So I fired up again and played with the mixture—we had a manual mixture control in those days. It would run fine just before it quit. I came to the conclusion it just had to be the carburetor. Trouble was I had never taken one apart before. I pulled the carb off the intake and split it, and out fell a little ball check-valve. It was a bad scene because I hadn’t the faintest idea where it had come from. I thought, Oh my God! Here we are, way out in the tul[i]es [bush] and our only way to get out is in that damned helicopter!
Anyway, I found the float level was way out, way beyond limits, so I set that all up. Now I really had to decide where this little ball had to go. In the end the only place that looked likely was the accelerator pump, so I popped it in there, clamped the carburetor together and bolted it back onto the manifold. When I fired up the engine, it ran like a charm. I didn’t bother telling Don about the worry-session with the check-valve. When he got back from a quick test flight and thanked me because the engine was running good, I just shrugged and said, “That’s what I’m here for.”28
Engineer Ian Duncan and pilot Mike McDonagh had a similar experience when they worked for the Canadian Army doing barometer surveys out of Puntzi Lake, about 50 miles (80 kilometres) west of Williams Lake. Ian Duncan recalled:
About a week after we’d arrived here, Mike took off with this lieutenant and his barometer and all his instruments and away they went. Be gone four hours, Duncan, he said . . . So four hours went by and then five hours, and I started to get up off my cot in the tent; I started to walk around the tent. By the time it got dark, I had worn a trench about two feet deep around the tent—just walking around . . . Finally, just after breakfast next morning, in comes [Mike] back to camp. He’d walked all night and you could see the blisters on his feet; his feet were bleeding.
It seems that Mike had been taking off from a little sand beach and tried to pull up too sharply and lost his revs. The helicopter had ended up in the lake. The Army lent Ian a four-wheel-drive Dodge Power Wagon, and “making use of the winch on the front of it, [he] hauled the vehicle through several swamps and forded rivers to get to the damaged helicopter. Then [he] used the winch to pull [the helicopter] up onto the beach.” Okanagan sent a new engine, and they proceeded to rebuild the helicopter right there.
About a month later they moved from Puntzi Lake right up to Satigi Lake, just south of Aklavik [on] the estuary of the Mackenzie River. A week after that, Ian recalls, the helicopter disappeared again:
“Mike went off on another of these barometer trips. He said he’d be back by four o’clock, but he wasn’t, and I wore another trench around my tent. It took us four or five hours to get through to Aklavik [on the radio], where we could get some help to go and look for him.”
Eventually a Beaver belonging to BC Yukon Air Services and flown by company owner Bill Dalzell was sent from Aklavik to Satigi Lake to start a search. The Beaver’s condition shocked Ian Duncan: “He had the most beat-up old Beaver you ever saw in your life. The rudder cables on the floats were so loose he’d tied knots in them to bring them up to proper tension. You couldn’t see the front of the engine for the bugs and oil and stuff. You’ve never seen such a shambles in your life.”
From the Beaver Ian spotted smoke and saw the undersides of two helicopter floats sticking up out of the water. This time Mike had been the victim of glassy water, and the machine’s floats had dug into the lake bed. He and his passenger escaped just before the machine turned over and sank.
Everyone was flown back to camp in the Beaver. Another Okanagan pilot, Eddy Amman, brought a replacement machine up from Vancouver. Meanwhile, Ian returned to the accident site in the Beaver, and after a struggle with come-alongs [manually operated ratchet winches], they managed to get the submerged helicopter ashore where they dismantled it, loaded the pieces into the Beaver and flew them back to camp to start the rebuild. Mike McDonagh was “given a rest” after this second accident, but it was merely a temporary setback for Mike; he went on to a distinguished career as a helicopter pilot.29
The living conditions in the camps continued to be appalling. Eric Cowden remembers that after Yehinika and Chukachida lakes, he and Don Poole were sent to Paddy Lake, about 30 miles (50 kilometres) south of Atlin, to work with a topographic survey crew:
Well, when you were at this camp at Chukachida, you were lucky to get a can of sardines thrown at you. And when we were ferrying from there up to Paddy Lake near Atlin—incidentally, by now the old girl was perking along fine, no plugs missed or twitches or anything—Don suddenly made like he was going to land. And I thought, I wonder what that old bugger heard that I didn’t hear.
Anyway, we landed in a moose patch, and I said to Don, “What the hell did we land here for?”
“Well,” he replied, “you and I have been out a long time. We’re going to take ourselves a couple of days off. We’re going up to Atlin.”
So we poured in our spare gas, and when we took off again, Don flew much higher than I’d ever seen him fly before, and we went right over Paddy Lake. Of course, there’s a brand new crew down there, all excited, all ready to go to work. They were waving frantically. We pretended we didn’t even see them. Old Don was a good 5,000 feet [1,525 metres] [up] and we just chugga-chugged right up into Atlin.
The first thing we did in Atlin was to go to the café and order lunch, and the first thing I ordered was a salad.
“Aren’t you going to have a steak?” Don asked.
“Yes, later, but I need to start with this. I think I’m getting scurvy. My gums are all sore.”
“Me, too,” said Don. “That’s why we’re here!”
We lived like peasants out there in those days. It was expected of you, part of the job, so you accepted it. Changed days now; nobody’ll do it anymore.30
Eric Cowden also remembered the mixture of anxiety and boredom on the job. He spent most evenings doing maintenance under constant attack by mosquitoes and blackflies, but during the day when the machine was out flying he had nothing to do:
You could usually fish and walk around the shore of the lake, learning something about the vegetation and the animals, but most of the time it was sheer boredom. You had nobody to talk to during the day but the cook, and he was nearly always a cranky old bastard. I tell you, I’ve read thousands—and I mean thousands—of pocket books. In fact, I can pick one up even today and probably go through the first paragraph and say, “Dammit, I’ve read that one!”31
Later that year, Eric was sent on the S-55 course, the only civilian in the class:
I had the instructors at Sikorsky breaking down the engine, gearbox and transmission and anything I felt that I would have to repair in the field. The military guys were not happy campers as it added a lot more time on the course and took up the instructors’ time. The military guys were just used to changing parts, which they had many on hand. I was going to Kemano and would need all the information on the S-55 that I could get. I tried hard to beat Sig Hubenig’s course marks but he beat me by one mark. That’s why I guess he was my mentor.32
Eric Cowden became the base engineer of the Kemano project, in charge of the S-55s as well as the Bell 47s. By that time Bell CF-JJB had been involved in various accidents and rebuilt a number of times, whereas JJC was accident-free, and pilots noticed that JJB’s performance always lagged behind JJC’s. This really bothered Eric, so he changed all JJB’s components including the engine, swash plate and transmission. However, he could never get that machine to perform as well as JJC.
Okanagan’s first S-55s were leased from the RCAF and, though they had the Okanagan name on the machine, they still retained the RCAF logo on the tail boom, which shows up in photographs. Eric