FORT SIMPSON, Canada— OLDTIMERS here still reminisce about the good old years of the 1920's when Wilfred May serviced the North in a wood-and-fabric Bellanca Pacemaker until the Government discovered that he had only one good eye and made him quit. Bush flying north of the 60th parallel has become less colorful since then, but in some respects the risks are just as great. Among bush pilots these days, the talk runs more to high insurance premiums and fuel prices, aircraft financing and potentially destabilizing Government deregulation, and ever narrowing profit margins. As if that weren't enough, declining prices for oil and other minerals have led companies to cut back on their airborne forays into the Northwest Territories. 'It's a lot harder to fly up here and be cost-effective,' said E. Grant, a seasoned bush pilot who owns Simpson Air, one of two charter companies licensed to fly out of Fort Simpson, an old trading post. Much as city dwellers rely on taxis, the vast Canadian North depends on air transport for virtually every aspect of life, and bush pilots, flying in light aircraft in rugged terrain and uncertain weather, provide the only air service through much of an area that covers one-third of the nation.
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In general, it is where the scheduled carriers leave off that the bush pilots begin - ferrying oil workers, for example, from Inuvik to rigs on the Beaufort Sea. 'The young bush pilot today is a combination of bush flying and local commuter services,' said Robert P. Engle, the president of Northwest Territorial Airways, which flies scheduled routes to the Arctic and to southern Canada out of a Yellowknife hub. Bush pilots, flying four-passenger Cessnas, can make money where Northwest Territorial and other scheduled carriers flying DC-3's cannot.
But their dropout rate appears to be rising now that the scheduled airlines have moved into bush territory that has enough traffic to make a scheduled airline operation profitable. Despite the key role of the bush pilots in Canadian air service, they still operate so informally that not even the Canadian Government maintains statistics on the number of pilots or the volume of freight and passengers they carry.
Didier Feminer, a Quebec pilot who now works for the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, guessed that there are 2,500 to 3,000 bush pilots operating throughout the Canadian North, which includes not only the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, but also northern regions of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Terry Brown of Ptarmigan Airways, a charter company with nine planes and 20 bush pilots, operating out of Yellowknife, estimated that the Northwest Territories has at least 1,000 bush pilots.
It remains a solitary occupation with long hours and narrow profit margins that make survival a matter of economic as much as physical courage. A 1984 survey of non-union pilots in Quebec for Les Gens de l'Air, a Quebec aviation organization, painted a profile that, Mr. Feminer believed, was not untypical for bush pilot economics across Canada. The pilots who responded earned an average of $12,600 a year, or a little more than $9,000 in United States currency at current exchange rates.
Over one-third reported working 30 consecutive days with no days off, and 9 out of 10 said they had 12 or fewer hours of rest between two working days. Three-quarters of the pilots reported being on standby seven days a week. On average, they spent 3.6 months a year away from home. And 70 percent of the Quebec pilots employed by charter operations said they had been pressured to fly under illegal conditions. In the past, some bush operations blossomed into scheduled airlines. One was the forerunner of Pacific Western, which now flies scheduled routes in western Canada.
Another was run by Max Ward, who started flying an old Fox Moth out of Yellowknife and now owns Wardair, an airline with a Boeing 747 and DC-10 jumbo jets. But Bruce McWhirter, the director of marketing for Pacific Western's eastern and northern routes, said he could not think of any bush piloting service that could make the transformation today, now that regular airlines serve the largest towns of the North from airports built in the past few years. The Canadian government's effort to make the North more accessible by building these airports to accommodate scheduled airlines, ironically may have hurt the potential of bush pilots to expand their operations. The new obstacles to expansion make the business particularly difficult for bush pilots like Mr. Grant, 37, who learned to fly while serving with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Saskatchewan.
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Although he flies all year, he is busiest in the summer when the weather is relatively mild and almost continual daylight makes it possible to fly round the clock. That means logging 60 to 70 hours a week in the air and then doing paperwork.
On three consecutive days last summer, Mr. Grant hauled groceries to Fort Good Hope, 370 miles north; delivered fuel to forest firefighting crews and took a group of tourists to view the spectacular Virginia Falls in nearby Nahanni National Park. In each case, he returned home after midnight.