Vertical Horizons
Vertical Horizons
The History of Okanagan Helicopters
Douglas M. Grant
Copyright © 2017 Douglas M. Grant
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
Edited by Betty Keller
Indexed by Kyla Shauer
Text and dust jacket design by Shed Simas / Onça Design
Printed and bound in Canada
Photos on p. 2 and 126 courtesy of Okanagan Helicopters; photo on p. 6 courtesy of Tellef Vaasjo; photo on p. 8 courtesy of Sikorsky Historical Archives
Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Grant, Douglas M. (Douglas McGregor), author
Vertical horizons : the history of Okanagan Helicopters / Douglas M. Grant.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55017-813-5 (hardcover).--ISBN 978-1-55017-814-2 (HTML)
1. Okanagan Helicopters Ltd--History. 2. Helicopter transportation--British Columbia--History. I. Title.
HE9793.C22B7 2017 387.7’335209711 C2017-903641-6
C2017-903642-4
This book is dedicated to all the pilots and engineers who lost their lives during their service with the helicopter industry.
Introduction
I was employed by Okanagan Helicopters from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s, but it wasn’t until 2006, when I was working on an aircraft restoration project in Vancouver, that a friend, after listening to one of my stories, asked if a history of the company had ever been written. I was certain that someone had already done it but was surprised to discover the only information on the company was in Helicopters: The British Columbia Story and Helicopters in the High Country by Peter Corley-Smith and David N. Parker. While excellent, these books only cover the company’s early days and touch briefly on the Kemano project of the 1950s. I realized how much more there was to be told and that, if nothing was written down, an important part of Canadian aviation history would disappear.
Okanagan Helicopters went from humble beginnings in August 1947, when Carl Agar and Alf Stringer landed their first machine, a new Bell 47B-3, in Penticton, BC, to become the third-largest helicopter company in the world 40 years later, with 600 employees and over 125 machines in 33 countries. During my research I came to understand the extent of their accomplishments. In the early years Carl had faced the challenge of flying high-mountain terrain and started the first training school in Penticton to teach others how to do it. As the company grew, it began providing support to geological and topographic surveys, the forest, fisheries and mining industries, hydroelectric construction projects, petroleum exploration and operations as well as firefighting, heli-skiing, air ambulance and taxi services. The company’s helicopters seeded large areas of forest, trained military and civilian pilots in mountain flying, carried out polar bear counts in the High Arctic in all weather conditions and supported hydro tower installation. Two of their more dramatic operations involved relocating a 2,750-pound (1,250-kilogram) orca from a swimming pool to an aquarium and installing a rod to measure wind speed and air temperature on the top of the CN Tower in Toronto. The introduction of instrument flight rules (IFR) made it possible for Okanagan’s helicopters to fly to oil rigs 150 miles (240 kilometres) offshore and operate in the High Arctic in winter; one of their biggest challenges was flying IFR with under-slung loads in those long, dark Arctic days.
In 1965 they flew the first unescorted commercial helicopter ferry flight from the USA to the UK. A few years later an Okanagan S-61, again unescorted, flew from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Songkhla, Thailand, a distance of 12,659 miles (20,322 kilometres). Some of the countries that saw the bright orange helicopters with Okanagan’s hummingbird logo were Pakistan, India, Zaire, Egypt, Ireland, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Myanmar, Cambodia, China, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the USA, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Guyana, Haiti, Suriname, Peru, Venezuela and Greenland.
On the engineering side, in the early days Alf Stringer always found ways to keep the machines flying with a minimum of support when even the Department of Transport knew little about helicopter maintenance or operation. Often it was the crews in the field who came up with solutions to operational problems, which, once proven successful, were recorded in the company’s safety and operational standards manual and then adopted by other operators. Some of the more impressive engineering feats included the development of a monsoon bucket for forest fire control, a power-line stringer installed on an S-58 and a special bucket for moving salmon to spawning grounds. Other notable innovations included tree clippers for forestry operations, spraying equipment and drip torches, and Bambi Buckets for firefighting.
This book is an attempt to provide a record of Okanagan Helicopters’ entire 40 years of operation, the developments the company pioneered and the stories of the crews that made its success possible.
Douglas M. Grant,
West Kelowna, BC
Part One
In 1947 when the fledgling company that would become Okanagan Helicopters was beginning to take shape in BC’s Okanagan Valley, I was just taking my first tottering baby steps in the little town of Nairn on the northeast coast of Scotland. My father, who was stationed at RAF Dalcross nearby, subsequently took his small family to more exotic places—Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Singapore, Yemen—and at sixteen I followed him into the RAF where I trained as an air radar mechanic. It would be two more decades before my own history and that of Okanagan Helicopters ran in parallel. Thus, the story of the company’s early development that I have recounted in Part One of Vertical Horizons is taken, not from first-hand experience, but from both published and unpublished documents and from personal interviews with the people who were there at the time and who made it all happen.
Chapter One
The Early Years: 1945–50
In June 1945 Carl Agar, recently demobbed from the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), walked into the Rienterer-Bent car dealership