For the Love of Flying
For the Love of Flying tells the story of Laurentian Air Services and its subsidiaries, Air Schefferville, Delay River Outfitters and more. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with Laurentian's owners, pilots and ground crew, author Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail explores this innovative company's colourful 60-year history from its founding in 1936 with biplanes through the 1990s when it operated twin-engine turboprops.
This book is filled with lively flying anecdotes from the cockpits of the world's most recognizable bushplanes, including the Beaver, Otter, Douglas DC-3 and Grumman Goose. From daring rescues and close calls, to the filming of Hollywood's Captains of the Clouds, to the perils of flying Canada's most eccentric millionaire, Laurentian's pilots did it all. Interlaced with these fascinating accounts are the stories of back-country air tourism, the mineral and hydro-power boom in Quebec and Newfoundland-Labrador, and commercial aviation in North America.
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For the Love of Flying
Publications
Flying Away from it All
Middle-class motor tourists often ended up at holiday destinations frequented by the upper classes, much to the chagrin of the latter. As historian Earl Pomeroy wrote in the 1950s: “The aristocracy was quick to take fright and retreat before common clay, and sometimes fled into the remote wilderness.” Like frightened birds, some of the elite took to the air.
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Flying Away from it All
Articles
Being a Bertonite
The Yukon is startling, surprising and almost uncomfortably free. It’s a territory of intense weather and topography, of people looking to make their own paths, to escape family, or reinvent themselves. It’s a place that manages to defy all expectations even in this age of Google, Twitter and 24-hour media.
The Berton House Retreat, located in Pierre Berton’s childhood home in Dawson City, offers a base for writers to explore the Yukon – and themselves.
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Being a Bertonite
Articles
Side Trips and Sideslips
Standing in front of the giant map, I am struck by the reach of the Mackenzie Delta. Flying overhead a few days earlier in an Air North Hawker Siddeley 748, my face all but pressed against the frosted window, I’d studied the expanse of water and earth. The tributaries and lakes, the dead ends where the water is trying to push into new territory; they had all caught my attention as I tried to memorize the topography of a foreign land. On the ground in Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, though, it’s easy enough to forget this place is more water than terra firma – that this town was actually created in the 1950s to relocate the people of flood-prone Aklavik. Staring at the map tacked to the back wall of the Gwich’in Helicopters hangar, I am reminded.
This article was published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Journal of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society. The full text of this article will be available here shortly.
