Frosty Fridays and Floatplane Egress

It’s a rare July morning or evening when we fire up the woodstove to take the chill off the house, but we’ve lit a few warming fires this past month.  I lit one just a few days ago, on the 28^th. And last Saturday I stopped through home to re-fuel enroute to Yellowknife after a week-long tour out in a far corner of the NWT. As I climbed out of the plane I caught a whiff of woodsmoke and Kristen said, “Yeah, I decided to stop layering on more sweaters up in my office, and lit the stove!”

“A frosty Friday?” I asked. 

“Well not quite, but close,” she said.

It was my bush-flying mentor Bruce Gordon, always fond of the nuances of language and a clever turn of phrase, who put “frosty Friday” into our lexicon. Sometimes spiced with an additional alliterative f-word, Frosty Friday connotes a hard “not-gonna-happen” response to something.  For example, taxiing away from a jagged pile of boulders after offloading a couple thousand pounds of stuff from a Twin Otter on floats, Bruce might mutter, “It’ll be a frosty Friday before we bring a load in there again, unless they build us some sort of a dock…”

I think the full derivation of frosty Friday is from the classic, “It’ll be a frosty Friday in Hades when such-and-such happens.”  Linked, of course, to the old “Snowball’s chance in hell.”  Not likely, in other words.

It’s ending warm, but it’s been a cold July in the far north. I looked back through my old airplane Journey Logs and found the date of a frosty July morning (a Tuesday, not a Friday) back in 2013, the 16^th of the month, when I was overnighting at a fishing lodge down at Taltheilei Narrows.  When I went out to the plane that morning, I was amazed to find an honest coating of frost on the windshield. And as anyone who knows me might imagine, I brought that up in conversations for about the next three weeks – frost in mid-July!  (Yawn.)

This year I think we will finish July with a tally of five or six fires in the woodstove, and that might be a record. As of today it looks looks like our average daily high temperature has been 15.3 degrees Celsius or 59.5 degrees F.  With a breeze, that’s wool-sweater territory for sure. In a canoe, with rain and a headwind, it’s almost mitten time.

My point? Don’t have one, really. But I’ll swerve right over to one now, because I feel some soapbox oratory coming on. This one is related to our sometimes-chilly summer weather hereabouts, and my work in floatplane transportation.

Standing on the dock at a fishing lodge the other day, watching a group of eager but very elderly anglers climb aboard a floatplane, for a day-trip fly-out to a lake at some distance from the main lodge, I heard the guide yammering on about how silly he thought it was that nowadays everyone aboard a floatplane is required to wear an inflatable life-jacket. Not wanting to make a scene, I didn’t interrupt his soapbox soliloquy. It wasn’t my plane and they weren’t my guests.

But I’ll interrupt now:

First, given the size and weight and – ahem – “waning physical prowess” of the heavy-paunched fishermen I saw clambering into that floatplane, I had to agree that it was a little silly, and likely useless, to hand each gent a tiny strap-on pouch that looked like a Victoria’s Secret purse, to serve as his legal “life-jacket.” I knew it was mostly silly and useless, because I’ve been upside down in a floatplane once, upside down in ice-cold water, and that was in the days before we were all required to wear a life jacket equipped with two brightly beaded pull-cords (a.k.a. “rosary beads”) to inflate your ample Mae West flotation.

We got out of the plane that day, and made it to shore, and no, we were not wearing our life jackets when we flipped over. Does that mean I think the ruling forcing us all nowadays to wear them is a dumb idea?  Nope.

I remember another bush-flying mentor of mine, the late Jimmy McAvoy. Every year, around Labor Day, Jimmy would start showing up for a day of Single Otter flying, wearing a life vest of the type sold in those days for wading fishermen – with a little sheepskin patch for your fishing flies, and a rip-cord CO2 canister for inflation. This was 1992 – three decades before the new ruling on life jackets.

Turns out Jimmy had once nearly died of hypothermia clinging to an overturned Helio Courier in the icy waters of a northern lake. The passenger who was with him was not quite as hefty and strong as Jimmy.  Jimmy lived, sans extra floatation. His companion that day, after some desperate hours,  had gone to the bottom before rescue arrived.

And that brings up another point here, fellow pilots:  if your passengers all have life jackets on, your job in the critical seconds after an accident just became a tiny bit easier, because you can reach over and yank the inflation rip-cords on someone else’s life jacket. That person’s chances just got a huge boost, and you can turn your attention to whatever or whomever needs it next. Pull on another ripcord, and even if that person might not be conscious, and could be badly injured, they are not going to sink. 

Yes, these are ghastly, scary scenarios to contemplate. I’m not trying to be a kill-joy. I spent all day flying a floatplane.  It went fine. It will likely go fine again tomorrow, and it’s been going fine for many years.  If we never wanted to take any chances, we would never get out of bed in the morning. And yet, whenever I hear people (including seasoned bush pilots) whine and harp about the “silly, stupid” requirement that everyone on board a seaplane needs to wear a life jacket, it makes me cringe.

Think about this: if you wanted to design a really lousy boat, it might end up looking a lot like a floatplane. And if you were stepping aboard that really lousy boat, and someone offered you a life jacket, would you really say “nah, I’m good.”  (Question mark?)

I’ll stop now. Wear a good inflatable life jacket in a floatplane. It just might save your bacon someday. It may be a Frosty f—-in’ Friday when you need it, but hey, Frosty Fridays do happen. Even in July.