The Ice Pilots. Michael Vlessides

DST (Douglas Sleeper Transport) took to the air, followed soon after by its sister dayship, the twenty-one-seat DC-3. American Airlines introduced DC-3 passenger service on June 26, 1936.

      With the advent of the DC-3, air travel changed forever. The plane needed to refuel only three times during transcontinental trips, meaning people could fly from one side of North America to the other in as little as fifteen hours. The plane boasted amenities previously unheard of in air travel; passengers enjoyed such luxuries as on-board bathrooms and hot meals. For the first time, passengers could stand up and walk around the plane while airborne.

      Thanks to a comfort and convenience previously unknown in passenger air travel, more people took to the skies than ever, and rail travel faced serious competition for the first time. Some airlines realized they could make more money from passenger travel than from shipping mail and other cargo, so it didn’t take long before American Airlines’ competitors jumped on the bandwagon: over four hundred DC-3 orders were placed almost immediately.

      War changed the landscape once again, and the DC-3 was the world’s plane of choice to move troops and cargo. During World War II, some ten thousand U.S. military versions of the DC-3 were built, though under different names: the C-47 Skytrain, the C-53 Skytrooper, the R4D Skytrain, and the Dakota. These planes boasted reinforced metal floors, larger access doors, and a towing cleat for pulling gliders. The plane could carry twenty-eight fully equipped paratroopers or as much as six thousand pounds of cargo, which might include a jeep and trailer, or even an anti-tank gun. Yet the Americans were not alone in their love of the DC-3. The armed forces of many countries involved in the war also used the DC-3 to move troops and cargo.

      In one famous incident in China, a DC-3 earned the nickname “Whistling Willie, the Flying Sieve” after it was riddled with bullets from Japanese machine-gun strafers. After Chinese labourers patched more than a thousand holes with pieces of canvas, the “3” was deemed airworthy enough to carry sixty-one refugees—far more than its intended payload—to India. The plane encountered a tropical storm en route, ripping the canvas patches to shreds. With nothing to cover its myriad holes, the plane whistled through the air like a screaming banshee for two hours through hostile skies. When it finally landed, an Army major approached the weary pilot and growled: “Why did you bother to radio ahead? We could hear you fifty miles away!”

      Production of the DC-3 came to a halt in 1942, but that didn’t prevent commercial airlines from adding the planes to their fleets in the years to come. When the war ended in 1945, militaries around the world—particularly the U.S. military—found themselves sitting on more DC-3s than they could ever hope to use. The solution was to convert them back for civilian use and sell them to commercial airlines. This almost unending supply of cheap and easily maintained airplanes helped usher in the postwar air transport industry. In total, 16,079 DC-3s had been built, the majority in California.

      Of the thousands of DC-3s built more than seventy years ago, approximately four hundred are believed to be still flying, primarily as cargo aircraft, though they are also used in aerial spraying, military transport, sightseeing and skydiving, and as passenger airlines. The fact that it is still in daily use makes the “3” unique among prewar aircraft. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that the plane is used in some of the harshest working conditions on the planet. It has an uncanny ability to land on improvised runways of grass, dirt, and ice (its landing gear can be outfitted with skis), making it popular in remote locations and developing countries, where runways are not always paved. From deserts to jungles to the High Arctic, the DC-3 has been there—and is still there.

      Buffalo Joe is among those who stand on the front lines of DC-3 dedication, never wavering from his firm belief that when it comes to reliability and efficiency, little else compares to this aging warbird. The company currently owns thirteen of the aircraft—six of which it keeps running at any one time—spread among its various hangars in Yellowknife, Hay River, and Penhold (Red Deer), Alberta. The DC-3 comprises the largest percentage (27 percent) of Buffalo’s current fleet.

      Joe will tell you it’s one of the most reliable and trouble-free airplanes ever built. That’s no surprise, really. One of the most important features of the “3”—a design specification ordered by none other than pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was a TWA director at the time—is that the plane should always be able to fly on one engine.

      Perhaps that’s why pilots and mechanics alike are so dedicated to this creaky old bird, a pilot’s aircraft if ever there was one. There’s a common saying among those who know the plane best: “The only replacement for a DC-3 is another DC-3.” Buffalo Joe sees it much the same way, though he adds his unique flair when describing the merits of the plane: “If you really want to experience flight in this life, you have to strap a DC-3 to your ass,” he says.

      He’s right. Though I’ll likely never know what it feels like to fly a DC-3, in the months to come I would have ample opportunity to sit in the cockpit of that great groaning beast as she made her way across northern skies. And like Joe says, there is nothing—nothing—that compares to soaring above the world’s last great wilderness in a plane that once flew clandestine missions during World War II.

      Having a DC-3 strapped to his ass is where Joe is in his element. The metamorphosis that occurs in his personality at every Sunday–Friday afternoon is remarkable. Here is a man who carries the weight of running an airline on his shoulders for most of his waking hours. He worries about the safety of his aircraft and the people he calls upon to fly them. He worries about the employees who depend upon Buffalo Airways to pay their mortgages and put food on their tables. He worries about remote northern communities that would be stuck without essential food, products, and services if his planes missed their deliveries. But at his core, Joe McBryan is a pilot, and he is never more comfortable than when he sits down early every morning and late every afternoon (except Saturday) in the cockpit of C-GPNR, C-GWIR, or C-GWZS, the three DC-3s that ply the skies between Yellowknife on the north-central coast of Great Slave Lake and Hay River on its southwestern shore. “It’s like night and day,” Mikey says, “a complete change of personality. He’ll yell and scream all day, and once he gets that over with and gets on that plane, he’s happy.”

      It doesn’t take long for even the newest arrival to the Buffalo family to see it. By day, Joe is a hardened businessman, one with exceptionally high demands for the people around him, no matter what position they hold in the business’s hierarchy. He rarely cracks a smile, and he prowls around the hangar and adjoining offices like a lion on the hunt. If there’s something going on in the business, Joe knows about it, is likely worried about it, and will probably find something about it that needs to be improved. Walk across the tarmac of the Yellowknife or Hay River airports to the stairs of the DC-3, however, and there’s a different person waiting for you. Sure, he looks like the Joe McBryan you’ve been scared to bump into in the hangar, but this Joe McBryan is busy greeting passengers as they board the plane. He chats with old friends, welcomes them aboard, laughs and smiles as they offer their stories of the day. He is, in a word, charming.

      And the more I came to know this man, the more I realized that he needs to do this. He needs to fly, needs to be behind the controls of the aging World War II beauties to which his name is so closely linked. But he also needs this kind of relaxed, gentle human interaction that he seems to find so difficult at other times during the day. Because while he is loath to show it to the outside world, Joe McBryan is really an ol’ softie at heart.

      You certainly couldn’t tell by his work ethic, though. Buffalo has been offering its scheduled Yellowknife–Hay River service continuously since 1982. Joe flies each one-hour (200-kilometre) leg across the belly of the great lake, leaving Hay River at 7:30 every morning and returning home at 5:00 every evening. That’s twelve flights each week, or 624 flights a year. So between 1982 and 2010—give or take the odd missed flight for weather—Buffalo Airways’ daily DC-3 airline passenger service flew 17,472 times. Joe McBryan was at the helm for almost all of them.

      It makes me wonder if he ever looks forward to a day off or (God forbid!) a vacation. “Why would I go on holiday?” he snapped at me when I asked him when he’d last taken a break for a little R & R. “So I could sit on my ass?”