The Pilot and the pantyhose ...

 I have to write in a blog at work on occasion, so I figured I should share some of the stuff I write in my personal blog. Enjoy the following...

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I have been lucky in my career to have gone to interesting places. Not that I was ever a foreign correspondent, but I have been on assignment in foreign lands and have seen some odd things. 

I like to tell friends about the episode I call ‘The Pilot and the Pantyhose’. Before you let your imagination run wild, let me assure you this is really a mundane story, but the set up is good.

Several years ago, I was invited to shoot some photos with the Austin Airways company as they travelled north (wayyyy up north) to visit some of the destinations in the Eastern Arctic where they had customers and employees. At one time, Austin was based in Sudbury. In the 1970s and 1980s, Austin was headquartered in Timmins. 

The purpose of our trip was what the fellows at Austin called a Santa Claus flight. They were bringing gifts of food and candy to the people in small communities. In fact one of those flights took us to Greenland, but that's a story for another day.

On this particular trip we were headed to Baffin Island, but our itinerary called for a stop at  Ivujivik, which is the Inuktitut name for a tiny settlement on the northern tip of Quebec. It was December. We didn't land in the village, but a few kilometres out on the ice of the Hudson Strait.

As part of the stop, it was a chance to refuel the de Havilland Twin Otter airplane. We had departed from Timmins, some 1,500 kilometres south, earlier that morning and now it was close to lunchtime. 

As the plane landed on the ice, we noticed several of the villagers approaching the landing strip on snowmobiles. This was nice. As soon as we stepped out of the plane, we were hit with a blast of the coldest air I can remember. I also noticed that at this time of the day, there was the merest hint of daylight. Most of the morning we had been flying in the dark. 

The Inuit villagers greeted us with smiles and handshakes. Businessman Bill Deluce, not to be confused with his brother Bob of Porter Airlines fame, was the chief pilot on this day. At the time, Bill was one of the working executives at Austin in Timmins and a regular pilot. The Deluce family owned Austin Airways.

When Bill got out of the plane, he was greeted by several of the locals who knew him by name. Bill was more than pleased to see the villagers, several of whom were Austin customers. In no time at all, some of the villagers had set up a tiny stove on the ice and boiled up a large cooking pot of sweet tea.

I cannot think of a time when a drink of hot tea was more welcome. The temperature was somewhere around minus-40 and the windchill was pushing the temperature down to minus-60. 

I noticed that people kept moving around trying to get out of the wind by standing close to the plane or close to the stove. I stood next to a large rubberized bladder, about five feet in diameter and a little taller than six feet. This was a big rubber bag holding airplane fuel. Next to it was a pump, a length of hose and a nozzle. It was big enough to block the wind. 

That's when I noticed Deluce approaching the fuel bladder. He reached into a leather satchel (all pilots carried satchels in those days) and pulled out a small flat package containing pantyhose. Well, of course. Any man who has ever been a husband knows what this looks like. That was enough to get my nosey news curiosity boiled up. 

As I stood back and watched, Deluce ripped open the package and extracted a pair of pantyhose. Yes, he did. Then he did the strangest thing. He doubled up the legs of the pantyhose and slid them over the fuel nozzle. Then, he inserted the nozzle into the fuel port on the side of the plane and the fuel pumping commenced.

I, like a few others nearby, was a bit wide-eyed at what we were seeing.

Deluce explained it easily enough. Poor man's fuel filter.

He revealed that the rubber fuel bladder had a problem in that during extreme cold weather, tiny particles of rubber could break off inside the bladder and could inadvertently be pumped into the airplane. By wrapping the pantyhose around the nozzle, the particles would be trapped. 

Tiny rubber particles are not the sort of thing you want sucked into an aircraft engine while flying in the Eastern Arctic. The other thing I learned about — the hard way — as many travelers do, is to ask for clothing advice when travelling to places with climate extremes.

Having survived winters in North Bay, Sudbury and Timmins, I figured I was in tune with the sort of clothing I would need for a winter flight to Baffin Island. Not so. I brought denim jeans and three pairs of long-johns.  As it would turn out, it was so cold that I wore all three pairs of long-johns, and just changed the inner pair from day to day. 

I noticed the airplane crew guys were all wearing winter leggings, or snowmobile bib-pants. I remembered that for future flights. 

I also noticed when we were at the Austin bunkhouse in Povungnituk, on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, that the air crew guys didn't wear pants under their snowmobile leggings. It was fashionable just to wear long-johns. It's all you need to stay warm. One didn't really care. Arriving at the bunkhouse — at P.O.V. By The Sea — as Bob Deluce was fond of saying, we could sit around in our long-johns. There was steak, beer and a billiard table to help pass the time.