North Country Aviation Tales - Search & Rescue, Jets, Bush Flying And The Airlines

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.

The true life story of Canadian Arctic bush pilot Don C. Braun is must reading for aviation fans everywhere. His fireside narrative plus 32 pages of photos capture the spirit and adventures of the first man to land a wheeled aircraft at the North Pole. Born on a farm near St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1913, Don built and flew a glider as a teenager and then operated an aircraft repair shop at Harlem Airport in Chicago in the 1930's. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941 and flew the North West Staging Route from Edmonton to Alaska. His first bush flying was in an RCAF Norseman during the war years, and he went on to become one of the best known and most respected Canadian Arctic bush pilots of his time. He joined with Max Ward in getting Wardair off the ground as a small charter operation out of Yellowknife in the 1950's. While Max grew Wardair into one of the world's premier charter airlines, Don preferred the cockpit and the North. His stories of close calls and life in the North always spoke his mind, and this handsome book does no less. The Artic Fox, as he was known in the North, was superbly resourceful, bailing himself out of tight situations almost daily in his days of High Arctic flying. A great pilot and an even better mechanic, Don shares details aviation fans will know and love. This is your book, pilots and all others who love flying.

In the intervening years he was a military pilot, bush pilot and test pilot. He taught fledgling aviators at Camp Borden. He survived forced landings on frozen lakes. He was the first to fly new air mail routes in an open cockpit plane. He tested newly-built Hawker Hurricanes before they joined the Battle of Britain and an early version of the "flying wing".

He may well have been the only person to work on all three of the only fighter aircraft ever developed in Canada: the FDB-1 Gregor, the CF-100 Canuck and the CF-105 Avro Arrow.

Valuable information for pilots regarding operation of aircraft and associating issues. Learn from the experience of others.