All photos © Pacific Coastal Airlines
OCEAN CHRONICLES Threading Mountains: Pacific Coastal Airlines Ascends to Become BC’s Small-town Connector DAV E FLAWSE WHEN QUENTIN SMITH pointed the nose of a Cessna 172
This particular memory sticks out for Quentin Smith
towards the notorious Savary Island airstrip, he barely
because his father “didn’t have a lot of time for personal
had 20 hours of flying time recorded in his training log.
flying,” he says in a phone conversation. “He was work-
At only 700 meters long, the Savary airstrip would have
ing hard, and we didn’t see him that often.”
made any pilot’s palms sweaty, not to mention the other challenges the sandy runway supplied. The dry sand could nosewheel an aircraft; dense salal grew right up to the edge, concealing skittish deer; and maintenance was almost unheard of. From the passenger seat, his father, Daryl Smith, guided him through the necessary maneuvers for a smooth landing. The plane bumped and jerked down the yellow strip, and the wheels came to a rest before the brushy terminus. A few years later, news came that surprised no one—the airstrip would be shuttered for safety reasons. 1 0 | C O M PA S S M A G A Z I N E | I s s u e 4 0
Before jumping into a pilot’s seat, a young Daryl Smith jammed gears into cranky truck transmissions. He hauled brimming loads of old-growth Doug fir down muddy, vertigo-inducing plunges that could hardly be deemed roads. Perhaps that thrill failed to sustain his lust for adventure because he left old-growth logging on BC’s mountains for a career threading a plane between them. In 1964, after two months of training, Tyee Air hired him to fly freight and his former co-workers in and out of logging camps. W W W. C O M PA S S M A G A Z I N E . C A
