1954
For Okanagan Helicopters the year 1954 was very eventful. The company introduced a newsletter and established the Penticton Mountain Flying School, which is still in existence. The company’s machines carried out several medical emergency flights while working with Newfoundland’s Department of Fisheries, flew the Duke of Edinburgh from Kemano to Kitimat and Governor General Vincent Massey around Vancouver Island. Carl undertook a promotional tour to the USA, UK, Europe and New Guinea. In addition, the company began work on a new Vancouver airport facility at 4391 Agar Drive in Richmond with 10,000 square feet (930 square metres) of hangar space and 5,000 square feet (465 square metres) for offices. It would remain the company’s head office until 1987.
▲ Despite some success in the early 1950s, Okanagan still faced financial problems. Alf Stringer looks to Carl Agar for more money for spares; Agar, in turn, questions company president Glenn McPherson, who shows them his empty pockets. Image courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives, Fonds PR-1842
As work on the Kemano project wound down, Alcan cut its operating fleet to one S-55 and two Bell 47Ds, releasing the remaining S-55 and two Bell 47s for purchase by Okanagan, the S-55 going for $115,000. Fortunately, offsetting the loss of revenue from Alcan, the company received numerous inquiries from all over Canada and the US, including one for a geological survey in the Harrison Lake area of BC for the Dominion Exploration Ltd., a scintillometer survey of the North Thompson River for Warmac Exploration, and a freight lift operation in the Anyox area, 37 miles (60 kilometres) southwest of Stewart, BC. As a result of all this interest, management decided to set up two new subsidiaries to handle the workload. Agar Helicopters Consultants Ltd. would deal with both the Canadian and US military, and Scintillopter Ltd. would provide airborne Geiger and scintillometer surveys for geological exploration.
When the Kemano project was winding down, Carl released the following operational facts:
| Flying | 2,203 days |
| Helicopters in service | 4,551 days |
| Number of trips | 21,722 |
| Platform landings | 18,561 |
| Number of landings | 42,021 |
| Passengers | 20,433 |
| Freight | 2,008,405 pounds [91,0997 kilograms] |
| Air miles | 6,214.25 [10,000 kilometres] |
About that time all the S-55s in North America were grounded because of a manufacturing mistake. Jock Graham, who had left Okanagan to become a technical representative for Pratt and Whitney, discovered the mistake. He had been called to a mining camp in the Yukon to solve a problem with an S-55:
The pilot, Russ Lennox, kept having the engine almost fail. It looked like fuel starvation. He would land, shut down and then start the engine again, and everything would be good. He’d come back to camp, and the other engineer and I would just about tear the whole fuel system apart, and we couldn’t find anything. I was baffled. Then one day we were sitting around with all the screens [filters] out of the fuel system. One of them was a finger screen—a hollow tube with a fine mesh screen like a thimble on top of it. The mechanic from the Otter we were using picked it up and tried to poke a piece of grass up through the bottom hole. The grass wouldn’t go. When I had a good look, I found there was another very fine screen in the hole, where it certainly shouldn’t have been. The people who had made the filters for Pratt and Whitney had misread the drawings and this extra screen was causing the fuel starvation. So we had to ground every S-55 in North America until the second screen had been punched out.34
Another first for Okanagan was a contract at Fort Good Hope, 90 miles (145 kilometres) northwest of Norman Wells, where local game warden O. Eliason wanted to carry out a survey of the beaver population in the Hume River watershed, which was reported to have the richest beaver stock in the Northwest Territories. The survey had to take place in late August or early September due to the beavers’ habits. The project, undertaken using a Bell 47 flown by J.P. Smith, required about 30 hours flight time to cover approximately 2,500 miles (4,025 kilometres), flying tracks a mile apart over 50 square miles (80 square kilometres). This was the first beaver survey in the area and certainly the first anywhere using a helicopter. With the success of the survey, similar studies were proposed for other areas.
Rumour had it that Shell Oil was doing exploration work in the Mackenzie area and needed something larger than a Bell 47. Jock Graham arranged a meeting with the executive assistant to Shell’s president and their chief pilot and suggested they call Okanagan. That call resulted in a three-month contract for the S-55 with pilot Bill McLeod at the controls. It was, Bill reported, the most enjoyable job of his career:
That was the first year that Shell had used a helicopter. They got a 55 and a Bell and I flew the 55. We did a preliminary geological survey of the Mackenzie Mountains, starting at Fort Liard and working our way not quite to the Arctic coast. We were back in the Richardson Range by the time we finished up.
They were surveying a swathe of country approximately 40 to 60 miles [65–100 kilometres] west of the river, depending on where the pre-Cambrian rock occurred; in other words, it was soft rock geology. That was extremely interesting because we stayed only ten days to two weeks in any one location; then we moved on.
They had three geologist, three helpers, my engineer George Chamberlain, myself and a cook on our part of the operation. In the morning I would load all six of the geology crew and put two crews out to measure sections and take samples. Then I would travel with the third crew until it was time to pick up the others in the evening. Dr. Matthews from UBC was the geologist, and I became a one-man classroom for him for the season. By the end of it, he would pick up a fossil, hand it to me and say, “Well, what is it Bill?” and I’d reply, “Oh, that’s Middle Devonian; it’s a brachiopod.” I could reel it all off, and it made the job much more interesting.
But that was one of those good years. Even the cook was good, and we were on the move all the time. We got to the point where the engineer and I, we slept in the helicopter. We didn’t bother setting up the tent; we just rolled out our sleeping bags on the floor of the helicopter and went to bed at night—what there was of it.
I had one engine failure and they had to come looking for me . . . The radio didn’t work—usual I think in those days . . . I had a magneto pack up on me. I tried to fly back to camp, but the engine got rougher and rougher. Then she started missing on one cylinder, so I thought I’d better put her down because I still had some 60 miles [100 kilometres] of muskeg to go over. We were working out of Fort Norman at the time . . . I put down on a river called the Redstone on a sandbar which was composed of red and cream sandstone. [But] the helicopter was painted cream and red [so] I had the best camouflaged helicopter you every saw. And when I landed, there was thunderstorm activity and there were fires burning—little plumes of smoke all over the country.
I did the usual thing: I laid out a square on the sandbar with a W in it, meaning “I need an engineer.” Then I gathered a big pile of brush to make smoke to compete with all the other smokes. Airplanes flew right over the top of me and never saw me. The fellow who finally found me was flying over a ridge 10 miles [16 kilometres] away, and he saw the sun glint on the Plexiglas. Even then, he had trouble seeing exactly where I was.
It wasn’t a big deal. I was only out one night. The engineer came in and changed the mag—the drive had sheered—and we flew back to camp.35
1955
In April 1955 Okanagan Helicopters underwent a major expansion by purchasing two eastern companies, Canadian Helicopters Ltd. and Smart Aviation of Toronto, although they continued to operate separately. However, these purchases complicated the company’s