Write On!

              Radios often ' wonked out' and weather reports were sketchy at best. One pilot
said that he forecasted the weather by looking at his wings... if they were wet, it
was raining! It was the pilots, their ingenuity, bravery, dedication and great skill
and, as many of them claimed, sometimes just plain good luck that kept the
planes in the air. Hours alone, fighting the elements, doing maintenance and
repairs in frigid cold, often lost and out of radio touch, ' just doing their job'
made these men a breed apart, made each and every one of them heroes.
In 1947, Austin's had bought a brand new Norseman aircraft, call
letters BSC. Of his more than 30,000 flying hours, Rusty flew over 10,000 of
them in that plane. CF- BSC, retired with more hours in the air than any other
Norseman, is in the Aircraft Hall of Fame in Surrey, BC. BSC and Rusty
became synonymous to everyone in the north. If a child was sick, someone
injured, medicine needed, someone stranded or lost, people knew that Rusty
and the BSC would get there if it was humanly possible. All over the north,
when a plane flew overhead, adults and children alike would run outside, look
up and wave. BSC would waggle it's wings as it flew over... a " hello and all's
weir from Rusty.
As a side result of the many, many mercy flights he made in the
north, a great number of those waving children carried the name Thurston" or
just plain " Rusty". Rusty always said he lost count of how many babies he had
flown to hospital to be bom and, in many cases, even helped deliver but I'm
sure he really knew each and every one. I listened to stories of frying a woman
to hospital, only to be forced to land, deliver her baby in the airplane on some
remote lake, then take off again and proceed to hospital. Hal McCracken,
another long time pilot at Austin's, once told me that Rusty had probably
delivered at least four or five dozen babies, maybe more. He laughed about it,
saying they could never be sure. Rustys laconic radio message would be
something like, " Austin base from BSC... 14: 20 hours; landed safely at Moose
Factory, with two passengers". From that, Hal said, you could check his back
communications to see how many passengers he had picked up and often
deduce that he had delivered another baby enroute. Sometimes, of course, by
the time he got to the isolated mother- to- be, it was too late to even try for the
hospital and Rusty would often help in the delivery before transporting the new
mother and child. To a woman in labour in a remote village, he must have
seemed an angel from the sky; no wonder they'd want to honour him and their
new child by giving it his name?
These are the stories I grew up hearing. I remember so many times,
usually in bad weather ( the only time you found a pilot sitting around on the
ground), at Blakey's, at the base or in our camp lodge listening to the many
pilots who flew in and out. And what stories they told!
One pilot recounted a tale about flying a team of sled dogs to an Inuit
hunting camp when the tether line in the plane broke. With ten frightened half
wild and half wolf animals loose and fighting in his plane, the pilot was in real
danger. He had a pistol for protection but it was relatively useless in this case.
First, he could not kill all the dogs without reloading, probably a fatal delay and
second, to start shooting in an airplane would likely cause a crash, also fatal.