Carl Agar came down to Vancouver; he spent some time talking to me and decided, I guess, when he went back to the people who were going to form this club, that I would be a likely subject to tighten the nuts and bolts for them, so they hired me and I headed up to the Okanagan Valley. In fact, this deal in Penticton didn’t sound too awe-inspiring, but there wasn’t much going on in aviation at the time anyway, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.2
Carl must have been very persuasive because he was only offering a small salary; in fact, for the first few months until the business got going, Alf got no money at all. Carl did, however, provide food and lodging and gave him a chance to work in aviation. Alf fit in; he was a good engineer with a very cheerful disposition regardless of the circumstances. He had a great knack for keeping everyone on the ground in good spirits while Carl was flying.
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From the start, the South Okanagan Flying Club was in trouble because the expected deluge of potential customers did not materialize, and their association with the Royal Canadian Flying Club, which had made it so easy to get started, became a burden by virtue of its charter, which only allowed them to offer training. Then just as they were managing to break even, another operator set up at the airport with more modern equipment, and it became obvious that they were not going to survive. Reluctantly they sold their assets. However, the failure of the South Okanagan Flying Club did not discourage them as they were convinced that a commercial flying venture in the Okanagan was feasible.
When Andy Duncan, another ex-RCAF pilot, joined them and contributed $1,500 in war bonds, they formed a new partnership called Okanagan Air Services (OAS). The Department of Transport granted them a charter for not only Penticton but also Kelowna, which unfortunately did not have an airport. However, the residents of nearby Rutland, then a small village to the northeast of the city, changed that by turning out in force with graders and rollers to produce a landing strip that was perfectly adequate for small aircraft.
▲ Penticton mayor Robert Lyon hands parcels to Carl Agar, who sits in the South Okanagan Flying Club’s de Havilland Tiger Moth. In 1946, Agar started an air parcel service between Penticton and Kelowna. Photo courtesy of the Okanagan Archives Trust Society
OAS’s new charter gave them the right to continue training and to carry out contract work. Barney travelled to Wichita, Kansas, to pick up their first new aircraft, a Cessna 140, registration CF-EHE. The business started off so well that they soon acquired a second Cessna 140 and became the Cessna agents for the Okanagan. When instructing took a downturn during the winter months, they decided to concentrate on charter work to provide a more reliable source of income.
Since the economy of the Okanagan at that time was almost entirely dependent on orcharding, they came up with the idea of establishing a spraying operation and contacted Dr. James Marshall, the entomologist in charge of the nearby Summerland Research Station. Okanagan orchards were experiencing serious pest control problems, and Marshall agreed that using aircraft could improve spraying efficiency as it would use only five to six gallons (23–27 litres) to the acre (0.4 hectare) rather than the 500–1,000 gallons (1,890–3,790 litres) required in ground applications. Carl and Barney decided to investigate a similar operation in Yakima, Washington, about 280 miles (450 kilometres) south of Penticton. That was when they learned about the high mortality rate for spray pilots and concluded that the risk of becoming a “cropper chopper” was far too great to spray using fixed-wing aircraft. It was shortly after making that decision that Carl read a story in an aviation magazine about helicopter spraying. Alf Stringer recalled that:
A company called Central Aircraft out of Yakima in Washington . . . who had been in the aerial spraying business for years, were going to go into helicopters because they looked like the answer for spraying.3
The magazine article described a new machine, the Bell 47 helicopter, which was capable of flying forward at around 90 mph (150 km/h) as well as backwards and sideways and hovering. Its advantages included slow speed and remarkable manoeuvrability, and when spraying crops, the downwash from the rotor blades tended to drive the insecticide down into the foliage of the plants below. This machine was easy on gas and did not require a large landing area, but the thing that really raised their interest was that it was fitted with an agricultural spray boom.
▲ Arthur Young (far left) and friends demonstrating the power and handling of the Bell Model 30. Young, an American helicopter pioneer, designed the Model 30 while working for Bell Aircraft of Buffalo, New York. This was the precursor of the famous Bell 47, which would appear on the television series M*A*S*H. Bell, with its Model 47, was the first company to get type certification for a commercial helicopter. Photo courtesy of Bell Textron
The two-seat Bell 47, which had been designed by the talented inventor Arthur Middleton Young, had been the first commercial helicopter in the world to receive a certificate of airworthiness. The Bell Helicopter Corporation, founded in July 1935 by Lawrence Dale Bell in Buffalo, New York, had initially built fixed-wing aircraft for the military and only began experimenting with helicopters in 1941. By 1947 they had Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) certification for the NC-1H Model 47. At first their market was mainly with the military, but they had also opened an agricultural division, which sold the Bell 47B-3; a 1946 advertisement offered a Bell “Roadster” Model 47B-3 for $35,000. Capable of carrying a 400-pound (180-kilogram) disposable load, this machine had an open cockpit with a rear-view mirror, a belt-driven blower and dust agitator as well as a spray-valve indicator mounted in the cockpit, and it came with accessories for crop-dusting and spraying.
In Canada the first commercial helicopter, a Bell 47D with registration CF-FJA, was bought by Photographic Survey Corporation of Toronto and registered in March 1947. Later that same year Skyways Services of Winnipeg bought CF-FQR and CF-FQS, but both Skyways machines crashed, one in June and the other in July; to replace the two that had crashed, Skyways purchased another machine, CF-FZN.
Carl and Alf went to Yakima to meet with Herman Poulin of Central Aircraft, the agent for Bell Helicopters. He took them for a ride, flying low and slow, sideways and backwards as well as hovering, ascending and descending. Given his fixed-wing experience, Carl was immediately sold on the machine and could see potential far beyond the manufacturer’s vision. Returning to Penticton full of enthusiasm, the two men realized that it was the answer to the problems of aerial spraying. All they needed was the $35,000 for the machine and another $1,500 for insurance, spares and training.
It happened that a consortium, formed by Douglas Dewar, CBE, a retired financier who had been deputy chairman of the Foreign Exchange Control Board during World War II and now spent his summers in Penticton, and Ernie Buckerfield, a Vancouver businessman, had applied to the Department of Transport in early 1947 to start an airline service between Vancouver and a number of towns in the BC Interior. Carl and Alf knew Dewar through his association with the flying club, and when his consortium’s application for an airline service was rejected in favour of Canadian Pacific Airlines (CPA), Carl, Barney and Alf approached them about financing their OAS proposal. However, after they had demonstrated the feasibility of their operation, Dewar suggested they approach the local fruit growers for financing, as they were the ones who would benefit from a spraying program, and he offered to arrange an introduction to Pat Aitken, the president of a local investment company. Dewar explained that if OAS could come up with a convincing argument to support their proposal, Aitken would assist in working out the details.
It fell to Carl to sell the plan, and he arranged for a group of fruit growers to go to Yakima for a demonstration. Also included on this trip were Pat Aitken and a Vancouver Province newspaper reporter named W. Beaver-Jones, whose story about that trip, “Helicopter to Spray Okanagan Orchards,” appeared in the Province in March 1947. Carl followed this trip with numerous meetings to convince the growers that helicopter spraying would be effective on their orchards. Not long afterwards, Okanagan