July 13: Took 1st Mate on ice reconn early AM. Ships obscured by a fog patch about 4 miles square. Using 423 for ADF [automatic direction finder], which worked well. Took 3rd Mate on trip, good vis but too much ice for ship to make much headway. Radio (on ship) failed to reach A/C [aircraft], but relayed through other ship.
July 15: Numerous ice floes laying around the ship, present position NE point Bathurst. Right mag. went U/S [unserviceable]. Ron working most of night.
July 16: Fog off and on all day. ADF proved invaluable. Ship stopped by heavy ice in evening.
July 23: Reached Pin A, caught up [US Coast Guard cutter] Storis, LST1072 and Chastity. Went up to Site to clear deck for unloading.
July 24: Anchored. Visited 1072; seems in good shape by our standard.
July 27: Reached Pin C. Took Capt. on harbour flight. Many Eskimos reported to have died here some years ago. Skeleton remains lying about. Re-erected one of the radar beacons on site but couldn’t be seen from ship. Lately skyline refraction makes things appear larger on horizon, also creates impression of solid ice where none exists. Temp. here today 69ºF, quite a heat wave.
August 3: Ship arrived Tuk. Windy and warm.
August 8: Left Tuk.
August 12: J. model from US Coast Guard cutter Storis visited flight deck. Now 3 ships in convoy.
August 14: Large puddled ice field with Storis pushing a path through. No definite leads in ice field. Our charts in error Etah Island area. Simpson Strait observed open. Storis plotting new shoal area NE of Hat Island.40
Meanwhile, Okanagan’s Mid-Canada Line contract had been extended for another year, and the RCAF provided four S-55s for the job to replace the company machines that were required for other contracts.
In western Canada 1958 was one of the worst forest fire years on record, with 4,000 fires burning over 2 million acres. The year also saw a helicopter water tanker used for aerial firefighting for the first time after Okanagan’s engineering group fitted a 225-gallon (850-litre) tank into the cabin of an S-58; the tank was given specially designed plumbing and a discharge nozzle fitted underneath the belly. Later, to give the machine more flexibility, they developed an aluminum tank and slung it under the machine’s fuselage; it was first used on fires near the headwaters of Ashlu Creek and Squamish River, north of Vancouver. Now besides being able to land crews close to fires quickly, the S-58 was able to fight the fire with water dumps, scoring direct hits almost every time. Donald Owen, a forest protection officer, described the S-58 as a great addition to firefighting.41
▲ Four new Bell 47s leave Bell’s plant in Fort Worth, Texas, for Vancouver in 1958. Pilots: C. Weir, Jack Godsey, Bill Pinner, Jack Milburn; engineer: Ed Brown. Photo courtesy of Jack Milburn
1958 Annual Report
In the course of the year, Okanagan had acquired four more Bell 47G-2s, making a total of 52 machines operating across Canada, and they flew 24,000 hours, an increase of 2,000 over the previous year.
At year-end Douglas Dewar retired as chairman of the board.
1959
The late 1950s had seen a number of important technical developments in the helicopter industry and many of them went on display in 1959. On January 6, Hiller Helicopters was awarded its first FAA (Federal Aviation Agency—now the Federal Aviation Administration) certificate for its three-seater 12E, a more powerful version of the US Army’s “Raven” helicopter. It had a 305 horsepower Lycoming engine, and at 2,700 pounds gross weight, it carried a payload of 1,000 pounds (453.6 kilograms), had a ceiling of 16,200 feet (4,937.7 metres), and a hover ceiling of 9,500 feet (2,896 metres). In the UK, Fairey Aviation announced that the Rotodyne had established a world speed record when it flew a 60-mile (100-kilometre) circuit at an average speed of 190.9 mph (307.2 km/h).
The 1959 Farnborough Airshow saw the first public appearance of Saunders-Roe’s P531, a five-seater gas turbine helicopter powered by the 425 horsepower Blackburn Turbomeca Turmo engine. Cessna also entered the commercial helicopter market with the YH-41, a four-seater that had been designed for military use and powered by a 270 horsepower Continental piston engine. Two years previously, the YH-41 had established world altitude records of 29,777 feet (9,076 metres) and 28,090 feet (8,561.8 metres) in various weight categories.
In February 1959 it was apparent that Carl Agar was looking to the future when he was interviewed by a reporter for the American Helicopter Society Newsletter:
The equipment situation keeps changing so rapidly that it’s hard to tell exactly what will be needed in the future. [Carl] believes, however, that there will always be a place for the small helicopter such as the Bell and the larger craft such as the S-58 which, he says, “is the first helicopter ever to give us a surplus of power needed for operation in high and rough terrain.”
[He] foresees a need for a flying crane . . . that maybe . . . ought to look like a crane and not necessarily like a helicopter. “There’s nothing beautiful about an oil rig . . . It’s built for strength. So there’s no need to build something that looks like Marilyn Monroe to carry it around.”42
In 1959 Okanagan carried out “Operation Skyhook” for the Southern California Edison Company, to discover whether using helicopters to build a power line was economically viable in difficult terrain. The experiment involved the construction of a 12,000-volt power line in Soledad Canyon, northeast of Los Angeles, up to the US Navy’s radar station on top of Pleasants Peak. Two large buckets, each capable of lifting a ton of concrete, were modified for the Sikorsky S-58, and the helicopter’s job was to pour 106 concrete bases and then insert the 40-foot-long (12-metre-long) wooden poles complete with cross arms and insulators into them. As each pole site required a perfectly level platform, a hopper or vertical chute was placed over the hole prepared for the pole, while in the helicopter the engineer lay on the cabin floor and, peering out through the open door, gave instructions to the pilot over the aircraft’s intercom system. On completion of the pour, the machine returned to the base camp where the bucket was dropped and the pole picked up, using a hook designed for the US Marine Corps and lent to Edison for this trial. The entire operation was carried out without the machine landing except for refuelling.
The next part of the operation involved the steel rigging. The helicopter placed bundles of steel, each weighing 3,000 pounds (1,360 kilograms), at marked intervals along with the required hardware. The riggers, who were transported to the site by the S-58, set the line in place on the ground using a gin pole (a rigid pole with a pulley attachment used for lifting) while the hovering helicopter manoeuvred the pole upright. Once the tower was in place, the gin pole was dropped to the ground and the helicopter picked up the long lead and moved to the next site. The operation, which initially took about 25 minutes, was eventually reduced to 10 to 15 minutes, proving helicopters to be cost effective for a project in difficult terrain.
At home BC Telephone chartered a Bell 47 to put technicians onto the top of Lost Mountain near Salmo after a snowstorm damaged its tower there and disrupted service in the West Kootenay area. The technicians were transported by helicopter from Trail to the site in 40 minutes, a journey that would have taken 18 hours if they had relied on snowplows and snowshoes.
Over the summer, Okanagan again had a contract for Northern Transportation’s “Sealift” operation in the Arctic, this time using two Bell 47G models. CF-HNV was crewed by pilot Bill Marsh and engineer Al Hambleton and CF-HUD by pilot Bob Roberts and engineer Roy Robson. Dispatched from Toronto to Tuktoyaktuk, a distance of 3,960 miles (6,373 kilometres), the helicopters left within two days of each other in mid-June, flying via Fort Nelson, Norman Wells and Inuvik and arriving at Tuktoyaktuk on July 10 and 12 respectively. CF-HNV was assigned to supply the vessel LST-1072 under Captain Allen and CF-HUD to LST-692 under Captain Thomas. The operation encountered the usual Arctic conditions—poor weather, fog, ice floes,