Summer is the time in the North when all the promises of spring—those little teasers that begin with ever-increasing sunshine and end when the last piece of ice melts off the last lake—come true. People who have spent the past couple of months slowly becoming accustomed to the idea of warmth and light rush out of their homes in droves. Like the flowers that burst into bloom on the lands around the city, the residents of Yellowknife explode outdoors, eager to take in all that this glorious season has to offer before it fades into yet another grey winter.
People move more slowly now too. In winter, Yellowknifers hurry from place to place and task to task, hunched over and bundled up against the bite of winter. Now, the pace is decidedly more relaxed. People walk as though they’ve got nowhere else to be but this place at this time. Even the cars move slowly, cruising down Franklin Avenue, downtown Yellowknife’s main drag, as if every day was cause enough for a Sunday drive.
In some ways, the summer version of Yellowknife—particularly Old Town—is reminiscent of a seaside village. Great Slave Lake seems more like an inland sea than a lake. The wide water is a constant backdrop; boats come and go from docks peppered along the shorelines; houseboats bob gently in the sheltered waters of Back Bay; float planes roar to life with a splash. There are even fishermen hawking the day’s catch from the backs of their pickup trucks.
Away from the water, colour has returned to the landscape. The white and grey of winter and spring have given way to glorious green. Most people walk around in shorts, although I am always surprised at the number of people who opt for jeans and jackets, even when the temperature pushes into the twenties (seventies Fahrenheit). Maybe on some level they don’t trust the sun, having been deceived by it one too many times.
Life at Buffalo Airways takes on a decidedly different groove in summer too. Though there is still a buzz of activity in the hangar—nobody whose last name is McBryan ever really goes on holiday—the place seems more relaxed, friendlier. People smile more, bark less, and seem to have more time to enjoy themselves. Maybe that’s why the Omni TV crew chooses this time of year to pack up its gear for a few months before returning in September: happy, contented people do not make for intriguing television programming.
“It’s better TV in the winter,” Mikey said one sunny afternoon. “Plus summer is boring, because it’s actually nice. Everyone loves coming to work; it’s like summer camp.”
The nature of business at Buffalo Airways changes too. Sure, Mikey and friends are still running charters to all corners of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, but the jobs are fewer and farther between. The Mackenzie Valley run, one of the cornerstones of Buffalo’s winter business, grinds to a halt, as barges use the Mackenzie River to carry hundreds of thousands of pounds of food and other goods to the communities of Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope.
Planes that have stood long dormant jump to life. The change is particularly acute for the CL-215 water bombers, which are enlisted into firefighting service by various provincial and territorial governments as soon as the snow is off the ground. Every pilot capable of flying one of those strange, amphibious aircraft is scrambled to wherever the whims of nature take him. I traded text messages with Scott Blue as he headed down to Fort McMurray, Alberta; Justin Simle was in Fort Simpson.
In fact, firefighting is a huge part of Buffalo Airways’ business, accounting for approximately half of its entire annual revenue. I suspect there are a couple of reasons why this critical element of the Buffalo puzzle fails to make it to the television screen with any regularity. First of all, the television crew is simply not around during much of the firefighting season. Perhaps more importantly, Buffalo’s firefighting contracts are all with provincial or territorial governments, which are not particularly keen on having the things they pay for immortalized on video, presumably for insurance and liability reasons.
It’s too bad, really, since from what I can tell, firefighting is some of the most exciting flying a pilot can do, period. There is nothing commonplace about flying a DC-3, DC-4, or C-46, but for adrenaline junkies, fighting fires is the way to go.
Rick Sinotte is one of those guys. Small, spry, and boasting a weathered face that you can’t help but like, Rick is a gun for hire, a pilot who works for Buffalo on a contract-by-contract basis as the situation dictates. Rick flies one of Buffalo’s two Beechcraft Barons, which serve a very important role during firefighting operations. They’re the “bird dogs.”
In the world of aerial firefighting, the bird dog is the spotter, the plane that safely leads water bombers into and out of the action over a fire. Though a variety of aircraft are used as bird dogs around the world, their task is primarily the same. “In conjunction with the air-attack officer, we do the reconnaissance over the fire and assess what resources are needed there to contain that fire,” he told me one warm summer afternoon in the Pilots’ Lounge.
The air-attack officer then directs the land and air firefighting operation. “We call in the water bombers, then show them what we want them to do and where we want them to drop,” Rick said. “The air-attack officer watches the drop to make sure it goes where we wanted it to go.”
Rick has been flying for forty-five years, but he still gets excited when talking about the thrill of flying a small plane through clouds of smoke some twenty metres (sixty-five feet) above the burning treetops. “It’s fun flying,” he said with a wry smile. Yet despite the apparent risk of his work, Rick is quick to set the record straight. “It’s like anything else,” he told me. “There’s a real safe way to do it. And that’s what we do.”
Cameraman Sean Cable has had more than his fair share of experiences during his years on the Ice Pilots NWT crew. Here he gets uncomfortably close to a northern fire under attack by Buffalo’s CL-215 water bombers.
Firefighting is old hat for a guy like Rick. Over the five decades he’s been a bush pilot, he’s seen and done just about everything there is to see and do behind the controls of a plane. Then there’s Scotty Blue, who sits squarely on the other side of the spectrum. Sure, Scotty has been flying for several years now, but the summer of 2011 is his first in the right seat of the CL-215 water bomber (luckily, he fits!), a position that completely changes his view on life at Buffalo Airways.
“Honestly, I was wondering what my future at Buffalo would be like,” a hungover Scott confided in me one afternoon as we chowed on a delicious Sunday brunch at Thornton’s Wine & Tapas Room (located right beside the Yellowknife Shooting Club). “But you fly the Duck [CL-215] for a day and you’re like, ‘Holy crap, I may have been thinking about beelining to the airlines, but I don’t have to do that anymore. I might be quite content doing this.’ Honestly, I don’t think there’s too much flying out there that is more fun than water bombing. It’s the most exciting type of flying I’ve ever done. It’s a big reason why I’ve worked at Buffalo as long as I have: I always wanted to get into the water bombers.”
To hear Scotty tell it, to see the gleam in his eyes, his long arms gesticulating wildly, his voice getting louder with each sentence, is to realize that water bombing is testosterone flying at its best. “You’re on standby, so you’re sitting around the tanker base doing nothing all day long. Then the alarm goes off and you run out to the plane—you don’t even know where you’re going. You start the plane and let the oil warm up, and that’s when they give you the coordinates of your destination.”
Once in the air, Scotty and his pilot—in conjunction with the bird dog and the air-attack officer—find the closest suitable lake and make the first of what can be dozens of round trips between the fire and the lake in a single day. And when the lake is just a few minutes from the fire, the plane can drop fifteen to twenty loads of water every hour. “It can be repetitive like anything, but the rush of it is hard to describe. You look ahead and there’s a whole bunch of planes around, and there’s fire and smoke everywhere.”
“Sounds scary,” I said.
“There was a moment earlier this summer where we were flying through some smoke over Slave Lake and it got really dark and I was a little scared. I’ve heard stories of embers coming in through the ventilation system and stuff like that. So you’ve gotta be on your toes.”
Indeed. Water bombing is among the most technically challenging flying there is. The plane scoops up about 5,445 kilograms (12,000 pounds) of water in seconds, and dumps it even more quickly. With such significant weight changes occurring every few minutes, pilots have to be aware of what’s happening around them at all times, and ready to adapt at a second’s notice.
One of the most demanding moments comes when the plane skims the water with its probes extended (the probes allow the water to enter the plane’s belly tanks). The resistance at that moment is so great that some have equated it with hitting a brick wall. “You have to go to total take-off power as soon as you hit the water,” Scott said. “Ten seconds later you pull the probes up, the plane starts accelerating, and you take off.”
The same thing happens in reverse when the water is dumped. “As soon as you drop, the plane instantaneously wants to climb, because you’ve just dropped twelve thousand pounds of water,” he said.
Ultimately, while water bombing may be the adrenaline rush a guy like Scott needs to stay happy and engaged, it’s not the most predictable employment. Water bomber pilots operate at the whim of Mother Nature. If the fires burn, you fly. If not, you sit. And as the summer of 2011 began to wane, Scott had seen only thirty-two hours in the cockpit of the Duck. It would keep him sufficiently interested and engaged to stay in the Buffalo fold—for the time being. Still, as we sat there pondering Scott’s place in the aviation world, I couldn’t help but wonder if his days in Yellowknife were numbered.
For Scotty Blue, to step into the cockpit of “the Duck” (a CL-215 water bomber) was a reaffirmation of why he joined Buffalo in the first place. Few airlines can offer young pilots such an eclectic array of aircraft and missions.
The general ease of warm temperatures and long days does not mean the essence of Buffalo will change anytime soon. As long as Joe McBryan is steering the proverbial ship, there will always be more work to do. Mikey related to me a conversation he has with Joe about this time every year:
Mikey: “I want to go on vacation this month.”
Joe: “Don’t take it this month. This may be the month where we get Electra work.”
Mikey: “Okay, well, how about March?”
Joe: “March? Well, you never know, we always do fuel hauls in March.”
Mikey: “Okay, I want to take it in June.”
Joe: “June? No way, that’s firefighting season.”
Mikey: “Okay, what about September?”
Joe: “Well, you can’t then, because that’s after fire season and everyone else is on vacation.”
“Every month is the wrong month.” Mikey griped to me. “It’s always two or three more months down the road.”
Mikey says there’s no seasonal rhyme or reason to life at Buffalo. “It’s not really by month or season,” he says. “You can have a really slow week followed by the craziest, busiest week you’ve ever imagined.”
This lack of predictability seems to have been a huge factor in shaping Mikey’s personality. He is as dedicated a worker as anyone I have ever met, but he seems to have no plans for the future, for either himself or the business. Mikey is living in the moment in every respect, and will deal with change if and when it’s thrown at him. The result is a sense of liberation few people ever know.
“None of this is planned,” he said as we relaxed over a cold one on his deck overlooking Back Bay. “If you drive from New York to L.A., you don’t plan every rest stop along the way. It’s the journey, right? And you can never guess what’s around the next corner.”
I find Mikey’s take on things refreshing, albeit a bit uncomfortable when he starts talking matter-of-factly about the end of Buffalo Airways. Like so many people, I have come to love this quirky, renegade airline. We want it to exist, because we need to know that there is more to this world than the homogeneous, fast food, cookie-cutter crap most of us choose to ensconce ourselves in. Mikey is not bound by the same shackles.
“Look at Joe,” he continued. “He went to bed one night and he was one of a hundred people flying these old airplanes. And the next day he woke up and he’s the last one. And he’ll either die or retire. But he can’t really give up the world that he created. And it can’t exist without him. Shit, we can barely exist with him sometimes.”
Mikey seems to embrace his role in the scheme of things here. If Joe is the Ghost of Christmas Past and Rod the Ghost of Christmas Present, then Mikey is definitely the Ghost of Christmas Future. “For me, Buffalo Airways is the here and now. I don’t care about the stories of twenty years ago about some guy who’s dead now; it’s already happened. I want to know what’s going to happen next. I don’t want to read the history books; I’m looking at Google News because I want to see what’s happening now. Even newspapers are too old for me.”
Just as all the McBryans perform a different job for the company, this focus on different parts of Buffalo’s history—past, present, and future—seems to work. Joe is a link to the past, a bygone era whose old-school traits of hard work and “get ’er done” have kept Buffalo viable in a competitive industry with equipment that most people wrote off decades ago. Rod keeps things going on a daily basis. Without his expertise, the planes don’t fly now, and the whole thing comes crashing down, perhaps literally. Mikey is the visionary. For him, Buffalo is about so much more than the airplanes. It’s about opportunity, and it’s about seeing the world through a different lens.
“My dad and my brother just don’t get it. My dad says why waste your time talking to a writer and making a book when you can be outside shovelling the walkway. But I say why waste my time shovelling the walkway when I can be talking to a writer and making a book?
“My brother says, ‘Why bother?’ I say, ‘Why not?’ ”
You can’t argue with the guy’s success. He’s one of the stars of a successful TV program. His apparel business is growing at a dizzying rate. He’s got a book being written about him and his company; a website—Buffalo Airways Virtual—dedicated exclusively to fans around the world who want to simulate Buffalo flights; and even a few copycat shows “inspired” by Buffalo (Arctic Air, Flying Wild Alaska, and Dust Up). So when Mikey talks about an animated series à la Thomas the Tank Engine, featuring Buffalo’s planes, I respect the idea’s potential.
To Mikey, Buffalo’s potential client base is limited, which is why looking outside the company’s traditional revenue streams makes sense. “There are about fifty people in Canada who would be willing to pay sixty thousand dollars to charter one of our airplanes,” he told me, adding that the TV show has probably increased their business by about 10 percent. “But on a good week, we’ll get a million people watching Ice Pilots.
“We’re no longer an airline; we’re a brand.”
A big part of that brand is Mikey’s Buffalo Airwear store, which has seen its sales grow exponentially since Ice Pilots came on the air. “I went from selling T-shirts on a rack behind my desk in my office to what we have now,” Mikey said. And what they have now is quite something. The Buffalo Airwear store is a dedicated space in the Buffalo terminal, conveniently located for DC-3 passengers and curious passersby alike. On my first trip to Yellowknife, the store was manned by only one person, manager Peter Magill. On a return trip a few weeks later, I was surprised to find that Peter had hired a full-time assistant whose sole responsibility was to fill Internet orders.
And while those Buffalo commodities are red-hot now, things were a little tighter back in the early days of what Joe calls “Mikey’s T-shirt business.” “Back then, I really only sold to Europeans and the staff,” Mikey told me as we took stock of the hoodies, T-shirts and even underwear filling the shelves of the little shop. “I had to be diligent because profit margins were so thin—no freebies, no deals. I even bought my own: I have never, ever taken a T-shirt for free. The same goes for my father and my brother.”
Things have certainly changed. Not that Mikey is throwing product at people (I was secretly hoping he’d toss me a goodwill hoodie or some other kind of swag; it never happened), but he could if he wanted. He tells me that he is now the second-biggest buyer from North Vancouver supplier and printer Bold Merchandise, behind only Canadian rock band Billy Talent.
Yet the store represents much more than a profit centre for Mikey. Here is where he can be truly autonomous, where he can reach his creative and business potential. It’s an atmosphere quite unlike that inside the hangar. “My father micromanages everything else. It’s so bad that he has to sign every single purchase order. If you want to buy a can of WD-40, he has to approve it first.”
Joe may be controlling when it comes to the airline side of things, but you can’t argue with his success. Buffalo owns almost every single plane in its fleet, something few other airlines can boast. Mikey was reluctant to get into specifics about dollars and cents with me, but I could tell he struggles with the “multi-millionaire” tag that the show has bestowed upon Joe and the rest of the McBryan clan. “It’s still very expensive for the products that make the planes run: the hangar, the heat, the people,” Mikey told me one night as we took in his evening dose of reality TV—this time it was Pawn Stars, an American show that chronicles the trials and triumphs of daily activities at Las Vegas’s Gold & Silver Pawn Shop.
“Aviation is a very thin homeostasis, meaning all the money you make has to go back into the company to make more money. You only make money when you’re broke and you steal from yourself before the sheriff gets it or you sell out.”
That grim reality is one of the primary drivers of Mikey’s endless attempts to diversify the Buffalo brand. Yet diversification comes at a cost, and Mikey knows it. It wasn’t long before our conversation turned to the fact that as much as Mikey has done for Buffalo’s bottom line, he is also losing his connection to its core business: flying stuff (and people) around the North.
He revealed this to me one afternoon in his office. “Look, I’m sitting here with you, and I’m not out there looking at the planes. In some respects it’s like selling out.” And while most of us may cringe at the notion of selling out, Mikey sees it as a necessary step in the evolutionary chain of any business that wants to grow.
“Say you had your favourite kind of pop from your hometown,” he says, “Canmore Cola. You knew the owner, and you’d go get your can of pop, and feel good about it. Then you tell all your friends and they tell all their friends and it gets more and more popular.
“Only now, his supply doesn’t meet the demand, and he has to get a bigger store. He keeps growing because the demand is there. Eventually, he’ll be forced to go national, and in doing so, he turns his back on the person who got him there in the first place: you. People think that’s selling out, but you’re virtually forced to do it.”
And if that is the route Buffalo eventually follows, so be it. Mikey will have no regrets. “The more I go down the rabbit hole of opportunity, the more I’m losing what is at our core: Buffalo Airways. Because sending a DC-3 T-shirt to Paris has nothing to do with the DC-3 flying to Hay River.”
That is where the Buffalo symbiosis kicks in again, though. Mikey may be the one pushing the company to places it has never been before, but Joe¸ Rod, Kathy, and Sharon are the ones keeping the planes flying to the places that they’ve always been. The core business, it seems, is in good hands.
“Joe’s the one keeping it real,” Mikey said one Saturday afternoon as we watched the DC-3—with Joe at the helm—rumble down the Yellowknife runway on its way back to Hay River. “The more he tells you to fuck off, the more Buffalo is staying legit. Because once that plane stops flying, everything else comes to a grinding halt. Our heart will stop beating.”
This reality has not stopped Mikey from being Mikey, though, and revelling in all Ice Pilots has done for him. In short, Mikey loves being a celebrity.
For a kid from a small town in the Northwest Territories, being thrust into the public eye can be intoxicating. I can see it in Mikey’s eyes when we talk about the concept of Mikey As Celebrity. “For me,” he says, “the TV show opens up the world. Before Ice Pilots, I was stuck seven days a week in the hanger. Now I can go on Global TV news, on Canada AM in Toronto. I get to meet authors, people I would otherwise never have met.”
It’s not like Mikey hides the fact that he loves the attention Ice Pilots has granted him. He calls himself “shameless” when it comes to publicity. Nevertheless, Mikey never puts on a false front for the camera or his fans. He is who he is.
“I find that most people are scared of criticism,” he tells me one morning as we drive to the hangar in the glory of twenty-four-hour sunshine. “They run their lives based on what they think other people will think of them. It really holds people back.”
Not Mikey. Both on and off the screen, he wins his way into your heart by marching to the beat of his own drummer. On one of the most well-loved episodes in Season Two, Mikey and Joe venture to England to inspect a few Electras that a British airline is trying to sell. Joe spends his time elbow-deep in the operations of the craft; Mikey provides comic relief. At one point, Mikey heads down to the local pub with a bunch of employees from the airline, his face completely painted in support of England’s soccer team, which was playing in the World Cup that evening.
Later, fall-down drunk—he earns his stripes by guzzling a yard of ale (about 4.5 pints) without coming up for air—the youngest McBryan has forged a relationship with the seller that Joe could never manage. In some ways, that episode speaks again to the symbiosis between father and son: Joe makes sure the planes are fit enough to join the Buffalo fleet; Mikey cements ties to the client with the mortar of hops and barley.
As it did in England, Mikey’s celebrity status often comes in handy on the work front. There are times, however, when being one of the focal points of a hit TV show pays social dividends as well: over the course of Ice Pilots, Mikey has made loads of friends, both the Facebook kind and the real kind. Of these, perhaps none mean more to Mikey than Bobby Hanson and Serge Pharand, two very successful Ottawa entrepreneurs Mikey befriended at the EAA AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a few years back.
When November 27, 2010—Mikey’s twenty-eighth birthday—rolled around and Mikey found himself with no plans for the big day, he called Bobby and Serge. Within minutes, the plans were set: he and his best friend Austin were on their way to Ottawa. Other than for university, it was the first time Mikey had been out of the north without doing something related to aviation.
“We land in Ottawa, and Serge shows up driving a fully decaled Buffalo Airways Chevy HHR,” Mikey told me, an ever-widening grin on his face. “They take us out for this big, fancy meal and people are recognizing me left and right. It was crazy.”
The visit also took Mikey and Austin to Ottawa-area air and space museums, where they were treated like royalty. “They were basically throwing the keys at me, said I could be in whatever plane I wanted to be in.” Mikey took advantage of the offer on several occasions, though the highlight was his chance to sit in a plane he’s admired since he was a boy: the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, a single-seat fighter plane used extensively during World War II.
“Then they took us to an Ottawa Senators game,” Mikey continues. “We had rinkside seats: leather seats, the whole nine yards. Afterwards we got to meet Mike Fisher; I got my jersey signed by him after the game.”
As if this wasn’t enough for someone as hockey-crazed as Mikey, the trip was only going to get better. For if there’s one thing that Mikey McBryan likes as much as hockey—perhaps even better—it’s establishments that combine beer with scantily clad women. “Serge and Bobby dropped us off in Hull, Quebec, at the most magnificent strip club I’ve ever seen!”
The next morning it was off to Serge and Bobby’s private hangar, where Mikey found an astonishing array of aircraft “They open the doors and say, ‘Whatever you want... it’s yours to fly,’ ” he said, still only half-believing the event really happened.
“I had always wanted to fly in a fighter jet, and they had two Russian L-39 MiG training jets. While we waited for the pilot to show up, we went in a Pitts Special [a two-seat open-cockpit plane designed for aerobatics]. Now I’m completely fucking hungover from the strip club the night before, and here I am in the back of this plane doing full loops and cart rolls.” The going didn’t get any easier for Mikey when he eventually got in the cockpit of the fighter jet and found himself again doing loops, only this time at speeds in excess of 563 kilometres (350 miles) per hour.
Yet as much as he enjoys experiences born of his celebrity, Mikey still struggles to understand why people are so fascinated with him and his little world. In fact, it seems Mikey and his fellow stars can’t go anywhere outside of Yellowknife without being recognized. In one instance, Mikey and a friend were in Vancouver, where they decided to take in Conan O’Brien’s Legally Prohibited show. When the pair started walking up the aisle from their second-row seats to get more beer, Mikey was floored when audience members started screaming his name. “Here I am, star-struck because I’m seeing Conan O’Brien,” he said, “and people are stopping me for pictures! That’s when I really realized things had changed.”
On that same trip, Mikey and his friend were sharing a few beers on the patio of a local pub, when Mikey’s iPhone alerted him of an incoming message. “I have Google alerts set to search the Internet for my name,” he said. Turned out a woman at the next table was Twittering to all the world that Mikey McBryan was having a beer right beside her.
Mikey’s insight into the evolution of celebrity may be the one thing that keeps him from losing control. For as much as he loves it, he also knows that there is a dark side—a real dark side—to fame. “As hard as it is, you can’t allow yourself to be changed by fame,” he said one night as we stumbled home after yet another session at Surly’s. “Otherwise it starts to wear at you, and you get to the point where you’re at a restaurant screaming at the waiter because he doesn’t recognize you. It’s very insidious to who you are. You can see how people get caught up in it.”
It certainly helps that Mikey and crew are in Yellowknife, perhaps one of the most down-to-earth places on the planet. “You get the odd snide remark,” Mikey said, “but luckily I hang out with a bunch of tough rampies who can take care of people who make snide remarks.”
But for the time being, Mikey is happy to roll with the benefits of stardom, whether it be flying in a Russian fighter jet or having women pay more attention to him—way more attention—than they otherwise would. And the show has even made it easier for Mikey to handle the daily grind of life at Buffalo Airways.
Situations that used to upset him are now seen in a whole new light. “When you’re not used to seeing it on a sixty-two-inch HD television, you sometimes think that things are not going to work out and there’s going to be a real disaster,” he said. “Ice Pilots has shown me that things do work out, and there are triumphs.”
Mikey’s not the only one to realize this particular benefit. “Since the TV show has started, it’s been a real morale booster. We don’t go through as many people as we used to. Why? Because they see merit in their work. The show is now the mother. So it’s no longer necessary for Joe to come up to you and say ‘You did a good job.’ You can just go watch Ice Pilots.”
Mikey is certainly not the only member of the Buffalo crew who has felt the effects of stardom. Justin and Scott are both very popular with the ladies. Nevertheless, nobody, it seems, has let that fact go to his head. For the time being, heads at Buffalo remain level.
Even Justin, who is portrayed on the show as being as cool as they come, blushes his embarrassment when forced to talk about his new-found celebrity. Maybe it’s because he’s used to the attention. We take our customary seats at the Gold Range Diner, and the playful flirting between him and one of the waitresses begins almost immediately.
“Are you gonna get married yet?” she asks him, setting two glasses of water in front of us.
“I’m waiting for you!” he calls back as she makes her way to the kitchen.
“That’s what you say to all the girls, Justin.”
“Nope, just you, love.”
This is where Justin is most comfortable, in his everyday haunts, surrounded by people he knows and feels connected to. Perhaps that is why he has stayed at Buffalo longer than any other pilot currently on the Yellowknife roster. It also goes a long way toward explaining why he feels the need to spread credit for the show’s success as widely as he can, despite the fact that he’s one of its biggest stars.
“I was walking through the Edmonton airport with my daughter and heard a stampede coming behind me,” he says between forkfuls of the chicken cordon bleu special of the day. “I turned around and there was half a dozen girls there screaming and giggling: ‘Oh my God, it’s Justin Simle from Ice Pilots!’ They picked up my daughter and started passing her around like she was a toy. It was cool, but weird at the same time.” Ultimately, a very private person like Justin will look back on the Ice Pilots experience and appreciate it for what it was, but know that it didn’t really change his world.
“It’s a really neat thing that we’ve done here, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he tells me one night. “I’m grateful for the experience, but when it all goes away, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. You can’t change for anyone but yourself.”
I’m not sure if the same can be said for Scott, who shares heartthrob status with Justin in the Buffalo hangar. Witty, handsome, warm, and engaging, Scotty Too Tall (as he is affectionately known) has won over fans around the world with his honest and forthright take on life in the North. Scotty shares Justin’s humility—he too struggles to understand why people find him so interesting—but there’s no denying he loves the attention. For Scotty, being a part of Buffalo and Ice Pilots is the best thing that could have happened to him.
“There’s lots of different perks and unique situations that we find ourselves in because of the show,” he says. “You know what? It’s cool to be recognized all over the place, and it’s flattering when good-looking girls just want to hook up with you without really knowing anything about you.”
For Scott, though, Ice Pilots has opened doors to experiences that go far beyond interludes with members of the opposite sex. On one particularly warm spring day, he and I were celebrating the fact that he’d just been checked out on the CL-215, opening the door to his first-ever summer of fighting fires with the water bomber. Not long afterwards, Scotty was rubbing elbows with some of Canada’s biggest political figures... all because of Ice Pilots.
Driving home one evening, Scott came across a rally and photo shoot for the Conservative Party of Canada in support of a federal election campaign. Interested, he stopped to poke his head in, and was almost immediately recognized by security personnel, who let Scott enter the rally, even though he was not on the guest list. It didn’t take long for Scott to offer Canada’s most powerful political figure a tour of the Buffalo hangar; minutes later—and much to his surprise—Scott was showing Prime Minister Stephen Harper and wife Laureen through the hangar.
“That was pretty damn cool!”
But as much as Ice Pilots may feed the ego, Scotty believes the show helps clear up some fairly pervasive misconceptions about the life of a pilot. “A lot of people think that you go to flight school, and the next thing you know you’re flying a jumbo jet around the world and drinking champagne with hot stewardesses and staying in amazing hotels,” he says with an ironic chuckle. “Back in the day it may have been like that, but it’s not any more. Before Ice Pilots, I don’t think people realized how hard we work. But I think the show really gets that point across. It’s a labour of love.”
Labour of love, indeed. For every unique opportunity that Buffalo hands its employees, there’s a thankless one waiting around the corner. Scotty knows. “You’ll get a day when you have to come in early to get the plane ready, and it’s –35° and the wind is howling,” he describes. “So it’s already hard enough to get to work as it is. Then you get there and the engines are frozen up because the heaters have unplugged overnight.
“So you get a frost fighter [a small, portable heater] to warm them up, but the frost fighter is out of gas because nobody could be bothered to fill it the night before. Then you get the fuel truck but the fuel truck doesn’t have enough gas in it, so you have to go fill it up. But when you come back, you realize that it’s so cold out that the fuel truck won’t pump because it’s frozen. So you go back inside where the freight is waiting, and the floor is slippery and it’s a bitch to load. By that time, the captain has shown up and he’s pissed off and yelling. Those are the real clusterfuck mornings that make you question why you’re here.”
In the meantime, Ice Pilots is alive and well, and everyone involved with the show seems optimistic about its future. Whether it ultimately proves as successful as other hyper-popular programs like Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers remains to be seen. In the meantime, Mikey is not losing any sleep worrying about the future; he’s too damn busy in the present.
Late one evening, Mikey and I were the only two left in the hangar. For a moment, the massive building was silent but for the echo of our footsteps. I was waxing nostalgic again, hoping beyond hope that there is a way to keep something as raw, as true, and as authentic as Buffalo Airways alive. And I knew that the one hope for doing that was walking right beside me.
“Do you feel a desire to keep all of this going?” I asked.
As always, Mikey surprised me with his response. I was hoping for a moment of tenderness, a whispered “Yeah” that would bond us. No chance.
“Every single company that has ever existed—and ever will exist—will fail one day, will cease to exist.”
“You have a very pragmatic view of it.”
“I was born in the Microsoft age,” he replied, “where Microsoft was bigger than life itself, and everyone thought Microsoft would be running the world. But look around: Apple is gaining ground, things are changing, and Microsoft isn’t king of the world anymore.
“General Motors was king shit for fifty years,” he continued. “Hell, they built the planes that bombed Japan. And now they’re getting their asses kicked by Japanese companies.
“Every company fails, especially airlines. It will eventually happen. We just have to do the best we can while we do it... no regrets.”
So much for nostalgia. That doesn’t mean Mikey won’t be sad when Buffalo eventually does close its doors, because I know he will. He’s said as much. But for someone who’s always looking down the “rabbit hole of opportunity,” the death of one thing means the birth of another.
“There’s a freedom in mortality,” he said. “Once you realize you’re gonna die, you can truly be free.”
Clearly, Mikey is not stuck on the future. He is comfortable with his place in the universe. “I feel very fortunate that I understand where I’m at, because most people don’t. They’re lost; they don’t know where they fit in; they don’t know what they want to do. I know what I want to do. I want to be at work at seven-thirty tomorrow morning, make sure the planes get where they need to be, and work at any challenges that come my way during the day. I can’t predict what it’s gonna be, but I can predict that I’m gonna try my best.”
We turned off the lights and headed toward the small green door that had marked my entry to the world of Buffalo so many months before. “Is there anything you’re scared of?” I asked.
He replied without hesitation: “The one constant fear is the old man.”
“Why?”
“Because in Joe’s eyes, you gotta be perfect—unless you’re a fuck-up, and then you’re a fuck-up. And he knows I’m not a fuck-up, so I gotta be perfect.”
“Why does he have such high expectations of you?
“Because he knows I can do it.”
1 Chicken wings
2 Lobster
3 King crab
4 Kraft dinner
5 Ribs
6 Big Macs
7 Hot dogs
8 Blackened steak
9 Beans and toast
10 Beer
