The job in Peace River Alberta had gone quite smoothly considering I was a new Captain on the Casa 212 and the flat terrain of Alberta made it easy to master the art of EM survey flying which was very different from straight Magnetometer flying I had been doing up on James Bay (Attawapaskat) in a Caravan.
We waited for Eric , my co-captain who was also a brand new captain and we had attended the same course in Ottawa. Eric had had some trouble on the course , mainly due to his native toungue , French, but we all spent extra time helping him think in English for the standard operating procedures in a two crew enviroment. Some of us got together after hours in the cockpit of the Casa in the hangar and went through procedures over and over until he was more comfortable. He was a very pleasant chap and we saw the value in this small investment. We had heard that he was a very good pilot. I , too , asked help of a young first officer, Chris , in matters that I did not fully understand.
This next mission was daunting to say the least especially for two rookies. Two other captains had turned down the job because it was way up north above the Arctic Circle and was a tent camp on the barrens of Baffin Island. The engineer was a rookie too , a Greek immigrant called Stathi Popadoppagoppabobbopolis or something. He had been making arrangements to fly south and then the long way around by airlines in order to fly in comfort and arrive on Baffin on the HS748 charter which bore our spares and supplies. I vetoed this by assuming the role of benovelent dictator and informed Ottawa that he was to fly with us. That's the way it is, I informed him after phoning many layers over even his boss's head.... and besides ... I was a Duke.
We launched for Yellowknife , North West Territories where we needed a hangar for preventitive maintainence since we were bare-assed to the elements for the next few months. This was also the departure point for some very long legs over very barren territory with very few alternate airports.
So the Frenchman , the Greek and the Aussie took off on an adventure of a lifetime.
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