Yellowknife (July 21/04) - Airplane enthusiasts are looking to this weekend when jet fighters and helicopters will roar across Yellowknife skies. But many still remember the pioneering days of aviation: the days of Ernie Boffa.

Joe McBryan, owner of Buffalo Airways, stands with a bronze bust of Ernie Boffa, a pioneer bush pilot of the North.

Boffa was a pioneer bush pilot in the North. He passed away earlier this year while living in California.

"He was flying in the North when the air routes were still being pioneered," said Bob Engle, a Northern pilot and founder of Northwestern Territorial Airways, now a part of First Air.

"All the flying was on pontoons or skis," Engle said of the old days when there were no airports in the North and pilots had to land on lakes.

Engle describes Boffa as an inter-generational pilot, spanning the days of the very first bush pilots and the post- World War II era.

Boffa's contribution to Northern flight is tangible indeed. The owner of Buffalo Airways, Joe McBryan, would have had a very different life if Boffa had not flown his mother to a camp at Great Bear Lake so he could be born!

Boffa was born in 1904 in Italy. His parents immigrated to Canada shortly after. Years of trying different occupations led Boffa to aviation in the late 1920s.

For a while he wowed crowds with his wing-walking stunts before becoming an air force instructor during World War II. In 1943 he finally settled in his niche of Northern bush flight.

"I knew him when he was flying for Great Bear Lake Lodge," Engle said.

Boffa left the North and his aviation career in the late 1960s, said Engle.

Airplanes have changed much since in years past, but the work of Boffa and others like him was important to establish routes and standards of flight in Northern skies.

The NWT's Boffa Lake and Yellowknife's Boffa Street help immortalize this Northern adventurer. Forgetting him would be criminal in the eyes of some.

"If we don't learn lessons from history we tend to repeat mistakes," Engle said.