a high speed, victory fly past on arrival at Winnipeg. The homecoming epitaph of THS would have to be like the dedicated service the venerable Vickers Viscounts had performed for Air Canada,

its flight crews and mechanics over its active lifetime … steadfast, reliable, and unpretentious.

i climbed into the left seat and with difficulty overcame a sense of nostalgia for the five years i had spent flying this airplane and its sister ships west across the Canadian Prairies and Rocky Mountains to the coast and east paralleling the Laurentian Shield spanning Ontario and Quebec. i didn`t realize it at the time but these were the best years of my flying career. There was an eerie, alien strangeness in the cockpit layout that i had not anticipated. As Gerry clambered into the right seat and began reciting the liturgy of the checklists the old black magic came back and by the time we taxied out to the runway i was at home again at last.

The take-off was nothing like i remembered nor were the control responses. Thirteen years of hydraulically augmented controls and positive take off rotations on the DC-9 and 727 left me unprepared for the seemingly strange liftoff. We had a strong wind right on the nose, that and the resulting low ground speed gave the sensation of rising horizontally similar to an elevator so unlike the pitched

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up, nose high attitude of a jet. in the climb and cruise, there was not much attitude difference. My one regret was that the museum, with its limited financial resources meant i dare not, with a clear conscience, waste their valuable fuel to allow Gerry much time at the controls on the forty minute flight. A couple of short turns either way and that was it. We made a staid low pass over the meager welcoming crowd … the speed governed by the gear extended limits. The approach speeds and landing attitude were not unlike those of a jet and we landed smoothly.

We taxied in, i set the brakes, reached over and pulled all four HP cocks to ``fuel off”. There is something about the shutting down of engines after a flight. it has a death like finality about it like putting an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence. As the ear-splitting whistle of the Dart engines winding down echoed off the surrounding buildings into the inevitable deafening silence that follows the cacophony of flight, nothing stirred in the empty aircraft. These last few precious moments of complete silence before the clanging and clashing of opening doors and hatches by interloping groundlings were a time for reflection.

True to his word, Dad had made it back in time to photograph our sedate wheels down fly- by. A professional RCAF photographer during WWii, the out of focus photo injured Dad’s pride.

He later said, “You know Jimmie that picture would not be blurred if you hadn’t broken my rib.”

After our rather anti-climactic arrival, Gerry and i stood around with our hands in our pockets trying to stay out of trouble. One of the museum people who was in charge of towing THS into its new hangar home mentioned that they were going to have to suck the remaining JP-4 fuel from the tanks otherwise it would be a fire hazard.

i guess i had been too frugal with the museum’s fuel not only robbing Gerry of some pole time but also creating a further problem.

i don’t remember who the bright spark was that said, “Hey why don’t we start up THS and burn off the fuel instead by running the engines?”

Some other genius piped in with, “Yeah lets taxi the thing around the field and … hey let’s take everyone who wants to go … for a ride.”

it was all right for them but it was going to fall on my not-overly broad shoulders to execute the Uber ride, after all, i was the only one around qualified to do it. First, the ferry permit only stipulated one nonstop flight from Gimli to Winnipeg without passengers. Second taxiing on the ground with passengers was not prohibited. Third, it would depend on whether Air Traffic Control in the tower would allow it and if airport emergency services would be available. in today’s litigious environment, i would never have dreamed of doing it but back then i was starting to get a headache from over-thinking all the possible negative outcomes from unexpected circumstances so i said, “Sure. Why not?”

The duty supervisor from the tower must have been on his lunch break. in 1983, it couldn’t possibly have been a her. i guess whoever was in charge up there must have been as gaily cavalier as we were because they gave us clearance with free range over of the entire airport. My sidekick later said i was taxiing pretty fast but i can’t imagine myself engaging in such risky behaviour.

i can`t speak for Gerry but i had a sense of intense sadness that this aircraft would never again share with its crews the ecstasy of a minuet with the gods of flight. instead, it`s destiny was to be poked, prodded and groped by the sweaty hands of curious strangers. My one hope was for THS to be the queen of the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada’s historic fleet and as such be cared for with the diligence befitting such an honour.

Aviation historians continue to understate the contributions made by the Viscount in particular to the economy of Winnipeg’s aviation industry and to Canada’s transportation system. While it is true that the many smaller bush planes did much to open the north it fell to the turbine powered Vickers Viscount to gift multitudes of westerners’ fast, efficient, comfortable and above all, safe travel throughout the west and beyond. indeed the Viscount connected many small cities within Canadian regions and in turn linked those regions to the larger centres, Vancouver Toronto and Montreal and to the USA. There is evidence that the Viscount significantly altered the

travel patterns of businessmen and everyday Canadians. The Viscount’s hippedy-hop route structure improved intercity commerce and connected economically separated families more than any other aircraft in the dramatic shift from piston driven power sources for aircraft to turbines.

i am gratefully proud to have my name as the last entry in the logbook of CF-THS and to have had Gerry Norberg as my co-pilot.

Years later as Dad walked me to the elevator in the former Winnipeg Veteran’s Hospital, Deer Lodge, now a senior’s residence, where i was visiting him from our home in Niagara, he suddenly grabbed my elbow and said, “Jimmie remember the time you broke my rib?”

“Yes Dad i remember” i replied and continued, “i think you, me and Gerry had a fun day. i’m really sorry i broke your rib.”

“it’s okay Jimmie it wasn’t really broken anyway … only cracked.”

We hugged, said good-bye and that was the last time i saw him.

after hours

what do pilots do in their spare time?

I had a lawyer friend once ask me why I did it. He said, “I don’t go lawyering on my days off for nothing, to relax. Why do you fly on your days off and have to pay for it too boot?”

ididn’t have an answer except i guess an unrequited love of the game.

i flew a variety of light planes through to retirement and beyond. Flying with many F/O’s who’d been bush pilots and their heroic exploits on floats always piqued my curiosity enough so that i decided to try it on. A friend who owned a small air service, Neil Walsten, checked me out in 1979 on one of his Cessna 180’s CF-SLi, on floats for nothing...the for nothing part... appealed to my Scottish/Welsh ancestry.

With very little float time...i’d accumulated 7 hrs on floats, when a contractor, Helmet, who i’d never met before, with a lot of loose cash asked me to check him out on his factory new Cessna 185, C-GYZJ, on amphibian floats. The only time in the aircraft’s logbook was the ferry time from the factory to Winnipeg. i

guess Helmet figured if i was an airline captain i should be qualified to do anything. That i had such little float time and zero time on a 185 and had not a minute even as a passenger on amphib floats seemed not to bother him. i have to admit the first take off on wheels at the Winnipeg airport did seem a little queer perched way up there. Everything went well on our first trip to The Pas and Cranberry Portage. i did my first landing on amphib floats with Helmet following me through. i underlined how very important the under carriage warning horn was...i couldn’t help remembering my Saskatoon fiasco. A water landing with the wheels down would be a disaster. He went off to the indian reserve where he was doing some work. Good. Now i could practice while he was gone. On my third landing i didn’t know that if the undercar-

riage up switch wasn’t fully “up” the hydraulics would allow the gear to drop partially down. i did a short field or rather a short lake landing with landing run measured in inches instead

of feet. Luckily, nothing broke and nobody saw the huge splash. Yet another of my unforgivable regrettable faux pas and poor Helmet was none the wiser.

Thatunrequited love of the game was certainly at play when a group of us got together to do some serious lake fishing. it wasn't difficult to put a title to this 'boys day out' episode:

"An unrequited love of the game"

shoot out at clearwater bay

what airline pilots do in their spare time

best seat in the house

Seabees at rest—known to some as the "Flying Brick."

ican’t remember when i saw my first Seabee...but it was love at first sight. i was an avid angler, enthralled by the freedom to roam, but i seldom fished remote lakes until a happy opportunity with Cheechako, Gerry Norberg, presented me with the opportunity to be half owner of an amphibious Republic Seabee,

There were a few Air Canada pilots in Winnipeg circa 1984, most of whom were former bush pilots, who owned floatplanes. They just could not shed their love/hate relationship with float flying that they’d cut their aviation teeth on in the flying business. included, were a couple of floatplane sprogs. One of them, a wannabee bush pilot like me, owned a cottage at Clearwater Bay on the Lake of the Woods near Kenora, Ontario. in a group think tank at the Airport Hotel in Winnipeg it was agreed that a small flotilla of float planes would gather at the cottage, camp overnight, then fly en mass to Pistol Lake, accessible only on floats. We’d fish all day followed by a second camp-out, at the lake

Once at the cottage our gang setup tents, had some adult beverages and settled down for the night. it was alleged that later that night one of the pilots under canvas attempted to chop down the cottage owner’s door to get in. it was also alleged that the owner, on the inside, was brandishing a 22 calbre rifle. Lots of yelling both in and out and finally cooler heads prevailed with no shots fired. Anyway, a 22 would not have penetrated that heavy wooden door.

Next morning the motley flock of floatplanes headed north. After a full day fishing and water sports it was inevitable that a campfire for a weenie roast would result. What better way to spend an evening exchanging exaggerated exploits of piloting skills around a campfire while sipping a beer. inevitably someone suggested the performance of an indigenous fire dance complete with whoops and yells. No animals were killed or injured in the performance only the dancer’s shoes were burnt. How do you explain that to your wife?

Next morning after copious cups of camp coffee, everyone packed up to leave. Gerry and i, just like in the airline, took turns being the PF, (pilot Flying) and PNF,( pilot not flying). Today, it was my turn to be PF and being beached nose-in the reverse pitch allowed us to back out and be the first off. The narrow lake was oriented North- South and with a strong south wind blowing we’d have no trouble getting off even with the Seabee’s notorious lack of performance...or so i thought. We taxied to the far side of the lake and i turned into wind.

Gerry said:

“Jim i think we should let her drift back a little”

Being a sprog i graciously differed to Gerry’s bush rat expertise”.

i drifted back fifty feet. ”is that far enough Gerry?” i asked.

“No” Gerry said. “Let her go back some more.”

Now i drifted back till our tail was almost on the rocky north shore. “okay”, He Said, “ that should do it”. Lets go.

We’d both noted the hill on our nose at the end of the lake. After what seemed like forever we finally got on the Seabee’s little step....we broke water and the hill loomed very large ahead. i didn’t think we’d make it over the top, and imagining the subsidence downwind from the hill, i started a shallow turn to the left towards the campsite.

Suddenly, Gerry was screaming,” Jesus Jim don’t turn...for Christ sake don’t turn”.

i... as he did, knew the unbreakable rule... never turn down-wind at low level in any airplane...it’s a suicide move. But i had to, so i did. Meanwhile on the beach, the hustle and bustle of everyone starting up their planes and yelling obscenities and insults at each other suddenly went quiet as we started our take off. As i started my turn, i’m told, everyone on the beach held their breath anticipating the worst...but i’m here to tell the story so we made it. Again, no animals or people were harmed except perhaps the achey heads suffered by some of the fisher folk. No airplanes

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were dented and the only damage was to the soles of the dancer’s footwear although a certain Cessna 185 went home with spruce boughs in its spreader bars. We headed for my cottage on Sandy Lake and pulled up at my little dock. My wife met us and as the Seabee gently bumped the dock Gerry threw open the bow door and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Weeks later, Gerry did a beautiful wheels- up landing in a ploughed field after the gear failed to extend...not even scrapping the paint off the hull.

they just stick around 18

old pilots never die

Our drop mission was weather dependant. it required smooth conditions in a layer up to1500 ft above ground. We would have to stay below radar, and would need at least a minimum off-shore breeze of 10 Kt. The drop had to be done half an hour before sunset in cloudless, though not necessarily clear conditions. in fact, a little obscuring haze up-sun would help the stealth nature of the task.

We had to be back on the ground before total darkness. There was every reason to expect our conspiracy could be carried out under the noses of the authorities without our true intentions ever being detected. Regulations at the time prohibited dropping any object from an aircraft in flight. it wouldn’t take much fuel. Twenty minutes to the target area, ten minutes on a straight run half a mile out over the lake at 50 ft above the water, parallel to the shoreline and twenty- five minutes return flight would put us back just before official

best seat in the house

darkness. The lake was to the west of the airport and our only chance of being noticed doing anything unusual was the curiosity of drivers on the heavily traveled six lane highway which ran north-south along the lakeshore. We needed the setting sun behind us to blind any drivers who might take notice of anything odd taking place out over the lake.

Circumstances afforded us only a three day window of opportunity to carry out our proposed task. The May long weekend was the only time the aircraft, i and my partner-in-crime would be able to rendezvous for the mission. After that, other arrangements would have to be made. There was no plan B.

For two frustrating days we waited for just the right conditions. Providentially at last the weather gods and perhaps even other gods smiled on us. A high pressure area settled in late on Saturday afternoon bringing with it a light southerly return flow of smog. The hot sun beating down mercilessly

in calm conditions on Sunday our last available day, had produced a text book sea-breeze in the afternoon changing to a land-breeze just before the sun started to set. The perfect weather change seemed to add a special benediction to our mission.

The tired old Cessna 172 squatted forlornly on the ramp of the deserted airport as the end of the day approached looking a little lop-sided from too many hard cross wind landings. i did the walk around while my crewman adjusted his mission-specific, self-designed equipment inside the crowded cabin. it had taken many days of discussion and research to plan the complicated array of plastic pipes and containers. We had studied the many failures of others. Death had been the reward of some pilots who had dared to tempt fate in such a well intentioned, sacred endeavour. These were my thoughts as i rotated the aircraft into a blazing red sun setting ever lower on the horizon as i took off on runway 28.

it had all started in January when my friend and flying partner had suddenly taken a turn for the worse in the course of his debilitat-

ing disease and unexpectedly died. We were two old farts who had pooled our financial resources to allow us both to continue flying into our dotage. it meant we could log two hours of our shared passion for the price of one with the additional advantage that if one of us screwed up the other could probably pull the fat out of the fire.

My research on the internet confirmed what i had heard from an airline pilot years ago who had learned the hard way, that the biggest problem of trying to spread ashes from an aircraft was that inevitably some if not all of the ashes backwashed into the aircraft cockpit and cabin. At the very least the ashes make a mess of the cabin with lingering ash bits that adhere like Velcro and are impossible to vacuum up. it has been known for plane owners to find ash still clinging stubbornly to cabin fixtures especially carpets, even years later!

At worst it has been recorded more than once that ashes have been sucked back into the cabin blinding and choking the pilot resulting in loss of situational awareness and control resulting in catastrophic destruction of the aircraft

John Huckstep would have appreciated ,with his usual good humor, the problems we had performing the air drop.

with fatal results. Many methods were suggested on the internet but most proved at best only partially successful. Moreover, it was also illegal in some countries as it definitely was in ours, to spread human remains in the form of ashes from an aircraft in flight. it was the ingenuity of my pint sized crewman looking like an ancient mariner who came up with a successful contraption that had confounded so many others. He used a one gallon plastic fuel container, cut a four inch hole in the bottom and attached a six foot length of sump-pump hose to the spout using the screw cap which came with it to make an airtight or should i say, ash-tight seal. He fed the ashes, a large scoop-full at a time, into the four inch hole until the container was full, then covered the opening with a large sponge covering the hole completely. Fortunately

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he was short but even so the small cramped cabin made the reach down to the bag of sticky grey ash at his feet then up to the hole in the bottom of the upside-down gas container a real challenge. inevitably some ashes spilled onto the floor. The pump hose was then fed out the open side window. By manipulating the hose in the slipstream he learned that at one certain sweet-spot all the ashes were totally sucked out. it took several scoops for each drop but in the end:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Back at base, by the time we had secured the aircraft in the rapidly vanishing twilight, it was too dark to see inside the cabin very well even with the flashlight i always carried in my flight bag—especially since i had forgotten to check the batteries. Even with fresh batteries my cataracts would have dimmed any signs of ash spillage inside the cabin anyway. i ran my hand along the side

of the fuselage. i could sense rather than actually see a thin film of greasy fine grey ash which blended nicely with the thankfully faded paint-work extending all the way back to the tail. The aircraft was normally tied down outside so signs of our deceit would be nicely camouflaged by the accumulated bird droppings and bug guts.

Hopefully, the owner of the rented plane and the regulating authorities whose famous mantra is,” Hi, i’m from the government and i’m here to help you”, would never be any the wiser.

While my elderly co-conspirator, a veteran of the British Army’s D-Day glider assault on Pegasus Bridge and i savoured a cold beer to debrief the mission we toasted our dear friend whose earthly remains we had just spread to the four winds over his

beloved lake... well most of them anyway. i know he would have been pleased and at the same time highly amused by the blundering keystonecop antics of his two aging fellow members of the aviation brotherhood. This quip no doubt answers the question as to why aviators, after spending most of their lives in the air, seldom wish to have their remains spread to the four winds from an aircraft. We had tried to give our pal a worthy pilot’s farewell, nevertheless, i did have a feeling my good friend would be sticking around spiritually and literally to soar the friendly skies in that sorry old 172 for some time to come. There were no tears, regrets or recriminations instead, we did what our friend would have wanted us to do. We ordered another beer.

the FUN airplane

in 1975, my long time desire to fly the Boeing 727 came true. Coincidently, many of the old time management teams including Winnipeg flight Operations finally did go past their sell by dates, and retired. i wanted desperately to fly this plane. i was envying my Toronto based high school friend Freddy Miller who was already flying it based in Toronto but i would have to wait until the machine became based in Winnipeg before my wish would come true. Deregulation resulted in another expansion and i soon found myself on a Boeing 727 course with Denis again riding shotgun. His connections ensured first class seating to and from Montreal for ground school and down to Los Angeles for simulator training..such was his audacious self-confidence. The conversion course went smoothly guided by Toronto-based check pilot, Duffy Dweyer ,in the simulator at El Segundo California. i would spend the next twelve years enjoying every minute in this versatile workhorse traveling to many exciting destinations. i cannot say my luck changed but most of my crimes now went undetected and my flying career finally encountered smooth air.

i recall some great days during these years on the 727 and one particular flight during those earlier, peaceful days before the bulletproof door, when passengers were allowed to visit the flight deck and back when brazen sexist men hadn't yet learned to watch their manners:

There we were, a crew of three, just flying along in the middle of the night in a Boeing 727 across the prairies, taking flightweary, hung-over holiday makers from Montego Bay to Calgary. After a refuelling stop in Winnipeg, we three were groggy from lack sleep having been dragged from our beds in Winnipeg when the inbound crew exceeded their duty day and booked off. Now, just over Regina, a flight attendant asked if we’d entertain thoughts of having a cockpit visit by two young ladies. This of course was before 9/11 when airlines not only allowed but encouraged passenger cockpit visits. Sounded good to me. Might wake us up. Two, twentysomething debutants arrived. Even in the dim cockpit lighting we could see they were well tanned. The First Officer, a cheery outgoing worldly guy, seated on my right, immediately engaged them in semi suggestive conversation and asked.

“Did you ladies have a good time in Jamaica and drink lots of rum?”

“Yes,” They replied.

i have to set the table for what happened next. i, as Captain, sit in the left cockpit seat and the First Of-

ficer sits on my right both obviously facing forward. the Second Officer sits facing his panel of dials, knobs and switches at 90 degrees to us on a chair which swivels, when necessary, to face the front, like us. There is a fixed observer’s seat facing the front immediately behind me with about the same skimpy leg room as the cabin seats of most chisel-charter low cost airlines. One of the two attractive gals, both well-endowed, was in the observer’s seat where it was impossible for me to see her. The other was standing well back and since i had the cockpit lighting selected on dim, i couldn’t see her well either. The Second Officer, a reticent quiet young man, had his chair swivelled toward the front, his head being a scant few inches from the bosom of the babe in the observer’s seat. The First Officer had turned in his seat and was looking directly at the two femme fatales. i couldn’t see any of the action so i stared soberly straight ahead out the front window, pretending to look for non-existent traffic in the bottomless pit of a moonless night sky.

i heard the First Officer brazenly enquire, “Did you ladies get lots of sun?”

“Yes,” they replied.

Next he probed? “Can you show us your tide lines?”

He was referring of course to lines left on the body caused by sun exposure where shorts, tops and or bikinis demarcate the tan from the unexposed skin. There was an awkward silence as much as there can be silence in a Boeing 727 cockpit which had a reputation for being comparably noisy. At last, i wiggled enough to turn half way around in my seat and as my scan passed over the First Officer i saw that his eyeballs were virtually popping out of his leering face accompanied by a startled gasp from the Second Officer. Twisting further around in my seat i was just in time to catch a glimpse of both girls sheepishly lowering their sweaters. i’d missed all the fun.

Never at a loss for words the First Officer chuckled and prompted further, “Well those were pretty good tide lines for the top, now how about the bottom?”

Giggles accompanied the buxom beauties as they hurriedly escaped back to the cabin.

Now, we were really wide awake; even me who had seen nothing of the

dog and pony show except the drooling reaction of my crew. But alas, more serious in-flight entertainment was in the cards that dark night. A few moments later, the same flight attendant wanted to know if we’d see a young man who wanted a cockpit visit.

“Sure, if he’s not under the influence.” We replied.

“He doesn’t appear to be” she bubbled laughingly.

Again, i have to set the scene. The B-727 has an overhead panel between the pilots that contains among other controls, switches, and indicators, three red striped handles; the engine fire control system. The handle illuminates and sounds a loud bell if there is a fire in its associated engine. Pulling the handle injects extinguisher into the affected engine, shuts off the fuel and hydraulic pumps of said engine and hopefully puts out the fire, shutting the engine down.

Anyway the young man about, 25, unlike the two previous visitors, who had entered the cockpit somewhat uncertainly, strode confidently straight in. He reached up, and without a word or any hesitation, grabbed the fire handle of the centre engine with his right hand. Flabbergasted, all three

sets of our eyes simultaneously swivelled up to the fire handle and became riveted to it blocking out everything else. We had tunnel vision, and suddenly all the extraneous cockpit sounds and noises faded figuratively into silence and in our highly focused minds you could hear a pin drop.

Then he blurted out. “What happens if i pull this handle?”

it seemed an eternity before i became cool enough to say as calmly but as forcefully as i could, trying desperately to control any quaver in my voice that might betray even the slightest trace of fear.

“First,” i said, “there will be a loud bell and flashing red lights and then you will see all of us doing stuff in a hurry. Then it will get still and very quiet in here and then there will be lots of screaming and yelling as the Second Officer who is standing behind you with the crash axe whacks you on the head with it”.

Without me or anyone else saying another word, he promptly released his grip on the fire handle turned and abruptly strode out of the cockpit. After breathing a collective sigh of relief while all three of us were separately and silently reappraising

the advisability of allowing cockpit visits in our minds, the flight attendant breezed again through the cockpit door saying,

“jeez that was a short visit.”

She seemed about to ask something else when in unison we loudly barked a reply to her as yet unasked question…

”NO!" ***

it was about this time i ran for office in Winnipeg’s Council 7 for CALPA. Still the bride’s maid, i was Vice Chairman and became involved in flight safety and Pilot Advisory (An unofficial inter-pilot guidance system for keeping pilots from getting into trouble) and Flight recorders. CALPA, along with the company Medical and Flight Operations Departments, set up a pilot’s substance abuse agreement within their employee assistance program that was second to none in the industry. its worthy to note that our union executive positions, right up to and including the president, were volunteers. CALPA’s only paid positions were administrative in nature. True, we were displaced from our flights to attend union meetings with the

company at full pay but anybody who thinks attending those meetings was in any way considered a bonus, better think again. Being involved in CALPA or later ACPA, involved sacrificing valuable time off from your family.

Of the many destinations operated by Winnipeg 727 crews, my all-time favourites were San Francisco, (SFO), and Los Angeles, (LAX).We stayed downtown in SFO in an older but centrally located hotel. it gave easy access to the famous Fisherman’s Wharf and the infamous hippie conclave of Haight Ashbury .On arrival at SFO a van with usually the same driver met us right on the ramp complete with a bucket full of iced beer for the entire crew. When our regular guy didn’t show up our first stop into town was the liquor store at San Bruno. Our regular van driver took us on Napa Valley Wine Tours and even fishing charters. Of course, no trip to SFO would be complete without a trip to Alcatraz. The second part of this pairing was a SFO-YC-VR, (Vancouver), cycle with a layover in VR, and at this time, the heyday of hippieness, i’d say VR had more hippies than SFO.

in LAX we stayed at the Santa Monica Hotel. it was also an older but magnificent hotel a block from the famous Venice Beach and the Santa

Monica Pier. On weekends, the beach was like a freak show...i saw my first chain saw juggling act there not to mention many famous athletes and Hollywood elites working out at the beach side gym.

We would leave WG at about 7 a.m. and with a stop in YC, (Calgary), would arrive at the S.M. Hotel at about 1 pm. We were just in time for noontime Margaritas on the hotel rooftop bar. it was in LAX that my crew and i took hang gliding lessons. The ground school was in a nearby store conducted by a young African American gal. Our actual flights took place on Dockweiler Beach at the west end of the runways at LAX. if you will pardon the pun, i could not get the hang of it, but my two honchos did... and shamed me.

We had these layovers in the middle of Winnipeg’s bitter winters. You can imagine my amazement when these parings went to junior people like me. The senior guys apparently would rather fly overnight charters to Montego Bay and back and knock themselves out for a few miserly extra bucks for night differential. What kind of idiot would turn down two back-toback LAX layovers in winter for that kind of punishment?

View from the Best Seat in the 727

Boeing 727

in 1965, TCA was renamed Air Canada following government approval. After the deregulation of the Canadian airline market in the 1980s, the airline was privatized in 1988. On 4 January 2000, Air Canada acquired its largest rival, Canadian Airlines. in 2003, the airline filed for bankruptcy protection and in the following year emerged and reorganized under the holding company ACE Aviation Holdings inc. in 2007, 34 million people flew with Air Canada as the airline celebrated its 70th anniversary.

The Boeing 727 was Griffith's favourite mount. He spent twelve years in the left seat of this aircraft, choosing to move on to the B747 for the last five years of his employment with Air Canada.

a blast from the past an unexpected reunion

The closest kids my older brother and i had to play with growing up during WWii in Winnipeg were the Kruger brothers. They lived two houses and a vacant lot down the street from our house. There was Ron the oldest, Lloyd in the middle and Bob the youngestß. Their father, Sam, was a vital asset in our war-rationed neighbourhood. Mr. Kruger saved our soles. He was the community shoemaker. With all the shortages, worn clothes and especially shoes were mended, not thrown away.

Mr. Kruger demanded and got high scholastic achievement from his boys. As a result, both Ron and Bob

became engineers and Lloyd built a successful automotive business. After the war, when the huge economic boom powered by the greatest generation that ever lived overtook us, we went our separate ways. Over the years, and many moves later, i lost touch with the Kruger boys—even Ron who i learned worked in the same airline as i, although i had no idea where nor in what capacity. Our paths never crossed.

it was beautiful clear day in January. We were flying a Boeing 727 from Winnipeg to Toronto with a full load of southbound passengers most of them connecting in Toronto to escape

the bitter Winnipeg winter. The ride was smooth with both terminals CAVU and a wind favouring a straight out, easterly departure from Winnipeg and a straight in, easterly arrival to Toronto. Even the usual messed up radar vectors from Toronto Arrival Control would not ruin our early arrival.

A few minutes after reaching TOC at FL330 and setting cruise power the oil filter bypass/low oil pressure amber light for the number three engine on the front panel came on. A quick check of the S/O’s panel revealed oil pressure and temperature were normal. The QRH (Quick Reference Handbook) mandated reducing power on the affected engine. However, if the front caution light went out and the S/O panel indications remained normal then engine could be kept running at reduced power to meet the demands of the electrical and pressurization systems. Buried within the wordy QRH was the need to press -to-test the bypass warning light on the front panel for brightness. in other words, the light had a dual purpose and a dual brightness function.

We discussed our options and agreed to keep the engine running at whatever power kept the light out

as long as pressure and temperature remained normal. The alternative option meant shutting down the engine and returning to Winnipeg. That meant inconvenience and aggravation for our connecting passengers not to mention cost considerations for the airline. But something about the complicated QRH procedure left me feeling uncomfortable. We decided to seek further advice and called Maintenance Central in Montreal on company frequency. We told them our problem, actions and plans and asked them if our actions would cause any damage to the engine. They replied that we had interpreted the procedure correctly.

Feeling good about our decision, we continued with the number three engine just above idle keeping all the a/c systems running normally. We had no trouble maintaining FL330 with only a slight reduction of airspeed. We would still arrive early, all our passengers would be happy and the company would save the cost of the associated delayed connections. For weeks, i wore a smug smile on my face as i told my colleagues what a wonderful job i had done.

Then one day i learned the whereabouts of one of my boyhood pals. i opened my company mailbox to find an envelope containing a curt note from the manager of the company Pratt & Whitney overhaul department. it read:

Captain Jim:

We found a little problem after tearing down the number three engine on a/c number 413 that you brought in from Winnipeg on flight 190 January 15th from Winnipeg. The engine was starved of oil. If the engine had continued running for fifteen minutes longer, it would have catastrophically self-destructed.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Regards:

Ron Kruger Manager PW JT8D Engine Overhaul Montreal

As a career-long Boeing enthusiast, i found the 727 oil filter bypass warning system counter intuitive to the typical uncomplicated engineering of both Pratt and Whitney and Boeing. i lost trust in our airline’s Maintenance Central and Flight Operations Department and the quality of their 727

QRH write up. Buried deep in the procedure not highlighted in any way was a statement to use the procedure only if one engine was already shutdown as a means to keep electrics and pressurization operating. That statement should have been in large bold font at the very beginning of the procedure.

Above all was my regret over not interpreting the QRH procedure with the due diligence it deserved. The possibility that i might have caused a disaster left me shaken to the core.

i thoroughly enjoyed my thirteen years flying the 727 thinking that it was completely devoid of any bad habits or engineering flaws. Compared to other airplanes it seems nit-picky to point out this one small but potentially dangerous flaw in an otherwise great machine. in spite of some interesting management shuffles, our airline is a great airline and i am proud to have been part of the team. To me it was the range of experience, age and camaraderie of the three-person crew on the 727 that made my time on it so enjoyable.

best seat in the house

itchy feet again

With the introduction of the A-320 and the withdrawal of the 727 on the Winnipeg horizon, i realized it was time for an equipment change. Added to that, my family was all grown up and we certainly did not need to stay any longer in our four bedroom one hundred year old house any longer. All my flying, other than my time as a second officer, had been domestic so it was time to stretch my wings. in 1987 i bid the B-767 in Vancouver. The switch from an analogue to a glass cockpit was intimidating for an old curmudgeon like me. i seriously considered retiring early so daunting was the change. in the end, i made it thanks to ground school instructor Garth Condelack who worked unpaid overtime to get me through and the patience of flight instructor Glenn Down. The grueling course finished, we moved house to Vancouver. i had been based in Winnipeg for twenty years but i quickly accommodated to VR by getting involved with Chapter 85 of the RAA, the Recreational Aircraft Association, at the Delta Airpark, a grass strip inside the dyke on Boundary Bay. i enjoyed flying our Drouin Turbi, the Piper J-5 and the fellowship of the many aircraft owners and homebuilders on the field. Also the excitement of flying overseas and the fact that many of my F/O’s had been at least temporarily on the Winnipeg Base took the sting out of the gloomy VR winters. Again, things were going too smoothly and i should have known things were about to go pear shaped.

grounded at 37000

With nine years to retirement, i settled onto my new base in Vancouver BC. it’s the dream of every prairie oyster to leave the summer mosquito and bitter winters of Winnipeg to retire on the wet coast. it was a win-win for us. We owned a house on Boundary Bay or rather the bank did, a half mile from the American border at Point Roberts with its cheap gas, groceries and beer. The other win was my new ride, a Boeing 767.

Late December 1990, cruising at 37000 ft on a glorious clear day overhead Cheyenne from Los Angles to Toronto, i thought, it just doesn’t get any better than this. Suddenly, the data link printer spat out a short message. Even before i read it i had a feeling that my bubble of bliss was about to explode in my face.

The message read, “ cpt flt 790 to fone vr med dept on arr yz”, ( Captain of flight 790 phone the Air Canada Vancouver Medical Department on arrival Van-

couver). The short chilling message included the phone number.

The ink of the doctor’s signature endorsing the pilot’s licence in my pocket was barely dry. i’d just taken the medical a week before. i was puzzled and i didn’t know how i was going to sit still for another two hours or so to Toronto to find out what was going on.

Our company had just installed a First Class feature on all their wide bodies, the Flight Phone. it was a conventional telephone handset allowing passengers to make long distance phone calls in flight by entering their credit card data.

Excusing myself to the F/O to answer a call of nature i headed to the First Class cabin behind the cockpit. it was almost deserted, i snatched up the phone in the first seat, quickly entered the Vancouver medical department number and my credit card information.

A youngish sounding woman answered, “Air Canada Medical Department, how can i help you?”

“Hi” i said, “This is the captain of flight 790, your office asked me to call … May i ask why the urgency?”

“Ah … yes captain. i wasn’t expecting your call so soon. Where are you calling from”? She asked.

“Well right now i’m over Cheyenne Wyoming at 37000 feet,” i said, trying to sound indifferent but dreading to hear what was coming next.

Then she asked, “is this a secure line?”

Dumbfounded, i answered, “As far as i know it is but the question sounds ominous … is there a serious problem?”

She hesitated then said, “Okay captain here it is … i have to immediately ground you medically.”

“Crap” i said, “How serious is it? Should i land this thing in Cheyenne?"

"Oh my god. No, Captain don’t do that,” she blurted out.

"Am i going to keel over dead … or what?” i said.

She caught her breath and continued. “When you get to Toronto you will be displaced from your flight home to Vancouver and deadhead on the same flight. Your electrocardiogram had an anomaly and i have to ground you but you are not, repeat not, in danger of imminent death. Call me on arrival in Toronto and i’ll explain.”

To add insult to injury displaced from the flight home meant i would ride the cushions in the back of the bus instead of the cockpit’s left seat. i hung up and returned to the cockpit trying to conceal my tumbling emotions with the thought … the landing in Toronto might be my last one ever so i had better make it good.

Just as i was about reap the rewards of clawing slowly up the seniority list with its prestige, bidding rights and financial reward now i would never fly again … or so i thought.

What followed next was a series of procedures to see why my ticker was so lazy. it ended with these encouraging words from the company VR aviation medical specialist, “if you were a truck driver or a tower crane operator there would be no problem but as an airline pilot and potential crowd killer i have to advise Transport Canada to revoke your licence.”

Then he added, “looks like you’ll need a pacemaker and there are no pilots flying in Canada with such a device.”

Finally, the registered letter arrived ordering me to surrender my licence forthwith and send it by

registered return mail to the Transport Canada Director of Personal licencing, Pacific Region. Anyone who has gone through this, seeing their dreams and livelihood fly out the window will know exactly how i felt ... why me? it left me depressed, despondent and yes, a little desperate.

Meanwhile i became a self-pitying, disinterested slug lying on the couch watching sitcom re-runs, Phil Donahue and OprahWinfrey. Depression, its symptoms and more importantly its potential dire consequences were not well understood by the general population in the late eighties. Looking back on it now i realize i was probably on the brink of clinical depression. Thanks to my wife who gave me ... how shall i put this ... a strongly worded reality check i began to take positive action.

it was before the internet. My only tools to mine the pilot network for information relating to certification of pacemakered pilots internationally were the phone and snail mail. i had hopes of going offshore. The news was universally negative. The Brits disallowed it for fear of interference from EMi, (Electro Magnetic interference), from flight deck electronics. The Americans, at the time

restricted the paced pilots to freighters …but i did not rate my luck in the green card lottery for American citizenship as being any better than it was at the Assiniboia Downs racetrack.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the Air Canada and Transport Canada Medical departments and the Transport Canada Aviation Licensing department were in a cat fight to determine whether i should regain my licence to fly. The medical people supported the position of the electrophysiologist that i did not need a pacemaker. The bureaucrats opposed it worrying about liability. i suspected that it was a turf war over who had the final say over licensing. it was like being an awe struck bystander at a knife fight.

it all ended well and only took five anxious, frustrating, miserable months out of my life as well as my significant other’s before i was back on

the line with a restricted, with or as a co-pilot, Airline Transport Licence. There were some restrictions but they were inconsequential.

Later i became symptomatic and required a pacemaker taking another six months out of our lives. Upon successful implant and a period of monitoring, i received an unrestricted Air Line Transport Pilot licence. Nevertheless, compared to others my little contretemps with the authorities is tiny in comparison to those who underwent major surgeries and extensive rehabilitation before returning to the line or worse, those who would never fly again. They and their families endured much more grief than we did. i cannot speak for anyone else but my take from the experience is that as a pilot losing your licence to fly, even recreationally, can have deep psychological consequences even suicide with catastrophic consequences for the pilot’s family.

best seat in the house

the whale

the bigger they come the easier they land

One of the few mistakes the company made in procurement of new planes was purchasing the 747-400 Combi in 1989 to replace the DC-8 freighters. The planes were in a half passenger, half freight configuration with a main deck cargo hold. There simply wasn’t enough freight business on the main line to justify the things so they were stored, brand new, in the Arizona desert. Three years later, they realized that the extended range of the 400cseries afforded an opportunity to extend their routes into the Pacific. They were brought out and put into service on the Vancouver- London-New Delhi, Osaka, Seoul and Hong Kong routes and to appease Quebec, Montreal-Paris route.

They compounded their mistake by initially operating these routes with two pilots. Thanks to a weak dithering response by the newly formed ACPA, (Air Canada Pilots Association) it took the personal courage of two captains threatening to cancel the inaugural Hong Kong flight unless a third pilot was added.

it wasn’t long before i became restless again. My pension would be based on my best five years, so in 1992 i had exactly five years to go and the 747-400’s had come back from the desert. You could smack the fleecelined seat cushions and see clouds of desert dust emerge. By bidding them i’d have to leave VR and be based in Y and be on reserve again. Reluctantly, i took the plunge and successfully bid the slot. i soon realized that on reserve, commuting was not for me. So we would move back east and Joyce and i could shuffle down to Niagara on the Lake. Before that happened, ground school and

simulator training for thirty pilots at the Boeing Plant near Seattle was part of the airline's 747-400 purchase agreement. i was lucky enough to garner a slot on the first course. it was only a short drive from Tsawwassen, where i lived, to Seattle so we had a bit of a breather before heading east. The training was superb and i felt like a real airline pilot rubbing shoulders with students from all over the world. Our Boeing simulator instructors had many tales about Asian and other international pilots to compare ourselves to and our take away was that they placed Canadians high on the international scale of professionals or so they told us.

dozing for dollars

Try to imagine being a train driver in a single-manned engine cab crossing the Nullabor Plain of Australia. You are trying to stay awake staring at three hundred miles of absolutely straight railway tracks converging to a tiny dot where the sky meets the dead flat horizon. The Trans Australian Railway uses an alerting device called a dead man’s throttle, a handle on the master controller, which if the driver

falls asleep and releases his grip, engine power is cut off and all the train brakes are thrown full on getting the attention of any passengers who might be aboard and upsetting any lurking nearby Kangaroos. What does this have to do with all the latest chirping about pilot fatigue?... read on McDuff

The faint after-glow of sunset was fading behind our port wing. We’d just left Tokyo ATC’s airspace two hours after leaving Seoul eastbound out over the North Pacific. The westbound trip the day before was like a recurring nightmare what with the usual frustrating yet easily rectified airport ground delays at Vancouver that compounded into further ATC slot time clearance delays then made worse by strong headwinds, turbulence and the normal eyeball searing glare of flying westbound into a never ending blazing noon. The North Star i’d started out on so many moons ago was a far, far cry from our present mount, a Boeing 747-400.

i know, i know… hah! hah! hah! That’s why they pay us the big bucks.

On previous trips, both of us crew had tried all the gimmicks that wise guy frequent flyer nerds and aeromedical quacks had recommended to stay

Look Mom, No Hands—glass cockpit and all. Enroute Hong Kong in the 747-400

awake to no avail. it’s quite funny to watch someone fall asleep sitting up; their heads loll onto their chest then some wicked synaptic brain fart wakes them and their heads snap up like the cracking of a whip only to repeat the sequence moments later. When you are really tired no matter what you do your brain will eventually just shut you down into a virtual coma.

Anyway, as we were wondering how we were going to stay wake for the remaining nine hours of flight my trusty side-kick asked if i remembered the Boeing pilot response warnings from ground school. i was ashamed to admit i’d forgotten all about it because i’d never experienced such a warning nor knew of anyone who would knowingly admit to having one. Ask any flight crew, pilot or flight attendant, and they will tell you the best way to fall asleep in your hotel room when your body is totally out of synch with the time zone is to read your company manuals. You’ll be in dreamland in mere seconds. So we threw caution to the wind and decided to take the risk and start reading our onboard manuals.

best seat in the house

Here’s what we found, verbatim, under (EiCAS), the Engine-indicating and Crew-Alerting System: an electronic display and warning system to monitor various flight systems.

PiLOT RESPONSE

Caution Beeper after advisory message PiLOT RESPONSE displayed, FMC does not detect crew activity in monitored area within a specific time.

Pilot Response EiCAS Alert Message

Miscellaneous EiCAS Memo Messages

Message Level Aural Condition

PiLOT RESPONSE

Warning Siren After caution message PiLOT RESPONSE displayed, FMC does not detect crew activity in monitored area within a specific time.

PiLOT RESPONSE

Advisory FMC does not detect crew activity in monitored area within a specific time

Translating from manualese into English means that if everything goes quiet in the cockpit and nobody activates any of the Flight Management functions, ( nobody talks, nobody makes a radio call, nobody initiates

a data link message or nobody activates a switch) for a specified time a sequence of visual and aural alerts are triggered. it starts with a visual advisory message on the EiCAS coloured amber saying, “PiLOT RESPONSE”, accompanied by an aural low volume beeper which probably wouldn’t wake your average deep sleeper pilot and it means: wake up sleepy head. Then, if there is no cockpit response to that message a visual alert saying “PiLOT RESPONSE” is repeated except this time it is in red, accompanied by a loud siren meaning: do something stupid. if there is still no response the stall warning stick shaker is activated and that machine gun like rattling should almost awaken the dead.

What the manuals we were using didn’t define was what is meant by, “specified time”. A quick call on the old Sat Phone to maintenance central revealed the specified time to be thirty minutes. Picture yourself sitting doing nothing for thirty minutes without moving a switch or checking some function or answering a radio or crew call from the back and the worst challenge; not speaking a word to the person you’ve been sitting beside for the last few hours…unless of course it was your wife.

So we set about to challenge the system. We promised each other to sit silent, do nothing and touch nothing for thirty minutes to activate the warnings… or so we thought. Less than ten minutes in and without thinking i said something to my accomplice so we had to start the timing again. Now, twenty minutes in and a radio message from ARiNC in San Francisco had to be answered. Start again. Twenty five minutes in, turn up the heat on the top deck. Start again. Time was dragging on increment by advancing increment but by golly we were staying wide awake trying to beat the computer. Finally twenty nine and half minutes in, almost there, and “thwack” the flight deck door bangs opens and, “Hey you guys want a coffee?”

“ARGCH…#**&!%$^?”

By this time, the sky to the east was lightening and we could see the lights of Dutch Harbour in the Aleutians ahead so we knew the radio would get busy as we came under radar control so we gave up. Yet, for the whole crossing our little game had kept us wide awake. i had to wonder if this is what Boeing had intended or did they think the pilot response computer warning would make up for a two pilot operation on an airplane that could stay aloft for sixteen hours or more.

Finally, relief pilots were added on all long haul flights. The extra pilots were formally called cruise pilots but because they earned their pay while euphemistically sleeping in the bunk or in a first class seat, in effect dozing for dollars, they were known

in the pilots’ lexicon simply as…Dozers. At least it’s better than what second officers on the 727 were called…voice activated data links! it’s amazing even today's pilots, their unions and regulators are still at it...bellyaching about crew fatigue and doing zip about it.

As i found out on my Lagos trip, being on reserve can be advantageous in spite of the drag of bring on call 24 hours a day. Air Canada was a leader in banning smoking in passenger aircraft cabins starting in 1971 when it offered seat selection in non-smoking sections. in the cockpit, it was left up to the crew to decide whether to smoke or not. The captain of course had a built in veto but the seniority system allowed for parties of both persuasions to bid around perceived offenders at least for block holders. People on reserve one way or another just sucked it up and got on with it. Like most airlines, Air Canada had elected to seek an extension on the no smoking rule on

its Pacific routes because of the majority of the huge smoking demographic of the Asians. The company decided to be the first international carrier to take the plunge in spite of possible revenue losses. it made its no smoking policy worldwide simultaneously with its inaugural scheduled passenger flight to Japan, flight 891, YZ(Toronto)- VR(Vancouver)KiX(Osaka) September 20th 1994. There were two us on reserve that day...me and my nemesis from the sad last Lethbridge departure, Dennis the menace. Now he would spoil the last of my two measly claims to fame as an airline pilot, the company’s first flight to Japan. i had always wanted to go to Japan. Being senior, i had a choice of the YZ-VR leg or the VR- KiX leg. The duty day was too long for the whole flight

YZ-KiX; naturally, i took the VR-KiX leg. in the event the media covered the departure from YZ where Denis was captain and Denis shows up in the Air Canada official historic time line as Captain on the company’s first flight to Japan. They even got the name wrong saying it was Rene not Denis although that could have been Denis`s middle name after his father, my former Winnipeg boss.

My first Officer was actually a check pilot, George McKay. i don`t know if the company was out of reserve pilots and drafted him or asked him to hold my hand because i was the first Air Canada pilot to have a pacemaker or whether my previous outspoken behaviour had caught up with me. Either way, i couldn`t have had a

more amiable companion. We had many cockpit visitors, Among them Canada`s first woman astronaut, Roberta Bondar and the Air Canada CEO, Hollis Harris sat in the jump seat for landing. i didn`t know it at the time but his testimony would tilt the courts ruling in a multimillion dollar lawsuit in our favour years later. We also met the Air Canada CEO in waiting, Robert Milton. Knowing what i know now i should have kicked his sorry little butt out over the North Pacific when i had the chance.

Our arrival was shown on Japanese National TV, NHK, and we were treated like royalty with a lavish diner and many bouquets of flowers. Now i really did feel like a bride and not a Bride`s Maid.

Kicking and Screaming

My flying career was one tent away from being a circus or a badly planned and poorly executed practical joke. it was mundane unless of course you include the exhilarating buzz of nearly being fired a few times and being suspended five months before retirement. My crime...swearing at a load agent on company radio. i was ashamed of myself for allowing fatigue and a spiteful F/O to interfere with my critical thinking. At the suspension meeting i again had my big boy pants on and spurned the offered ACPA hand-holder. As soon as i entered the room i had a flashback to Winnipeg and the little Viscount that shoulda but didn’t. The chairman of the meeting and me had history in Torbay, Clearwater Bay, at a float plane fishing derby and on the MV Oliver Clark tied up on a wharf opposite Annasis island in the Fraser River in a snow storm. That could explain why my suspension was symbolic. Three days to be served on my days off with no loss of pay. i sought out the offended agent on my next flight into VR. i shook hands with him apologizing for my bad behaviour and gave him a formal written note of apology.

On my last flight from LHR to YZ they had to drag me kicking and screaming out of the cockpit. i was truly fortunate to have my wife and my son and his family aboard for my last flight—there is nothing that could be better than that.

iwasn’t the only one to retire that day. My ever-loving wife and soul mate, Joyce , also retired from her very special occupation—an airline pilot’s wife. Her unfailing optimism guided me through a medical issue that could have grounded me. it was she who played the role of mother AND father at the Christmases, birthdays and family events that i was unable to attend because a pilots work schedule. it never failed, if a toilet was going to plug or if one or all of the kids got sick it was all too often just moments after i’d left for a trip to some exotic place.

Joyce had her own special skills. She was giant in the world of miniatures. As a young girl she had learned the knack of knitting, tatting and crocheting. She carried over the art into replicating the same objects in miniature in the recognized scale of 1/12th to the inch. At international shows in London, she sold her products to miniature enthusiasts all over the world for 20 years. it’s very sad that the term, stay at home Mom, has earned such a mean spirited derogatory reputation in the current era.