SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - As he watched his plane go up in flames on a frozen lake in December, David Mathieson thought, 'How am I going to tell my wife?'

Mathieson, president and chief pilot of Summit Air, was en route to Fort St. John, B.C. in his own private plane Dec. 22, when smoke filled the aircraft, forcing him to make an emergency landing on a frozen Falaise Lake, 120 km southwest of Yellowknife.

"I just looked for a lake and I found one just off to my right and just sort of headed for it," he said.

"I have air brakes, so I deployed those and (the aircraft) drops like a rock once you hit those buttons, but it filled up with smoke bad enough that I actually had to depressurize the airplane and open the door so I could breathe out the crack of the door and see straight."

Although it was over very quickly, the smoke Mathieson inhaled left him with a sore throat for a couple of weeks. He was otherwise uninjured.

"I got out of it within a couple of minutes, had (the plane) ditched on the lake, sort of walked 100 yards away and sat there and watched it burn," he said.

"It definitely ruins your day because it's a lot of money in that aircraft," he said. "I'd been working on it for two years, making it better than new and to have it fail right at the last stage was quite upsetting, but I didn't get hurt."

Mathieson stood on the ice for about an hour before Rob Carroll, president of Trinity Helicopters, came to pick him up.

"(It) was a welcome sight because it was pretty cold," he said.

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