You felt like you were really pioneering because [the helicopters] were open cockpit Bell 47B-3s. You felt you were right back with Wilbur and Orville Wright and you had a sense of flying. You had to be dressed for it. In the winter you had to wear everything you had.10
OAS also needed a pilot to replace Paul Ostrander. Carl had developed a very demanding training plan that incorporated his own experiences and observations, but he looked for pilots who already had a well-developed air sense, experience in mountain flying and the ability to anticipate trouble and take appropriate action. OAS pilots were expected to fly in rugged mountains, land on isolated peaks or tiny platforms and tolerate primitive living conditions. They also needed to command respect and appreciate the customer’s point of view.
Carl met Bill McLeod, an ex-RCAF flying instructor, in a Vancouver airport coffee shop. During the war Bill had applied for aircrew, but when he was initially turned down, he had spent some time as an engineer before being finally accepted for pilot training. Later he had become an elementary flying instructor, and when he was posted to Abbotsford, Carl had been his commanding officer. After the war Bill got a job flying QCA’s Stranraer flying boats and Norseman float planes in difficult weather through the maze of inlets and islands along the West Coast of BC. When Carl asked him if he would like to fly helicopters, he replied that he had never even seen a helicopter, so Carl invited him to join him on a little job hanging a hook attached to a long rope on a smokestack at one of the lumber mills on the Fraser River. This set-up would allow steeplejacks to climb the stack then pull up the equipment they needed to work on it. McLeod recalled:
So I climbed into this stupid machine—at that time I figured it was a stupid machine—it was the open-cockpit Bell 47B-3 with the four wheels. They had had a hook manufactured—a homemade thing with a sort of a loop on the bottom and a long arm welded to it so I could reach out and clip it over the edge of the steel chimney. The rope went through the loop and I had the rest of it, a big coil of heavy rope, in my lap.
So we took off and chugged off along the Fraser. There was a nice brisk wind blowing from the west about 25 miles an hour [40 km/h], which gave us a bit of added lift. Carl steamed up alongside this smokestack, and I found I couldn’t handle the pole sitting down. I had to put the rope on the floor, undo my seat belt, climb half out of the machine and put one foot on the wheel leg to hold the pole properly. Anyway, I got the hook on, picked up the rope and threw it down and got back into my seat. Then I realized the long handle of the hook was against my stomach, and if Carl started to move forward I was going to end up with a bad stomach ache. So I got back out again, held onto the door frame, put my foot against the smokestack and gave a good shove. The machine moved away and the handle dropped out. I sat down again and gave Carl the thumbs up and away we went. By the time we got back to the airport, I was thinking: “Anything you can do that with, I’ve got to learn to fly.”11
Carl trained Bill McLeod over the winter, and by the time he took on his first job with OAS in the spring, he had put in a total of 60 hours. Bill recalled the encouragement he received at the start of his first helicopter operation:
When the machine was loaded up and I was ready to leave for Kispiox, [BC], Carl came out and shook hands with me, and he said, “Well, Bill, remember one thing—if you get through the season without breaking a helicopter, you’ll be the first man who’s ever managed to do so.” With those happy words ringing in my ear, I climbed in the machine and took off. As it turned out, I did manage to get through the first season without breaking a helicopter, but I sure scared the hell out of myself a few times.
You see, the truth was you had to learn a whole new ball game. Remember that in an airplane you’re trained right from day one to approach a landing and to take off into wind. If you persist in this in a helicopter in mountain terrain, you’re dead—you’re going to kill yourself; it’s just that simple. Because it means that if you’re approaching a mountain and you’re into the wind, you’re also in the down draft. If you do that, pretty soon you’ll find yourself looking up at the place you were going to land, instead of down at it . . . An awful lot of what I learned that first season wound up in the mountain training manual Okanagan produced, because I wrote a lot of it—but only after I’d discussed my experiences with Carl Agar. That was Carl’s great talent: he had a very special ability to talk to a pilot after the pilot had had some shaky experience and reduce it to its elements. He seemed to be able to see through what you were saying to the essence of what had happened. I guess this came from his long experience as an instructor. I think it was this ability to sort out the meat of an experience and then analyze it that made Okanagan Helicopters what it became . . .
I’ll give you one example. I had landed on a ledge at about 6,500 feet [2,000 metres] . . . jutting out from the mountain. There was a short cliff on one side and a sheer drop on the other, and the ledge would be about, oh perhaps 150 feet [46 metres] wide. I landed about 60 feet [18 metres] in from the edge on a nice flat spot . . . facing the cliff. What I learned then was that you never land unless you have figured out how you are going to take off again . . . But this time I did my jump takeoff too far from the ledge. The body of the machine was going to go over the edge all right, but I knew the tail wasn’t. I was already losing revs by the time I realized this. I shoved hard forward on the stick and then kicked on full rudder. I cartwheeled over the edge—cartwheeled so far that I was inverted at one stage and then I pulled out and got clean away with it . . . But after that I always landed very close to the edge of the drop-off, and I always jumped sideways off a ledge.12
In 1950 the provincial topographical survey, again headed by Gerry Emerson, carried on from the point where the previous year’s crew had left off, covering the area northwest of Kispiox, up the Nass River to Brown Bear Lake and into the valley of the Bell-Irving River. It began on June 1 with a flight from base camp to a site at the headwaters of the Kispiox River. The valley there is approximately 30 miles (50 kilometres) wide and broken up by a series of ridges and low hills with hundreds of small lakes. The Nass River flows through the western side of the valley, the Kispiox the eastern side and the Cranberry River forms the southern boundary. To cope with the difficult terrain, Emerson divided the area into five-mile (eight-kilometre) circles and positioned a survey crew in the centre of each circle to cover it on foot, taking barometric readings on all the lakes and meadows.
While fixed-wing aircraft brought in the equipment and supplies, the helicopter moved the five survey crews from one site to the next. As this meant the machine was flying every daylight hour of those long northern days and on numerous occasions the pilot also had to act as recorder for the surveyor, Carl and Bill split the flying duties. Sig Hubenig, who had been a pilot in the RCAF and worked for QCA as an engineer before joining OAS, carried out maintenance. To maintain the helicopter in serviceable condition, he carried out periodic checks each day, with Alf coming up from Vancouver to assist him with the hundred-hour check because this involved removal of the main rotors.
As the work progressed and the terrain gradually emerged from under the snow, it became possible to set up station cairns to assist with the work. Once each section was covered, crews re-occupied the control points that had been set up in the valley and the main triangulation stations in the mountains. During the Swan Lake base camp phase, the helicopter moved 18 fly camps over a period of 120 hours. On July 3 a QCA Norseman arrived to move the base camp to Meziadin Lake, and the pattern of work changed. Here the valley was narrower with ridge country behind it, making it easier for a single crew to handle the survey work while the other crews worked in the mountains. More food and gas stoves were needed as these camps were above the timberline, most at altitudes of 5,000–6,000 feet (1,525–1,830 metres), but the helicopter pilots had no difficulty finding good landing spots. Three weeks later the crews were repositioned partway between Meziadin Lake and the final camp at Bowser Lake where an additional 22 fly camps were set up in 90 flight hours. As the operation for the year moved into its final phase at Bowser, the mountain landings again became difficult due to more rugged terrain, and some of the 14 fly camps were exposed to high winds, which on one occasion destroyed a camp, leaving the crew to walk to the next camp for help. On August 3 visitors from the Forestry Service’s public relations department arrived