Aging birds in the north

Don't let anyone say Canada has no Commandos up there--talk about adventure tourism (this post's for Dave, sixth comment here):

The ambience aboard Buffalo Airways' 1942 Douglas DC-3 is somewhere between Disneyland and chicken bus.

From the outside, the plane's pug nose and bulbous fins look like a cartoon come to life. Inside, stacks of frozen fish and auto parts jut into the narrow centre aisle, their odours mingling with propellor exhaust and motor oil.

A flight attendant - or "biscuit shooter," as the position is known at Buffalo - dressed in greasy jeans and an oversized sweatshirt passes out homemade cookies.

The regulars - most of them northerners making the morning hop from Hay River, NWT, to Yellowknife for work or for family - have learned to tolerate day trippers. In the nearly 40 years that Buffalo Airways has been flying to all points north of 60, its antique birds have become increasingly irresistible to history buffs and aeronautical nerds...

Ask aviation enthusiasts around the world and they'll rattle off specs for Buffalo's vintage fleet and its distinction as the last airline in North America to fly scheduled DC-3 passenger routes.

Search Buffalo Airways online and you'll come up with hundreds of photos and several YouTube clips of a hardworking airline whose reputation for keeping history aloft attracts aviation nuts from all over the world to the Northwest Territories...

Among Buffalo's main attractions are several snub-nosed DC-3s, the revolutionary planes whose 21-seat configuration [spot the joke in the link] first made commercial passenger flights financially viable in the late 1930s; two Curtiss C-46s, or Whales, whose cavernous bellies hauled Allied troops and cargo over the Himalayas during the Second World War; and nearly a dozen temperamental DC-4s, which clocked a million miles a month over the Atlantic when German U-boats were posing a menace to marine convoys [C-54s actually, and I don't think their flights were terribly relelevant, one way or another to U-boats, more like expedited personnel and special cargo movement]...

A few weeks ago, for instance, two German fellows showed up unannounced on the Buffalo tarmac wanting a ride in a Curtiss C-46.

"They didn't know a thing about northern Canada," says Mikey McBryan, the founder's son, "but they knew they wanted aboard a C-46. They waited around for a week and a half, but we couldn't get them aboard."

They settled on flying aboard a DC-3...

Last year, Buffalo updated the fleet with the purchase of two Lockheed Electras, four-engine long-haulers [not really] rolled out the year John Diefenbaker became Prime Minister [I flew on the rival Vickers Vanguard several times, along with DC-3s; no C-46s for me though I'm pretty sure my father was a passenger on them over the hump to China in WW II - MC]...
Nice piece of journalism.

Update: The Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, Hamilton, has a flying Dakota (via Jack MacLeod--Commonwealth services' name for the C-47, military version of the DC-3). More on the origins of the DC-3, and RCAF service here (pdf).

And a charming letter in the Globe and Mail, Dec. 1:

What a great aircraft.

By PETER WARD

Ottawa -- At the end of the Second World War, the RCAF bought a large number of DC-3s, many of which were veterans of flying supplies over the Hump in Burma (Welcome To Prophead Heaven - Life, Nov. 30).

In the Canadian service, these DC-3s were called Dakotas, or Daks. I recall one Dak so stitched with patched bullet holes it was known as Whistling Willie, because it whistled when it flew. The Hump resupply operations used DC-3s and some DC-2s, the earlier model of that workhorse aircraft. One DC-3 was repaired by using a wing - slightly shorter - from a DC-2. They called it a DC-2½, and it flew right to the end of the war.

What a great aircraft.