NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
Buffalo Airways' newly-retrofitted Lockheed Electra water bomber is sitting in a Yellowknife hangar waiting for a test pilot to give it the 'OK.'

Mikey McBryan, general manager of Buffalo Airways, stands with the recently-retrofitted Lockheed Electra transport plane the company has spent $4 million turning into a water bomber for use against NWT wildfires. - Evan Kiyoshi French/NNSL photo

Mikey McBryan, the company's general manager, said the process has been a long one but the final step before the aircraft takes to the air to join the GNWT's water bomber squadron will be to have a test pilot from the Department of Transportation put the 1960s-era four-engined bird through it\s paces.

"It's ready to go now," said McBryan, standing in the hangar next to the machine he said cost $4 million to re-purpose, last week. "All the maintenance has been signed-off and everything so now a test pilot has to come."

McBryan said the backlog of aircraft waiting for testing means the company isn't sure when it will be declared operational.

The new water bomber isn't one of the aircraft in the reality show Ice Pilots NWT, which features Buffalo Airways. McBryan said the Buffalo team found two Electras waiting to be scrapped in Coventry, England. The planes hadn't been flying, he said, and were being used for their spare parts.

"They were going to cut them all up," he said. "It's kind of like getting a rescue dog from the SPCA."

Once it was back in Canada, McBryan said his brother, Rod McBryan, moved down to Red Deer, Alta., to help get the water bomber to the point it's at today. The second plane is still in Red Deer.

"My brother is the smart one on the whole thing," he said.

Rod McBryan said he moved his wife and daughter to Red Deer in order to be closer to the chief mechanic working on the planes. The company found an empty hangar where the planes could be stripped down and inspected.

"We were re-evaluating the certification basis to modern standards," he said, adding that the job isn't quite finished. "We had to analyze and recreate this thing under a new regime of regulatory authority. To get it to Yellowknife is a huge milestone Š but we've got to do all the test flight program. Usually this is done by a bigger company. We've invested and risked the whole show on this."

Rod said the aircraft was chosen to meet GNWT requirements for a more-modern aircraft than the DC4s they currently use.

"What the Electra can do is get there faster," he said. "It'll probably get there 70 miles per hour faster (than DC4s). And we're using jet fuel which is a little more available."

He said the older aircraft use avgas (aviation gas), which is increasingly expensive and difficult to produce. He said elsewhere in the world jet aircraft are being retrofitted as air-tankers, but the GNWT isn't quite there yet.

"It's cost prohibitive," he said, adding that the cost to operate jets like RG485 ­ currently being fitted as a fire-fighter in the U.S. ­ can cost as much as $12,000 per hour to operate.

"That's too much for any Canadian province or territory," he said.

Rod said it would probably cost less to keep operating the DC4s.

"I can support two DC4s, and burn less fuel, and deliver a quarter more product to the fire at a fraction of the price of an Electra," he said. "But we're kind of playing a catch-up game."

He said the electra won't cost as much as jet tankers would, but since it is a more complicated aircraft than the DC4, it will require extra attention.

"It's like dealing with a firearm. It's pretty safe until you misbehave with it," he said. "The Electra is kind of like an automatic weapon. It's a little bit high strung, but the basic reason is that's what the GNWT wanted."

Mikey said Buffalo Airways currently operates and maintains four CL215 waterbombers, two spares, one DC4 and four bird-dog light aircraft on behalf of the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources as part of their contract with the GNWT.

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