Bent Props & Blow Pots
Bent Props & Blow Pots

Author: Rex Terpening

Publisher:

Published: 2015-11-18

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9781550177572

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Crash landings were part of the job in the early 1930s, when Rex Terpening started out in arctic aviation. As an air engineer for Canadian Airways in the Northwest Territories, Terpening took the right-hand seat in the cockpit and flew "on operations" daily, warming the oil and the engine on winter mornings, refuelling, and inevitably mending both engine and aircraft when things went wrong. Terpening's beat stretched from Fort McMurray to the Arctic Ocean, and his remarkable bush-flying stories tell of planes wandering lost over unmapped muskeg, perilous rescue missions to retrieve stranded missionaries, dogged searches for downed flyers lost on the Barrens and emergency landings in blizzards on nameless pothole lakes. But there is humour, too, in tales of a drunken wolverine, a planeload of rambunctious sled dogs and a trip in a tiny Fairchild with a Catholic priest and the wife of an Anglican minister. And there are vivid evocations of the sheer joy of flying over the Arctic's raw beauty. Rex Terpening not only kept a meticulous journal from which these stories are derived, he carried his camera everywhere, snapping pictures of downed machines, their step-by-step resurrections, the men who flew them and those who fixed them. Most of those men and machines are gone now, but they live on in Bent Props and Blow Pots.

Bent Props and Blow Pots
Bent Props and Blow Pots

Author: Rex Terpening

Publisher: Harbour Publishing Company

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9781550173819

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Crash landings were part of the job in the early 1930s, when Rex Terpening started out in arctic aviation. As an air engineer for Canadian Airways in the Northwest Territories, Terpening took the right-hand seat in the cockpit and flew "on operations" daily, warming the oil and the engine on winter mornings, refuelling, and inevitably mending both engine and aircraft when things went wrong. Terpening's beat stretched from Fort McMurray to the Arctic Ocean, and his remarkable bush-flying stories tell of planes wandering lost over unmapped muskeg, perilous rescue missions to retrieve stranded missionaries, dogged searches for downed flyers lost on the Barrens and emergency landings in blizzards on nameless pothole lakes. But there is humour, too, in tales of a drunken wolverine, a planeload of rambunctious sled dogs and a trip in a tiny Fairchild with a Catholic priest and the wife of an Anglican minister. And there are vivid evocations of the sheer joy of flying over the Arctic's raw beauty. Rex Terpening not only kept a meticulous journal from which these stories are derived, he carried his camera everywhere, snapping pictures of downed machines, their step-by-step resurrections, the men who flew them and those who fixed them. Most of those men and machines are gone now, but they live on in Bent Props and Blow Pots.

Polar Winds
Polar Winds

Author: Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail

Publisher: Dundurn

Published: 2014-09-10

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 145972383X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Polar Winds traces a century of northern flight from balloonatics to bush pilots and beyond. "They were all gamblers and fortune seekers. They did things on their own — were independent people who wanted to be free to roam. They were good people, but, of course, some were loners or escapists. They all depended strictly on their wits." Joe McBryan, pilot and owner of Yellowknife-based Buffalo Airways, was talking about gold prospectors in the 1940s when he said this, but he could just as easily have been describing the aviators who have flown northern skies for over a hundred years. They were adventurers and pioneers, but also just men and women doing what was required to make a living north of the sixtieth parallel. Polar Winds uses the stories of these pilots and others to explore the greater history of air travel in the North, from the Klondike Gold Rush through to the end of the twentieth century. It encompasses everything from exploration flights to the North Pole in airships to passenger travel in jet liners; flying school buses for residential schools to indigenous pilots performing mercy flights; and from the harrowing crashes to the routine supply runs that make up daily life in the North. Above all, it is a unique history told through the experiences of northerners on the ground and in the sky.

Four Degrees Celsius
Four Degrees Celsius

Author: Kerry Karram

Publisher: Dundurn

Published: 2012-04-21

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1459700511

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This dramatic story of the rescue of eight men on a prospecting mission in the Arctic covers a period of four suspenseful months in the fall of 1929. A rescue team, headed by bush pilot Andy Cruikshank, at a time when aviation was in its infancy, encountered harrowing experiences but finally completed its mission.

Flying on Instinct
Flying on Instinct

Author: L. D. Cross

Publisher: Heritage House Publishing Co

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1927051843

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

They were nicknamed Snow Eagle, Flying Knight, Bush Angel, Punch, Doc and Wop. They worked in open cockpits and flew through cold, snow and fog without the benefit of radios, maps or weather reports. They flew over the Barrens, frozen lakes, boreal forests and mountain ranges by dead reckoning and line of sight. They landed on makeshift runways, glaciers, muskeg, tundra and glassy lakes. Comrades of the wilderness, they were Canada's early bush pilots. L.D. Cross brings us the incredible stories of the brave and enterprising pilots who rolled back the boundaries of western and northern Canada, delivering mail, medicine, miners and all the supplies needed by frontier settlements. Flying such planes as Curtiss, Bellanca, de Havilland, Fairchild, Junkers, Norseman, Stinson and Vickers, they were the off-roaders of aviation, venturing where no others dared to go. Climb into the cockpit with these pioneering pilots for an exciting trip into Canadian aviation history.

True-Life Adventures of Canada's Bush Pilots
True-Life Adventures of Canada's Bush Pilots

Author: Bill Zuk

Publisher: James Lorimer & Company

Published: 2014-09-01

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 145940775X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bush pilots haul cargo to remote reserves along the West Coast of Canada. They ferry big-game hunters to base camps and fly-in fishermen to remote lodges. They take nature photographers to scenic vistas and archaeological explorers to their latest dig. Bush pilots and the planes they have flown are an exciting part of Canada's aviation history. In his latest book Bill Zuk brings their exploits and adventures alive. With detailed descriptions of their planes, and stories of their daring and their bravery, he evokes our admiration for these enterprising men who have contributed so colourfully to the fabric of Canadian life.