Harrison Ford .."just another pilot"

[retiredVTT]

..for all the Beaver lovers out there..!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsgiEubacT0


Bill

[JohnOSullivan]

Beavers are the "Pickup Truck of the North"
One of the key requirement of the design was to accommodate 8'x4' sheets of plywood. These were necessary to build bush camps.
As an old prospector, I have worked in almost every province and territory in Canada and have been well served by both bush planes and helicopters.
In the old days we worked in isolated bush locations without any communications withe the outside world for extended periods.
Today with the advent of satellite telephones there is no way we would have to resort to the isolation that we considered normal 40 years ago.
On one occasion where I was in a fly-in situation, I not scheduled to be picked up for 10 days. On the first day out I hit a hornet's nest and received 38 stings on my back. I had no means of contacting the outside world. Fortunately, I had no adverse reaction.
This would not happen today, with today's technology

The Beaver was and still is a Jewel of an aircraft. Of simple and efficient design, it has been the prime means of access to the remote regions of exploration in Canada.
It can move required Bush camp equipment more efficiently than a helicopter or DH Otter.

Back to the Harrison Ford connection!

Harrison Ford’s Beaver used in the Film Six Days and Seven Nights, was displayed in the Atlantic Canada Aviation Museum in 2002 ( just across the Highway from Stanfield Airport). Not sure if it is still there. Originally an Australian registered Beaver from what I can gather. The aircraft on display in the museum was a composite from two or more Beavers.

http://www.dhc-2.com/id694.htm

Harrison Ford currently owns and flies a beaver
http://www.dhc-2.com/Beaver%20Personali ... items.html

http://www.dhc-2.com/id967.htm

For all you need to know about Beavers go here
http://www.dhc-2.com/current_cover_page.htm

Neil Aird has done a masterful job in cataloging the history of the beaver

I have spent many hours in Beavers over my 46 years of mineral exploration prospecting in Canada.
One of my earliest experiences of a Beaver was in August 1970 in Northern Ontario, about 60 miles northeast of Wawa. A Beaver came in to fly us our of an isolated bush camp. There was a claims inspector, a prospector, my wife and me. Added to this was an 18 ft. Prospector Canoe, strapped to a float and a few hundred pounds of soil and rock samples which we had collected. After takeoff, with my wife and I squatting on the samples in the back of the aircraft (no rear seats), my wife had a restriction of circulation in her leg. She had cartilage problems in her knee and had been strapped up tightly with an elastic bandage. As she could not straighten her leg out, we had to, stitch by stitch, open the seam of her jeans until we got to the knee and remove the bandage.
Another episode was when I was over from Ireland in 1977and working in Baie-Johan-Beetz on the north shore of Quebec, when we came across a crashed Beaver, from a year or so before. The crew had survived. I also came across a Beaver wreck in Labrador in 1995, with a makeshift camp site set up closeby. The occupants had survived.

In Labrador in the mid 90’s we had two Beavers registered to our company – Castle Rock Exploration, in addition to two Bell 206s and a 3-seater Enstrom Helicopter.

As the flight from Goose Bay to our camp was 2.5 hours, I got quite a bit of unofficial airtime on the Beavers. They were # 19 C-FFHF and # 81 C-FGQF.
Photos of these are shown on Neil Aird’s wonderful Beaver site http://www.dhc-2.com/
He has records of 1,222 of the 1692 Beavers built.

Unfortunately we lost C-FFHF with two crew on Sept 30 1996
http://www.dhc-2.com/id462.htm

I had a close call in 1995 with C-FGQF. We had landed on a lake about half way from Nain and Goose Bay to refuel. I had jumped out on a float with a rope to tie up. I walked forward on the float and I felt a blow on my right shoulder . I had walked into the still spinning propeller. The propeller had cut through my jacket shoulder, and I received a bruise on my shoulder, but no penetration of the skin. I glanced up to the window and saw the pilot with his hands over his eyes. He had expected the worst. It was indeed a fortunate escape.
In late October 1995 we had to do an emergency landing on a river in northern Labrador due to low visibility in a snow storm. Fortunately we were well supplied with emergency rations, but we only had one sleeping bag. Those so-called Mylar emergency blankets are not worth a knob of goat shit in sub zero temperatures. One of the coldest nights of my life.

I am not really a scale modeler, but I would like to build a model of the Beaver C-FGQF and a German sailplane in which I had many happy hours in the late 50’s and early 60’s, the Kranich II. This aircraft was built in Sweden for the Luftwaffe . I did repairs on the tailplane in 1961 after half the tail was severed when the take-off dolly bounced up after take-off. I recovered a piece of 1 mm ply sheeting with a Luftwaffe Certificate of Airworthiness stamp dated 7 may 1941, four days after I was born. It is somewhere in my brother’s attic, so Ill have to look for it when I next visit Ireland.
Sorry for the long winded post.