Float Plane Stories

[Boreal Birch]

As a former USAF Air Traffic Controller, I too enjoy the sights and sounds of air power. I probably wouldn’t be alive today without it. My prospective will differ from others, that’s what makes us all a little different. However I would think the silence in wild places is one thing that draws some of us together.
Loon Lake is on a edge of the BWCA and has a Sea Plane Base on it, along with other access roads to the Gunflint Trail, a major road in Cook County Minnesota where cars, trucks & RV’s drive within ear shot of of the lake. This is a major recreation area, with a year round local population, not someplace I would go if I were looking for solitude. Any place with a road nearby is going to be somewhat noisy. A paddle a couple of lakes, a portage or two make a big difference in sounds that are man made, but if you camp on a lake that has Sea Plane Base marked on the map, then you better expect float planes will be using it.
Happy New Year!!
……..Birch

 

[Robin]

I took a 3 day trip to Lobster Lake here in Maine this summer and in my little trip report (https://www.canoetripping.net/threads/3-day-lobster-lake-solo.127792/) I mentioned the many seaplanes that had come for the nearby Moosehead Lake Seaplane Regatta.
The regatta was for Friday-Sunday iirc, I would be leaving on Thursday or early Friday. I guess the group flew into Lobster Lake shortly after I left and parked on a long beach where I had camped the first night.
I think it would have been fun to watch but some would probably not agree, it is a beautiful lake for canoe camping and all that activity would have probably got annoying.

 

[Black_Fly]

Not my cup of tea on a backcountry trip. Nothing disparaging about pilots, I started aerial surveying (mapping) in SW Arizona at 22. Lost many a dinner in a 9x9 film can while straddling a belly camera the next day. Pilots were my mates. But resource conservation policy ain’t got nothing to do with nostalgia or vocation loyalty. It’s about the resource, and more commercial flights degrades the experience and therefore the resource. A lot of miners in Ely are not worried about what their industry will do either. Once gone it won’t come back, including economy driven concessions for whomever. My opinion is that encroachment and over commercialization a threat as growth is the hardest thing to stop. Like with porn, I know wilderness when I hear it.

 

[yellowcanoe]

I took a 3 day trip to Lobster Lake here in Maine this summer and in my little trip report (https://www.canoetripping.net/threads/3-day-lobster-lake-solo.127792/) I mentioned the many seaplanes that had come for the nearby Moosehead Lake Seaplane Regatta.
The regatta was for Friday-Sunday iirc, I would be leaving on Thursday or early Friday. I guess the group flew into Lobster Lake shortly after I left and parked on a long beach where I had camped the first night.
I think it would have been fun to watch but some would probably not agree, it is a beautiful lake for canoe camping and all that activity would have probably got annoying.

View attachment 133887

oh ick.. All along Ogden Cove! I would not have been a happy camper.

My home lake is a permitted seaplane base. It's usually not a nuisance but now and then there is one jerk who wants to practice touch and go for two hours.

 

[yknpdlr]

oh ick.. All along Ogden Cove! I would not have been a happy camper.

My home lake is a permitted seaplane base. It's usually not a nuisance but now and then there is one jerk who wants to practice touch and go for two hours.

oh double ick. I recall with great awful memory, as the navigator in a large USAF aircraft those 4 (Four!) hour pilot pro (proficiency) flights going nowwhere at all with the constant touch and gos around and around the airfield. Again and again. The worst days were those of clear sunny weather with puffy white clouds, wich meant a lot of updrafts and downdrafts, giving the bumpiest rides of all, I kept busy calling out altitudes and watching the controls to make sure the levers were set correctly on each approach, all while I kept the barf bag handy.

 

[jdeerfoot]

Funny thing - for nearly 48 years I have lived less than 1/2 mile from the local airport, home to 3 corporate jets and numerous small sport aircraft. When I first moved into the neighborhood I remarked how noisy it was and was told that within a year I wouldn’t notice it. They were right, we don’t. But on trips in Canada I notice those far off bush planes all the times. And particularly obnoxious is Bearskin Airlines, a small regional airline out of the Thunder Bay ON airport that uses small commuter planes that have loud and high pitched noisy engines. They serve many isolated First Nations reserves in Ontario. The plus with them is they are fast, so they come and go quickly.

 

[ppine]

I’d rather see a float plane than a pool of acid mine drainage seeping into the watershed, but it’s not about a blank check. The industry is too large. Permitting system needs to be reined in. Conservation should be the overriding value. I can sit on my porch and listen to highway noise and noise IS pollution. It’s a matter of degrees, expectations.

HI BF, I spent a career as an environmental consultant and working on plenty of mines. My specialty was mine reclamation. Permitting and environmental documentation are very complex and expensive in the US. I can't vouch for Canada.

 

[ppine]

Nevada is where the Air Force and Navy train their fighter pilots. The Top Gun Training School is in Fallon about 50 miles from here. Jets are a fact of life here. Every other year the local airport sponsors the Blue Angles or the Thunderbirds. They fly over my house for 5 days. One either can be upset by such shenanigans or accept it as part of the landscape and learn to enjoy it. I used to work in the remote Outback of Nevada which is 87% public land owned by the US Government. Sometimes the only person I would see all day was a military pilot. They always waved.

Float planes are the same. Accept them as part of Frontier life. Appreciate that they can bring supplies and fuel and save people that need emergency help. That is how wildlife censuses are made. It is how life in the North can function.

 

[Black_Fly]

One myopic, I’ll conceived decision after another. Yeah, more of that please.

 

[yellowcanoe]

the loons on Lobster must have been going nuts.. They scream every time a plane appears on our lake.. The alarm scream.

 

[lowangle al]

I've been pissed twice when a float plane illegally landed on my favorite trout lake. After 5 hours of portaging and paddling in from the nearest road it was the last thing I wanted to see. The first time the occupants of the plane, fished from the plane. The second time they unloaded a folding boat with a motor. They trolled the lake and took home some heavy stringers.

 

[yknpdlr]

the loons on Lobster must have been going nuts.. They scream every time a plane appears on our lake.. The alarm scream.

Read my post #8 above as my introduction to a float plane where it did not belong. The plane I witnessed must have landed to dump its passengers and gear very near a grassy area containing an active loon nest. When the plane finally began to leave, the loons seemingly chased after it, as it pulled away, screaming all the way across the lake. Later that evening the long time continuous fireing of a .22 could be heard in the same area from where I was camped a half mile away.

 

[yellowcanoe]

Read my post #8 above as my introduction to a float plane where it did not belong. The plane I witnessed must have landed to dump its passengers and gear very near a grassy aea containing an active loon nest. When the plane finally began to leave, the loons seeingly chased after it, as it pulled away, screaming all the way across the lake. Later that evening the long time continuous fireing of a .22 could be heard in the same area from where I was camped a half mile away.

Well I missed that We were paddling in Newfoundland then for a month with no internet. About the same as home! Christmas in the dark.. I am sure there is lots I have missed and I am not ferreting out every post.

I have flown in a few times in Wabakimi in a Beaver and into Duo Lakes Yukon in a single Otter.
One flight took off from Lower Annette Lake in a serious wind. So much the headwind that the takeoff was almost straight up!

I have flown on commercial flights of course. Every landing on those is a bumpy mess compared with the glassy landings of bushplanes on water. Can't vouch for gravel bars!

 

[Glenn MacGrady]

Accept them as part of Frontier life. Appreciate that they can bring supplies and fuel and save people that need emergency help. That is how wildlife censuses are made. It is how life in the North can function.

That's one reasonable perspective. But how long have float planes been part of frontier life? Didn't life in the North function before float planes? And weren't there a lot more canoes and canoeists around in the frontier and the North before the age of float plane outfitters?

I think the answer to my last question is clearly yes.

Other than that, I haven't found a quick answer as to when float planes began to be used to cart canoeists into the frontier. The Beaver, Otter and Cessna float planes were not invented until around 1950, so I'm going to assume there wasn't much float plane usage in the Northern canoe waters before then, but we know there were a lot of canoeists. And at that time, the canoe was something that even a person of little income could own and wilderness trip in. Now, top canoes plus float plane rides are only for the financially well off.

Maybe Black Fly simply prefers canoe life as it was before 1950 or so, and I think that's a reasonable perspective, too.

Here's a 2013 article that predicts a reduction in the practice of tying canoes to the struts of float planes in Canada because of lawyers, insurance underwriters and government bureaucrats.

Tying Canoes to Bush Planes, Canada, circa 2013

Starting in late winter and on through spring, we get a steady trickle of inquiries from canoeists wanting to charter a floatplane with a canoe tied to it. Their goal is to find an affordable wa…

bushedpilotblog.ca

 

[Odyssey]

Bush planes in the north go back further than that Glenn.

Bush Flying in Canada

In Canada, bush flying refers to aviation in sparsely populated northern areas. Flight in the Arctic and the “bush” of the Canadian Shield developed betwee...

www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca

Yes, there are different sides to this story of bush planes in the north.

 

[Glenn MacGrady]

Bush planes in the north go back further than that Glenn.

Bush Flying in Canada

In Canada, bush flying refers to aviation in sparsely populated northern areas. Flight in the Arctic and the “bush” of the Canadian Shield developed betwee...

www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca

Good find, Brad. Thanks. But there's no discussion that dates the flying in of canoeists in that article.

Nevertheless, let's say bush flying in float planes began around 1925. There was civilization in the North for thousands of years before that, and certainly lots of canoeists were tripping on Canadian waterways for 50 years before that. I'm talking about recreational trippers in my previous sentence, not the explorers and commercial trippers, like the voyageurs, who were plying those waterways for hundreds of years before airplanes—to say nothing about the centuries or millennia of native canoeists.

So, some of us may have preferred the quiet ambience of the lakes and rivers of the frontier, wherever the frontier line may then have been, in the days before visual and noise "pollution" of float planes beginning in the late 1920's. Or not.

 

[yellowcanoe]

The Beaver I flew in was built in 1947. Clearly bush planes were needed that were reliable and could do short take offs and landings.
Bush planes have been around since the 19 teens but reliable bush planes were a product of post WW II.

Bush plane - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

When canoes entered the story I do not know. I would presume an era when there were enough people with discretionary income. My first flight was to the Snake River in 1996 in that very old single Otter.

 

[Odyssey]

Here's a nice old plane with history.

Fairchild KR-34 | Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre

The Fairchild KR-34 was manufactured in Montreal by the Fairchild Company. The Centre’s example, originally registered as CF-AOH, was built in 1930 and

bushplane.com

 

[ppine]

Before planes people in Alaska had boats. They walked in the summer and they used sled dogs in the winter.
Read some early stories of bush Alaska. People walked 30 miles a day. When they got off the steamers from Seattle and landed at Dyea, Skagway or Valdez, they walked. The only way to get to Fairbanks from Valdez was to walk 250 miles.

That's where the road houses came from. It is possible to drive all of the paved roads in Alaska and a lot of the good gravel roads in a week. I have done it. The rest of the State is reached by air. Bush Canada is the same.

 

[ppine]

I was fishing at a favorite trout lake in the Sierra a few years ago. Two F-18s from the Fallon Naval Air Base flew over way below the normal flight deck. A few minutes later they made a fast pass upside down. It was loud, disruptive and dramatic. But jets are a fact of life in Nevada. So we just went back to fishing.