The pilot and the pantyhose!

Interesting news in Canadian aviation this week. Yeah I know I’m an airplane nut, but anyone who has lived in the North appreciates the de Havilland Twin Otter, one of the best airplanes of the 20th century. Well it’s so good that they’re going to start making them again. A Canadian company called Viking Air Ltd. plans to build another 200 planes over the next ten years. They used to make them at the plant on the Downsview air base where I lived as a kid.
One of my fave Twin Otter stories takes place some years ago when I was on a photo shoot with some fellas from Austin Airways. We landed on the ice for a refuelling stop at a place called Ivujivik, on the Hudson Strait just below Baffin Island. It was so goddamn cold I’ll never forget it. And we were still 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The pilot was worried that the fuel, stored inside a big rubber bladder, would be turned to jelly because of the cold. Luckily it wasn’t, but the windchill was seriously around minus 70! I’ll never forget how cold that felt. But because we were refuelling, everyone had to leave the plane. A group of Inuit villagers came out on the ice and boiled up some tea for us. (There is no Tim Horton’s in Ivujivik.) Then the pilot did the strangest thing. He pulled out a small package, and unwrapped it. It was women’s pantyhose! I didn’t know what to think until he explained that the nylon pantyhose was the best fuel filter you could use for bush flying. He said you don’t take chances when flying in the Arctic.
You may remember the Twin Otter from a famous news story from a few years ago. There was a women in Antarctica who desperately needed breast surgery as she was critically ill. The United States military, with all their power and might, tried TWICE to carry out a rescue using their biggest all-weather cargo planes. They couldn’t do it because of a howling winter storm.
But then a Canadian charter company, flying a simple Twin Otter, took off from Alberta and flew to the bottom of the world, landed on the ice on skis, picked up the dying woman and flew her safely back to a hospital in New Zealand where she was treated. How cool is that?!