At the end of May, Carl and Alf returned to Yakima to start training, but Carl was only partway through the course when he received an urgent phone call from Penticton. The sale of shares was going badly and he was needed back at base to head a promotion campaign. It seems that the fruit growers, being generally very conservative, were not completely convinced that a helicopter was the answer to their spraying problems. Now the directors began promoting the shares by tapping everyone they knew: friends, relatives and business acquaintances—no one was spared. In spite of the hard work, sales remained slow, and when the target date arrived, they were still short. After a meeting of the directors, Dewar picked up 10,000 shares, and a Penticton bank manager agreed to loan Carl, Barney and Alf funds for shares, making it possible to reach their goal.
Okanagan Air Services was incorporated on April 18, 1947, with the following registered directors:
Carl Agar, Penticton
O.St.P. (Pat) Aitken, Kelowna
Arnold Bent, Penticton
Ernest Buckerfield, Vancouver
Gordon Butler, Kelowna
Douglas Dewar, Penticton
James Kidston, Vernon
P.D. O’Brien, Penticton (secretary)
The new company continued operating the two Cessnas out of the Rutland field, which was overseen by Andy Duncan, and built its first hangar in Penticton for the sum of $275.
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▲ Logbook entry of Carl Agar and Alf Stringer’s landing in Penticton on August 9, 1947. Photo courtesy of Evelyn Stringer
Although he was already 45 years old, Carl Agar quickly adapted to helicopter flying. After just 7 hours and 50 minutes he made his first solo flight; his instructor, Carl Brady, aged 26, had a total time of 35 hours in his logbook. Alf was trained by Joe Beebe, the chief mechanic for Central Aircraft; Beebe had been one of the first men to assemble a helicopter in North America. On August 9, 1947, Carl Brady and Joe Beebe watched Carl and Alf take off in their new Bell B-3, CF-FZX, en route to Penticton, Carl with his 27 hours of helicopter time and Alf with his maintenance certificate. Carl Brady’s parting words to them were: “Keep it low and keep it slow,” but the flight was uneventful as they followed the valley north. However, flying in an open cockpit was not pleasant, even on a sunny August day, and by the time they reached their destination, they were so cold that they downed several cups of coffee before they realized that they had forgotten to fill out the import forms—as a result the first helicopter to enter British Columbia did so illegally.
They put CF-FZX right to work with the Summerland Research Station where they participated in a series of experimental spraying projects on orchard plots chosen by Dr. Marshall. He thought that dusting the orchards would probably not work but decided to try it anyway. The day of the first test was sunny and bright. Carl took to the air and as he released the dust over the orchard, it billowed out to form a huge cloud behind the helicopter. To the observers on the ground it was a spectacular sight, but when they examined the plot they found that very little of the insecticide had adhered to the foliage. Most had fallen to the ground or just drifted away. The test confirmed that, as a means of controlling insects and disease, dusting from a helicopter was not effective.
▲ Carl Agar (left) and Alf Stringer land in Penticton on August 9, 1947. Photo courtesy of the Okanagan Archives Trust Society
The next experiment, involving a liquid spray, was not without problems either. Dr. Marshall and his staff had calculated that the optimal application was five gallons per acre (20 litres per half hectare) at a speed of 35 mph (55 km/h). While more successful than dusting, this method left the mobile ground crew struggling to keep up with the helicopter as it sprayed about one acre (a half hectare) per minute. Another problem was that some areas within the patchwork of plots contained a variety of trees, each requiring different applications. As well, there were mechanical problems because the liquid spray, which was in a concentrated form in tanks on either side of the machine, plugged the spray apertures and caused load imbalance, leading to the instability of the machine. As a result, on a few occasions disaster was only narrowly avoided. In addition, the spray was corrosive and the helicopter had to be meticulously cleaned after each operation. Carl, sitting in the open cockpit, was thoroughly soaked by the end of each flight; the hazards of pesticide exposure were unknown at the time so there was no understanding what it was doing to his health on a long-term basis.
▲ Carl Agar at the controls of Okanagan Air Services’ first helicopter Bell 47 CF-FZX flying over Okanagan Lake in 1947. Okanagan Helicopters photo
▲ Carl Agar crashed Bell 47 CF-FZX into power lines during a spraying demonstration on September 1, 1947. Photo courtesy of the Okanagan Archives Trust Society
On September 1, 1947, OAS very nearly ceased operations at a demonstration at the 2.5-acre (one-hectare) apple orchard owned by Andy Duncan’s father. The orchard was triangular in shape with fir trees, some as high as 70 feet (21 metres), on one side and a road and power and telephone lines running along another. On the evening before the demonstration, Carl had looked over the orchard and come to the conclusion that, given the prevailing winds, he would have to drop over the telephone and power lines, spray the designated rows of apple trees, and then make a sharp turn to avoid colliding with the fir trees. The next day he circled around the plot a few times before dropping over the power lines. At a speed of 30 mph (50 km/h), he sprayed the first row, cleared the fir trees, and circled around for his second run, again nicely clearing the trees, before coming in for the third run. This time he found that the fir trees formed a barrier between him and the row he was about to spray. Concentrating on his approach, which took him very close to the trees, he lost sight of the telephone and power lines that were in his path and eased off on the pitch of the main blades, allowing the helicopter to sink. Suddenly in front of him were four power lines. He made a desperate effort to recover by pulling back on the cyclic while pushing up on the collective. The helicopter climbed very steeply, missing the high voltage power lines by a few feet, but it was too much and too fast for the machine, over-pitching the main rotor, causing loss of lift and dropping the ground speed to zero. Seconds later the helicopter was straddling the top two power lines. Then it fell through the lines with a sharp crack like a pistol shot, followed by blue flashes and flames. As it crashed through the power lines, the main blades chewed through the fir trees, and the helicopter fell with a resounding thud onto the road, spilling the contents of the spray tanks in all directions and leaving tangled power cables all over the ground.
As the bystanders watched open-mouthed, Carl stepped out of the helicopter and began surveying the chaos around him. As luck would have it, he had been sitting on a thick rubber cushion and wearing heavy rubber boots, and the handles of the controls were either rubber or Bakelite, an early plastic. The electrical cables had shorted out through the helicopter airframe. He walked away with minor injuries to his shoulder and a few bruises, but the same could not be said about CF-FZX.
The directors of OAS had a meeting, but in the end they agreed to let Carl make the decision on how to proceed. Although he was anxious to get right back to work, OAS did not have a helicopter and it would take all winter to rebuild CF-FZX. Fortunately, the Winnipeg company Skyways had brought CF-FZN to BC but had not found sufficient work for it, and when Carl approached them about a possible lease, they were more than happy to oblige. Using the leased machine, he soon completed OAS’s spraying contracts and returned it to Skyways.