Flying over the subarctic north? To those who endured difficult, dangerous, and often just plain miserable trips on the ground through that beautiful but hostile country, airplanes offered an attractive alternative. But, of course, mother nature in this part of the world makes nothing easy, including flying over it.
Link to another story “Becoming a Bush Pilot”
World War I made airplanes and flying serious business. And after the war a few Army pilots wanted to keep flying, but the Army didn’t need them. More, the Army didn’t need the planes they flew; made them available cheap. Inevitably some of these pilots and planes made their way to the North Country, offering a new possibility for travel and transport—flying over it instead of trudging through it.
Like everybody and everything that had ever found its way to this beautiful but brutal world, air transport developed an utterly unique form. Pilots who flew over British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska quickly learned that techniques they learned elsewhere were useless. Those who survived became not just pilots, but “bush pilots”—pilots with a unique skill set.
Reading a compass gets tricky close to the North Pole. Because of the vast distances and magnetic and atmospheric interference radio works sporadically if at all. When, in blissful ignorance, the US Army Air Corps sent mere pilots north via the Northwest Staging Route in 1942, the results proved famously disastrous precisely because the pilots didn’t know how to navigate and, worse, because they didn’t know they didn’t know.
Bush Pilots flew by dead reckoning over terrain they had memorized over long experience. If cloud cover made it impossible to see the ground, they “pruned the treetops”, scouring what they could see for a familiar mountain, lake, or stream.
They had to be masters of the ground as well as of the air.
A pilot suffering mechanical problems and needing to get his plane on the ground had few options. Usually he found a remote lake. And if he made it to the ground, he rarely enjoyed the luxury of communicating his plight to anybody who might be able to help him. That meant he had better be a mechanic as well as a pilot. Finally, when repairs proved impossible he needed to survive in the rugged wilderness and navigate his way back to civilization.