Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Apr 26/02) - Experienced bird watchers can easily spot and identify any variety of birds, but when it comes to steel birds, they are a little harder to identify.

Olaf Falsnes at Arctic Wings Ltd. is making that easier by painting his fleet of planes with some flashy new colours.

Partly for a corporate identity and partly for routine maintenance, he says the big money spent on aircraft paint is all part of the business.

Falsnes has been painting airplanes longer than he's been flying.

"I had a paint shop in Edmonton late 1960s and early 1970s while I went to school down there," he said. "In the winter time we painted one aircraft a week and that's how I paid my way through school."

At the University of Alberta, Falsnes studied anthropology, earned a bachelors degree in industrial technology with a major in aviation and a minor in business. He also has a masters degree in public health.

"I never really used it that much, I've just always played with airplanes," he said.

He flew North to Cambridge Bay in 1966 and worked out of there for five years, flying up to Victoria Island and back. He also worked 10 years out of Churchill, Man.

He moved to Inuvik 20 years ago and bought Arctic Wings from the Carmichael family in 1999. This year, he decided to give the fleet a face lift.

"Airplanes suffer a lot of wear and tear to the paint," he said. "There's a lot of movement in metal, a lot of covers and lids you take on and off and every time you scratch things and chip them a bit."

"They actually slow down a bit when the paint gets dull and ugly looking," he said. Painting is just part of the routine maintenance, but they also wanted to do something special with this paint job.

The old paint is removed to bare metal with a chemical stripper, before new paint can be applied.

"It is a lot of work, but we should be able to paint an aircraft in one week," he said. "It takes at least four days, because there are four colours in the design."

Arctic Wings just finished painting their Piper T-1020 Navajo, and plan to paint the same design on all seven aircraft in the fleet.

"We decide we wanted to use a Northern theme and so we came up with a design where we tried to incorporate northern lights," Falsnes said. "All the colours are in the spectrum of when you see the lights."

He spent a whole day at a paint shop in Edmonton trying to find colours that would suit his design.

"They have kind of a translucent colour, so it's hard to duplicate with paint," he said. "But when you look at a photo of the lights, the colours you see there are the colours you see on our aircraft."

The new paint is a swirl of spectrum colours from the front to the back on a blue background depicting the sky. The dark blue actually has more of a function other than looking good.

"It's more visible in the winter time and when the sun comes out, the frost on the wings just disappears -- even in cold weather."

He says the new paint will give the company a unique and recognizable identity to the public.