Although 1948 had been a better year, the improvement in finances was not enough to pull the company out of the red. Prospects looked bright overall, however, especially if OAS could capitalize on Carl’s hard-won expertise. Based on the year’s activities and the potential he identified in transportation, agriculture and construction, he argued for the purchase of a second helicopter, although the company had not yet made money with their first machine. Knowing the publicity they had received would bring in competition, Douglas Dewar began negotiating to buy Skyways Ltd., which had continued to operate its sole helicopter out of Vancouver, but he discovered that Skyways’ financial situation was weak and they had no work for their machine, CF-FZN, which OAS had leased the previous year. Dewar also discovered that the company had a number of outstanding insurance claims and that, apart from CF-FZN, their assets consisted of the helicopter parts from the two machines wrecked in the summer of 1947, which had been salvaged but not re-certified. At that point, negotiations were dropped. However, when Skyways went into receivership, Okanagan re-opened negotiations, this time with the insurance company that held the assets. It agreed to sell CF-FZN plus spares for $20,000 with a down payment of $1,000, subject to an engineer’s airworthiness report.
1949
Unfortunately, the winter of 1948–49 featured severe weather with heavy snow in the mountains, delaying the start of mining, forestry and survey work in the spring. For a young company bursting with ideas and know-how and desperately short of cash to cover overheads, the wait seemed endless and frustrating.
Finally in April 1949 OAS received a letter from an Idaho mining engineer inquiring about the use of a helicopter to move a diamond drill rig to a height of 3,500 feet (1,065 metres) from an operating base at Moyeha Bay in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. On a reconnaissance flight later that month, Carl took one of the prospectors up to the site, and while the helicopter hovered above the snow pack, the prospector jumped out and promptly sank up to his waist. Fortunately, with Carl in a low hover he was able to climb back on board, but it was a clear indication that this operation would require careful planning. The following day when the snow was frozen, they flew back to the site and placed two by eight–foot (.6 by 2.4–metre) plywood sheets down to act as a landing platform for the helicopter’s front and rear wheels. Then, since the blast from the rotor blades tended to move this makeshift landing pad, they covered the plywood sheets with a heavy duty tarpaulin weighed down with pieces of mining equipment. Base camp for the operation was an offshore log float covered with cedar shakes to form a landing pad and service area.
The helicopter was fitted with litter carriers on each side for transporting the diamond drill, the crew, their personal effects, tents, cookhouse, supplies and tools. Each load had to be broken down so that no item weighed more than 250 pounds (115 kilograms) then tied down in the carriers to ensure that the weight remained evenly distributed. Usually one of the crew flew in the passenger’s seat to balance the load. It took 80 trips to move over 28,000 pounds (12,700 kilograms) to the drilling site including 16 passenger trips. Each lift covered eight and a half miles (13.5 kilometres) and took about 17 minutes.
As spring advanced and the snow melted, there was insufficient space on the mountain landing site for the helicopter, so they used the plywood to build a six-by-ten-foot (two-by-three-metre) landing platform higher on the side of the mountain. A toboggan was brought in to move the cargo from the new landing site down the incline to the drill site. The weather that summer was unpredictable with low cloud, considerable rain and headwinds, and as a result, the helicopter had to be tied down on the log float every night so that Alf could carry out servicing and checks on it. It was a crude arrangement but provided convincing proof that the helicopter could take real punishment.
The mining crews occupied the site from June until October. Mining company officials who visited the project were impressed with the operation, especially when they factored in their savings in time and money compared to putting trails into that heavily wooded and rocky terrain.
With all this fresh interest in OAS’s services, the arrival of ex-Skyways CF-FZN that summer was a cause for celebration as they now had backup for the contracts that they had signed, and Carl and Alf began looking for another pilot and more maintenance staff. When CF-FZX returned to Vancouver from Clayoquot Sound, it was immediately contracted for another timber surveying job by the same company that had hired OAS for the Knight Inlet job. This time the operation was on the Elaho River, north of Squamish, BC. Using the helicopter, they were able to complete the job in two weeks.
Their next contract involved taking two mining engineers, W.J. (Bill) MacKenzie and George Warren from Kelowna, to prospect in the Gott Peak area near Lytton, BC, about 160 miles (260 kilometres) northeast of Vancouver. The morning after Alf completed the maintenance, Carl set off, following the Fraser River north through the narrow canyon to Lytton at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson rivers. During the flight he encountered severe turbulence, including violent downdrafts and updrafts that threw the helicopter about. He recorded these problems and his observations for future reference.
Lytton is set among deep gorges and high mountains, and in summer the terrain, coupled with high temperatures, creates intense thermal activity so that the helicopter’s descent to the valley floor was impossible. Even though Carl tried to dive it down in short steps, he could not lose altitude and, concerned that the machine would sustain damage, he was forced to climb out of the area and land elsewhere. He realized he still had much to learn about mountain flying. He picked up Warren and MacKenzie and in two trips had them and all their gear on the 9,700-foot (2,955-metre) summit of Gott Peak where there were plenty of landing sites, including snow patches, alpine meadows and the ridges between peaks.
These two engineers would use OAS again. In the April 1950 issue of Western Miner they wrote about their experiences with high-elevation landings and pointed out that the helicopter would greatly accelerate mineral exploration, assist in the development of mines and facilitate topographical and geological surveys. The helicopter, they said, had replaced fixed-wing aircraft and jeeps as the main means of transportation into remote sites. This article certainly reinforced what Carl had been saying about the value of helicopters to primary industries.
Bill MacKenzie was appointed to the OAS board of directors the following year. With 25 years of experience in mining in Canada and Africa, his knowledge was invaluable to the company.
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On completion of the Gott Mountain contract, Carl returned CF-FZX to Vancouver where he found a message that Professor Wilfred Heslop of the Civil Engineering faculty at the University of British Columbia had requested a meeting to discuss using a helicopter to conduct a survey for power-line routes in the northern part of the province. In the course of the meeting Carl sensed that this survey job was the beginning of a very big project and decided to give the professor a demonstration of what CF-FZX could do. He flew him over Vancouver’s North Shore, up the mountain slopes, along the ridges and peaks, landing in alpine meadows and deep canyons. The demonstration also included flying slowly over the treetops to the inaccessible site of the Palisade dam project on the Capilano River. Afterwards Heslop made a commitment to meet Carl in Terrace, BC on August 31 to begin a two- to three-week preliminary survey in that remote area for the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan).
For some years Alcan had searched for the ideal site for a large aluminum smelter with access to an abundant supply of low-cost electrical power. By 1949 the company had selected the Kitimat Mission area, a First Nations village on the Kitimat Arm of deep-sea Douglas Channel. Extensive studies of maps, topographical surveys and aerial photography indicated that a huge network of rivers and lakes in the Coast Mountains could be diverted to a powerhouse at Kemano. The purpose of Heslop’s survey was to determine the best route for the 70 miles (112 kilometres) of power transmission lines from Kemano over Kildala Pass to Kitimat, and the OAS contract involved checking 16 possible routes. Most of the year the area was plagued by heavy precipitation and dense fog, while in winter the deep snow brought a high risk of avalanches; thus, the choice of route was one of the most critical aspects of the project because any