Tracy Kovalench
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jul 31/98) - Ever feel like you're being watched?

A slight case of paranoia may be common among city newcomers as they glance up into Yellowknife skies. Suspicious thoughts are fuelled by the sound of engines, followed by the appearance of a metal wingspan, which disappears out of sight just as quickly as it arrived.

A few minutes of recovery calms visitor's nerves and then they come to the realization of their participation in the great Northern tradition of planespotting.

However, it doesn't take long to become accustomed to the frequent encounters of our friends in flight.

"If you've been in Yellowknife for any length of time, it becomes a fact of life," says Jim Smith, chief pilot at Buffalo Airways.

The charter airline, whose runways face the city's downtown core, Frame Lake South and the golf course, sometimes has as many as 30 planes leaving its hangar a day.

En route to a fire northeast of the capital, one of the airline's DC-4 water tankers provided the crowd at Folk on the Rocks with a surprise performance of its own.

"That was the biggest mosquito I've ever seen," joked East coast folk singer Teresa Doyle, who was forced to give up a few moments of her spotlight to an up-close-and-personal flash of the plane's big belly.

It's roar as large as its impact, the tanker is surprisingly an exception to the airplane watchers audio rule.

"Some of the loudest planes are our smallest ones," says Mike Polluck, a dispatcher at Air Tindi's floatbase.

After almost a decade of life in Yellowknife, Polluck says it's possible to identify the metal birds by their call, but he prefers to name the planes by sight.

"Yellowknife's a really neat place because you have a lot of older planes still in service," says Polluck, who was recently in awe of two French water bombers circling city skies last week.

Rich in variety of the two-tonne species, Yellowknife also attracts pilots from all over the world. Nautical navigators from as far away as Switzerland and France have migrated overseas for a chance to fly in the Northern sky.

"It's beautiful," says Newfoundland pilot Jay Hickey, of the bird's eye view North of Sixty. "It's like a miniature model of the city."