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Walter looked up when his passenger arrived, and for a moment, couldn’t believe his eyes. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen was walking toward the dock. By the time she reached the plane, he’d collected himself and was ready to help her aboard, settling her into the seat beside his.
Earlier that morning, when he’d checked in at the base, Barney had been waiting with his first assignment – a flight to Fort Chipewyan, a small settlement on the shores of Lake Athabasca, at the head of the Slave River. “You’re taking a nurse to Fort Chip, take the 180,” Barney had said.
It should have been a routine trip, nothing remarkable – except now, apparently, it wasn’t. His passenger, the nurse from the Fort Smith Hospital, was easily the most striking woman he’d ever met.
He wished Barney had assigned him any other plane for the flight. The Cessna 180 was Gateway’s least glamourous plane. The thing was as old as the hills and looked it. The windshield had a cross-brace added to keep the glass from popping out when landing on rough water. It certainly wasn’t the pride of the fleet, but it still flew, and that was enough reason for Gateway to keep it around. As Walter pushed away from the dock, his passenger sitting silently beside him, he very much wished he were in a slightly more luxurious plane.
The wind was gusting that morning, and as soon as they lifted off from the shallow water of Instant Lake, they hit turbulence – heavy turbulence. The plane began to hammer and bounce, and Walter saw the concern on his passenger’s face. He wasn’t happy about it either. He had to fly at maneuvering speed, well below cruise, to navigate the rough air. He could almost picture the old plane shedding a wing, if he wasn’t careful.
During a particularly rough jolt, the nurse reached over and gripped his arm. A moment later, he saw her heave. He passed her an airsickness bag, just in time.
That was only the beginning. The turbulence worsened the further they went. The nurse alternated between clutching his arm, and filling the bag, her face pale and drawn. Walter felt terrible for her; so much for offering his passengers a smooth, routine ride.
He also couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for himself. Here he was, with one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, in one of the most uninspiring airplanes he had ever flown, through one of the worst turbulence events he had ever encountered. This was not, he thought miserably, the way to make a good first impression.
They carried on, the plane bucking in the turbulence, each suffering through the grueling flight in silence. As they neared Fort Chipewyan, Walter saw whitecaps rolling across Lake Athabasca. The swells were too high to attempt a landing. Instead, there was a small pothole lake near the road that ran between the town and the airport. It was big enough for him to land, but small enough to avoid the chop. Even so, it was a rough landing. The floats slapped down hard against the waves, and Walter winced. He taxied toward the lee shore, where the road passed behind a stand of trees. From there, it would be a short walk along the road into the community.
He nosed the plane onto the shore and jumped out to secure it. As he grabbed the propeller to steady the aircraft, composing an apology for the terrible experience in his mind, the nurse flung open her door, stumbled out and – without a word, or even a glance – headed straight for the thicket. She disappeared into the bush toward the road, leaving him standing there, still holding the prop.
For a long moment, Walter just stared after her. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen had come into his life, endured one of the most brutal flights he had ever flown, and vanished into the trees without a word. He didn’t even know her name. All he had to confirm she had ever been there, was a well-used airsickness bag.
He flew back to the base at Fort Smith, to pick up his next ticket, hoping the rest of the day would go more smoothly.
Fort Smith, a town of about 2,100 people, had, until a few years earlier, been the capital of the Northwest Territories. It had passed that title to Yellowknife in 1967 but remained an important center of activity in the North. Several government offices and the hospital still served a wide area around Fort Smith, and the air base was a busy stop for passengers catching chartered flights to smaller settlements scattered across the territory.
As flights were booked, Barney, the base manager and lead mechanic, created the daily schedule, assigning pilots and aircraft to each job. Sometimes he had it ready the day before, but more often, Walter picked up his assignments when he arrived in the morning. Most days he flew the Cessna 206, but occasionally he might fly several different aircraft in a day, depending on the destination, the type of cargo or passengers, and the weather. Walter’s experience across a variety of aircraft made him a useful pilot when Barney was drawing up the schedule.
There were several other pilots around during the summer, as well as a couple of apprentice-mechanics, who did double duty as dock-boys down at Instant Lake. One of them was always there when a plane arrived. Walter got along well with the guys; they were good mechanics with an easy sense of humour.
Another pilot, George Fink, was a heavy smoker. He almost always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, the ash impossibly long, and somehow never falling. He also smoked in the planes. One afternoon, one of the dock-boys approached the plane George had recently returned to the dock. Preparing to check and clean the aircraft before its next flight, the young fellow opened the door, and looked around the cockpit. “Oh no!” he exclaimed, “George has been cremated!”
Walter looked in over his shoulder; there was a sizeable pile of ash on the floor where George had sat. A bit of humour was always welcome.
Around the base, rumours persisted about the pilots in Edmonton and their ongoing efforts to resolve the issue of vacation pay. Then, on an otherwise typical day of operations in the North, the dispatcher’s voice crackled over the air, directing all planes to land as quickly as they could safely do so – by order of the Labour Relations Board.
Walter wasn’t in the air at that moment, but many of his colleagues were. Puzzled, they found places to land, and within the hour the entire fleet was grounded. Pilots, along with their passengers and cargo, waited on the ground for several hours before receiving the instruction to resume operations.
From that day on, all Gateway pilots were paid in compliance with the labour laws of the day. It took a few days for the story of what had happened that afternoon in Edmonton to reach Fort Smith, but when it did, and it was quite a tale.
As Walter heard it, a representative from the Labour Relations Board had arrived unannounced to meet with the company manager. He began the meeting without pleasantries.
“I hear you owe your guys their holidays,” he said.
The manager replied, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
The LRB representative turned to the company dispatcher and said, “Order all your airplanes to the ground.” The dispatcher did as he was told, grounding the entire fleet.
Once he had management’s full attention, the LRB representative explained – in very simple terms – the vacation pay requirements set out in law. With their aircraft sitting idle, Gateway’s management team quickly came up with a plan to compensate the pilots, and within a few hours, the planes were back in the air.
The story of the unusual events of the day spread quickly through the staff, though Walter suspected it grew a little more elaborate with every telling.
Walter was too new to the company to have been directly involved in the dispute – he, like the other junior pilots, was simply grateful to have a flying job. Still, he appreciated the efforts of the senior pilots who had pushed for fair pay; their success would make the long days of the upcoming fire season feel much more worthwhile.
Walter was surprised to learn that in some years in the North, forest fires broke out before the ice was even off the lakes – sometimes as early as April or May. The brush and grass that had grown up the previous summer had died off in the fall, and when there was little snowfall over the winter, it left the ground bare. As the days warmed in the spring, the dead vegetation dried quickly, and the first lightning storms of the season often set it ablaze.
Sometimes, the airplanes were still on skis while the bush was burning, because the lakes remained frozen. As the ice began to melt, it softened first around the shore, creating a narrow band of open water. The planes could still land on skis, but they couldn’t get close to land. Supplies and firefighting equipment had to be unloaded out on the ice, and then the pilots would take off again. Crews on the ground would then have to walk out across the thinning ice to haul the supplies ashore. It was a dangerous situation for everyone involved.
More than once, Walter thought perhaps it would be better to let the fires burn, at least the ones far from towns or infrastructure, rather than putting so many people at risk each season.
Once the ice melted enough to expose open water on some lakes, one of the planes would be sent to Edmonton to have its skis removed and floats installed for the summer. It would return north, and another aircraft would go south in turn. By the time the lakes were fully clear of ice, all the planes would be on floats again.
When a strip of open water appeared on a lake, the rest of the ice went quickly. In the final stages of the melt, the ice “candled”, meaning its structure changes. Instead of being solid and opaque, it broke down into vertical, column-like crystals that weakened it even further, making it treacherous for pilots and ground crews alike. But once the ice had candled, it never lasted long. Complete breakup came soon after.
In the spring of 1969, Gateway added another plane to the fleet: a de Havilland Beaver, equipped with both wheels and skis. Designed for short takeoffs and landings, the Beaver could lift heavy loads of fuel, supplies, or passengers from small lakes or rough airstrips that few other planes could manage. A single-engine, high-wing workhorse, it had quickly earned its reputation as one of the most reliable bush planes ever built.
The Beaver was completely different to any of the other aircraft Walter had flown. All the aircraft he had previously flown were either naturally aspirated or turbocharged – meaning the engines relied solely on atmospheric pressure, or a turbocharger powered by exhaust gases, to draw air in. The Beaver, however, had a supercharged radial engine, where a mechanical compressor forced extra air into the cylinders, boosting power even at altitude.
In the naturally aspirated and turbocharged aircraft, the procedure for takeoff was simple: you just pushed the throttle to the wall. With the Beaver’s supercharged engine, everything depended on altitude. The pilot had to watch the manifold pressure gauge and advance the throttle only to a specific number – never fully to the wall.
Walter was scheduled to be checked out on the new aircraft. On June 22, 1969, Walter met John Langdon at Instant Lake. Langdon briefed him on the Beaver’s operating parameters, then took him up for a familiarization flight, showing him the numbers he needed to watch. Once they landed, Walter took the Beaver up solo to get a feel for it. From then on, the Beaver was his main ride.
The Northwest Territories are enormous, roughly equal in land area to France, Portugal and Spain combined, and much of it is uninhabited wilderness. By early summer of 1969, as the days grew longer, fire season was in full force. Several large fires burned in Wood Buffalo National Park, and Gateway Aviation had a contract to support the logistical needs of the firefighting operations in the park. Walter and his fellow pilots flew firefighters, equipment, supplies, and fuel for helicopters into base camps set up strategically throughout the park.
Wood Buffalo National Park is vast – over 17,000 square miles – and dotted with hundreds of lakes. Most were shallow, but many provided water sources for the big twin-engine Canso water bombers, and safe landing spots for floatplanes. The lake water was dark brown, like tea, “muskeg tea” as everyone called it, tinted by tannins from the surrounding bogs. The colour made it impossible to see the rocky bottoms that often lay just inches below the surface, so pilots had to be cautious on every landing and takeoff.
One lake, on the Hay River side of the park, stood out to Walter. Instead of rocks, it had a thick muck bottom and barely enough water to float a plane. Still, it was a strategic location for the firefighting crews, so the pilots landed in the muck, dropped off their loads, and with an empty plane, they could power their aircraft back out. When the planes returned to Fort Smith at day’s end, it was easy to tell who had been to that camp; their aircraft was in despicable condition, coated inside and out with thick muck.
At another camp, a helicopter pilot reported the average depth of the nearby lake was three feet – “plenty for a floatplane.” In reality, the depth ranged from a few inches to three feet and a few inches, with massive boulders hidden just below the surface, ready to tear off a float. Walter found that out firsthand when he landed there with an Otter. As the plane touched down, he noticed perfect circles of ripples forming ahead of him, ripples caused by rocks sitting just beneath the surface. He made a careful, tense taxi and takeoff, and when he returned to base, he mentioned the condition of the lake to Barney. Gateway pilots stopped flying in; helicopters handled the camp instead.
Fire season was hard on everyone. With so many hours of daylight, the work never seemed to stop. Pilots and ground crews often worked twenty-hour days, flying, unloading, and loading again. The work was often physically demanding. When Walter hauled fuel barrels into a camp, there was a better-than-fair chance he would also be the guy unloading them. Everybody was busy and did whatever work was in front of them. At night, he would head straight for his camper in Fort Smith, grab a few hours of sleep, and head back to the base for another long day. Exhausting as it was, he wouldn’t have traded it. In just a few summers, he had grown to love the rhythm of the northern work, and all that came with it.
When the fires were finally under control, Walter was sent back to one of the camps he had supplied during the height of the season to collect empty fuel barrels. He landed the Beaver on the same lake he had used weeks earlier, but this time, the aircraft came to an abrupt stop instead of gliding across the surface. He had run aground. Peering out the door, he saw there were only a few inches of water left in the lake, and his floats had hung up on the rocky bottom.
Fortunately, the Beaver had enough power to pull itself free, but not with a load. Even the empty barrels were too much, so he had to leave them behind until the water level rose again. As he urged the Beaver off the shallow lake, Walter couldn’t help by think how lucky the pilots of the big Canso water bombers had been when they scooped water from that same lake. If anything had gone wrong, and they had been forced to land, they would have never gotten one of those heavy aircraft airborne again.
Later that summer, Walter was assigned to fly a Water Resources crew on a circuit to check water gauges across the North. They made several stops, but the gauge on the Arctic Red River was the most challenging to reach. There was only one stretch of river deep enough for a floatplane to land. A small tin boat was cached there for the crew to use to reach the gauge. Walter set them down at that spot, and waited while they unloaded their gear and took the boat downstream to do their work. When they returned, he was ready to fly them out.
The takeoff procedure from that location was always a little tricky. Walter had to taxi out into the current, throttle back until the engine was idling as low as it would go, and let the Beaver drift backward until it ran aground. That way, a clear stretch of deeper water was ahead for takeoff. At the far end of the deep pool was a cataract – a steep, foaming slope of water, like a small waterfall, and he needed to be airborne before he reached it.
On this day, though, when Walter idled the engine and let the plane drift, it ran aground much sooner than expected. The spring runoff had shifted the riverbed, leaving him with barely half the distance he had anticipated. There wasn’t much room between where the Beaver now sat, and the cataract that he had to clear. Turning downstream wasn’t an option; the current would push him too far before he could get on the step.
He thought through his options, then pulled the stick all the way back, pressing the heels of the floats firmly against the bottom of the river. That gave him time to spool up the engine before he released it, and the Beaver powered forward. Just as he reached the cataract, the airspeed needle lifted off the peg, barely 50mph, the first mark on the dial, but it was enough. Walter eased the stick back a little bit, and the Beaver lifted, hauling itself over the cataract. Once clear, he lowered the nose to gain speed, until he reached a normal climb speed of around 80mph.
The Beaver had done it, loaded with passengers and their equipment. He had already been impressed by the Beaver, and this had only deepened his respect.
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Author’s Notes:
N.B.1: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?”
To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom, and you can read her story here, and now, “Learning to Fly” is the story of my dad.
Walter Harms was the oldest son of Mary and Jake Harms, Mennonites who fled to Canada in search of safety and the hope for a better future. He was a curious child, always interested in the land they lived on, and how things worked. As a young man, this curiosity led him to respond to an advertisement for flying lessons, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Walter is my dad, and this is his story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024-25. The story is pieced together from Dad’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person.
N.B.2: The town of Fort Smith is located within Treaty 8 Territory, and encompasses the traditional homelands of Salt River First Nation, Smith’s Landing First Nation, and the Indigenous Metis people of Fort Smith.
N.B.3: If you are an aviation buff, or just interested in learning more about the de Havilland Beaver, Neil Aird has compiled a comprehensive website that catalogs over a 1000 individual aircraft, including the aircraft Walter flew in 1969 and beyond. Here is the link to detail about CF-GQZ specifically, and here is a link to Neil’s “Master Index” of de Havilland Beavers, 1-2000. There are a few he is still searching for, perhaps you can help him out?
Great chapter! The 'old as the hills' Cessna and Walter’s silent hardware upgrade wish was spot on. Truely relatable.