Surrey, B.C. (Dec 15/03) - Sixty years later Rex Terpening still wonders what happened to the four Inuit orphans he helped fly from Coppermine to Hay River.

Ninety-year-old author and former flight mechanic Rex Terpening is still as active as ever. - photo courtesy of Harbour Publishing

"I sometimes wonder if their stories have become a part of their family histories," said Terpening.

In November 1936, Terpening was working as an air engineer for Canadian Airways.

On a trip to Coppermine, the Anglican church asked Terpening and pilot Rudy Huess to fly the two boys, aged about eight or nine, and two girls, one about six, the other 12 or 13, to the Anglican mission in Hay River.

All Terpening knew was that a family crisis had left the children with no immediate family to care for them.

When they had almost made it to Fort Resolution, they had to turn back over Great Slave Lake and ended up spending a few days in a mining camp in Yellowknife. It's just one of the experiences Terpening writes about in his book Bent Props and Blow Pots.

The children went to Aklavik the following summer, and that's the last Terpening heard of them.

Book stems from

pencil jottings

The 90-year-old wrote the memoirs based on the journals he kept while working in the North.

"Journal is a fancy term for my pocket notebook and my stubby pencil," he said. He was lucky to get about five minutes of jotting down at night before hitting the sack.

He also used to take photos, and that, he said, was a lot more complicated.

"The cameras were only one step better than primitive," he said.

Having enough light was a problem, especially in winter.

"And at temperatures of -60F or colder your camera shutter and your finger would barely function," he said.

Terpening explained the title of the book.

"Props (or propellers) were the objects, along with the motor, that kept us airborne. Undercarriage failures weren't uncommon, and these bent our props.

"A blow pot was a gasoline-burning heater and we used these to heat our motor on cold winter mornings. It would take about an hour."

Improvising repairs was "a matter of pride" for the early engineers, said Terpening.

He grew up in Fort McMurray, Alta. After school he used to work at the air base and got enough experience to get hired as an engineer.

He retired in 1978 and now lives in Surrey, BC. He began writing occasional articles for aviation history magazines, and found that he had enough stories to make a whole book.

The dangers of

winter flying

His tales tell of getting ready for winter flights, warming the motor with blow pots and then hand cranking the inertia starter to get the plane going. They also describe the perils of flying in the North, planes breaking through thin ice, search and rescue missions and one quick changeover to floats for an emergency medical flight.

"Danger did exist," said Terpening.

But he went on to add that pilots and engineers didn't really think much about the dangers at the time.

"There would be reminders though, when some of our friends failed to return from a flight," he said.

Terpening's flights took him to communities all over the Northwest Territories and what is now Nunavut, but he said his favourite town would have to be Aklavik.

"We had good accommodations there and many friendly and helpful faces among the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals staff."

He also liked Aklavik because it was the last stop before heading for home in Fort McMurray.

As well as an author, Rex Terpening is also a member of the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame.