Here, on the Earth’s last frontier, mavericks are still free to set their own course and dictate their own fate. It’s a perfect milieu for someone like Buffalo Joe, who runs his business according to a simple mantra that rings true throughout northern Canada: get ’er done.
Since Joe founded Buffalo, the airline has made a name for itself by connecting people living in remote northern communities with the goods they need to live. Up here, the company serves as a lifeline to the North. Take Buffalo out of the picture, and precious food and supplies wouldn’t reach the many northern communities that are otherwise cut off from the rest of the world. Although Buffalo delivers freight throughout the year, its effect is most acutely felt during the long, dark winters.
There is no way to characterize a day in the life of Buffalo as “typical.” I watched Mikey arrange flights to carry heavy equipment to remote mining camps, deliver massive diesel generators to Inuit communities that rely on them for electricity, ensure a group of bureaucrats would make an early-morning meeting in Whitehorse, and move a single man and his dog to a distant town to start a new life. In other words, if it needs to be moved, Buffalo can move it—and likely already has.
The backbone of Buffalo’s winter freight operation is its so-called “valley run,” a trip that sees the Curtiss-Wright C-46 fly the 1,700-kilometre (1,056-mile) round trip up and down the Mackenzie River from Yellowknife to four communities that can be accessed only by air nine months of the year: Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope. Several times each week, the C-46 starts its engines and soars over the valley. And if I was impressed by the DC-3 when I first laid eyes and hands upon her beautifully dimpled frame, I had no idea what lay in store for me when the C-46 was moved into the hangar. It is nothing short of a massive, yawning beast.
The Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando made a splash when it was introduced to the world at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It was heralded as the latest and greatest in high-altitude pressurized aircraft, ready for the enjoyment of the flying public.
The plane was not formally released until two years later, just as World War II was taking over the global stage. The designers of the C-46 may have envisioned it as a glamorous passenger airplane, but fate turned it into a bare-knuckled military aircraft. Instead of carrying passengers to the far corners of the globe, the C-46 played host to war supplies, paratroopers, ammunition, artillery, and wounded soldiers.
A total of 1,430 C-46s were built, a far cry from the more than 10,000 DC-3s that dominated the skies during the war. But the C-46 offered benefits that the DC-3 couldn’t even touch. Known by a variety of nicknames to the flyboys who manned her controls in both the European and Pacific theatres (she was called the “Killer Whale,” the “Curtiss Calamity,” the “T-Cat,” or “Dumbo,” after the flying elephant she resembles), the Commando could fly at high altitude and carry massive payloads, two of its most important traits.
The twin-engine C-46 was helped by the addition of its power plants, the newly invented 18-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-2800, each of which delivered 2,000 horsepower. They were so powerful that they could keep a lightly loaded C-46 in the air even if one engine failed, an attractive characteristic at a time when bullets were routinely screaming through the skies. When both engines were firing, the plane could carry as much as fifteen thousand pounds of cargo.
Though the 46 made its presence known throughout the war, it was perhaps best known for its role in the China-Burma-India theatre, where it carried supplies over the jagged peaks of the Himalayas from India and Burma to troops fighting in China. The C-46 wasn’t the only plane to serve this role, but it was certainly the best.
After World War II ended, military service continued for the 46, essentially dooming its potential as a passenger aircraft. Its presence was still felt around the globe, though in far more covert ways. The CIA used the plane to support French forces fighting communist insurgencies in French Indochinese countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and in Thailand. The 46 also played a part in clandestine anti-communist campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as supplying Chiang Kai-shek’s troops while they battled Mao’s Communists. In 1961, the C-46 operated in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The planes even served in the early years of the Vietnam War before being officially retired from active combat duty in 1968.
The Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando played a significant role in the U.S. military’s World War II efforts in Europe and Asia, and the company was quick to inform the public of its successes in these theatres. After the war, the CIA became an avid user of the plane.
Life for the C-46 did not stop there. The aircraft’s rapid climb rate and high service ceiling made it ideal for flying over the Andes in countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, and Chile. It easily covered vast stretches of South American jungle where roads did not exist. Today, a handful of C-46s are still in use throughout the world, transporting goods to otherwise inaccessible regions from Alaska to Kenya.
Buffalo Joe likes the C-46 because the aluminum alloy aircraft is virtually indestructible and can take off and land on small airstrips, making it the ideal candidate for the valley run. The way Joe sees it, the C-46 must be a great plane if it’s still working regularly around the world. As he says, a lot of planes have come and gone since then. Rod McBryan, director of maintenance at Buffalo and Joe’s eldest son, agrees. As Rod says, given the weather conditions in the north, the 46 is the only logical choice to be running tons of goods up and down the Mackenzie Valley.
Despite its rich history and legendary status in the aviation world, the C-46 is hampered by one significant drawback: it’s a bitch to fly. With its wide fuselage, broad tail, and small rudder, the C-46 is extremely vulnerable to crosswinds and is only rated to land in a twenty-two-kilometre-an-hour (fourteen-mile-per-hour) crosswind. Compounding the issue is the fact that most of the aircraft’s weight is located behind the main wheels, which means the back end can swing around if the plane’s not landed straight. And as Buffalo’s former chief pilot Arnie Schreder says, a C-46 tail that starts to swing on landing will continue to swing on landing. “If you look around the Arctic, there are C-46s strewn all over it,” he says. “And those crashes were always due to wind.”
If the secret to an airline’s success with the C-46 is expert pilots, then Buffalo has nothing to worry about. The 46 may be the toughest plane in the Buffalo fleet to fly, but Joe’s system of separating the wheat from the chaff among his young pilots means that only the brightest, most competent, and hardest-working pilots get to sit at the controls of that massive bird, and only after they’ve paid their dues on smaller, easier-to-fly craft like the DC-3.
The “Dumbo” was an imposing figure in the skies over World War II battlefields. Here the C-46 flies in tandem with the Curtiss p-40 Warhawk, one of the most famous fighter planes used during the war.
That fact holds true for all but one member of the Buffalo team. At six-feet-seven, Scott Blue is simply too big to fit behind the controls of the DC-3. He can squeeze himself in there tightly enough, cross his legs, and cruise. But control the ailerons (the small, hinged “winglets” attached to the trailing edges of the wings) and rudder pedals with his feet and try to bring it down safely in a crosswind? Not happening. So Joe and Scott had no choice: Scott earned his stripes on the C-46.
“I love the 46 because you can never take it for granted,” Blue says. “It’ll kick your ass, no matter how good a pilot you are.” Even captains who have flown the C-46 for thousands of hours will tell you the plane stubbornly refuses to be mastered.
“A.J. [Decoste] is one of the best drivers I know, and even he has some days where a landing doesn’t go as well as he wanted,” Blue says. “And that man knows that plane cold. He