Page 14 - April 2018

Norm’s first mission took four hours and involved no Of one captain who also flew NAO’s large,
fewer than 60 drops. That works out to about one drop underpowered Cansos in the 1980s and 1990s,
every three minutes or so. There are no computers or Norm said, “he liked the Canso, but he LOVES the
bombsights in use. It’s an art and science shaped by turbines.”
experience, affected by things like wind direction and
One memorable fire in 2014 was in the Yellowknife
honed by feedback from the bird dog. (Norm has also
area. Good weather in Saskatchewan meant Norm’s
seen an experienced crew spot a lone tree that was
aircraft and several other were deployed there for
“candling” or bursting into flame, then extinguish it with
three days before “the wind shifted and the
one well-placed load “without even tipping over the community was saved.”
plastic outhouse.”) Crews take pains to avoid coming into
too low, lest their load of retardant “snap off trees -- and
the ground crews have to crawl all over that to put out a
fire.”
Norm and his captain had a ritual: whenever they
dropped and the bird dog called “bulls eye”, they got an
M&M!

The largest fire on which he’s worked had nine
aircraft working on it. Not one, but two, bird dogs
were needed to oversee everything. Norm was
flying for WestJet in the summer of 2017. When the
weather over northern Saskatchewan was good but
fires were burning fiercely in Montana. Several

Saskatchewan 215Ts, he heard, were dispatched to
Crews typically flew in shorts and T-shirts because of the
help fight them. Said Norm: “Montana, they didn’t
summer heat – even though 215Ts are air conditioned.
want to give them back ’cause they were so
Crews from older ‘215s which lack AC pop open the efficient!”
hatch at the bow to get a cooling breeze through the
aircraft.
Still around Northern Air Operations are pilots who think
fondly of the Trackers, which were nimble and could be
flown by one pilot.