When I was 18 I spent the summer working up in Churchhill Manitoba. My job was preparing and organizing how cargo would be loaded onto old DC4's and flown into the various remote sub-artic and artic communities.
The planes were basically ill maintained and sometimes we'd get them loaded and only 3 engines would start.
The Chief Pilot was an alcoholic Finnish guy who had been fired from FinAir (sp?) because oh his love for drinking before and during flight. He had lots of experience and could fly amazingly even if he was drunk.
Quite an experience as an 18 year old sitting jump seat and having a swig as the flask gets passed around the cockpit.
I remember late one night coming back from a flight to a village in the Arctic, and getting caught in a storm. Captain Rantalla slurring his every word, and not being able to find the airport in Churchill.
The fog was dense and the visability pretty much non existant.
He says "I think it's here, I'm gonna set her down". At this point I'm standing and looking out the side window. We're decending and all of a sudden I can see the whitecaps on Hudson's bay right below us. I yell, and he say's "oh shit I guess we're in the wrong place".
Second attempt, he found the runways and we made down.
Still amazes me to this day, that they let him fly !
I've got a few other stories about being in the back of overloaded Cessna 185's and a Beaver on floats transporting alcohol into "dry" isolated Native communities in Manitoba.
Sometimes I think I should have followed my brothers footsteps into avaition, then I think about one of his good friends that he worked with was the first plane to be flown into the World Trade Center.
