Free The Ice Pilots by Michael Vlessides Page A

he made his own rules.”
    “This whole thing,” he said, waving his arm to indicate the hangar, “is like Disneyland for Joe. It’s all his design.”
    And yet, as Lone Ranger as Joe may seem, the success of Buffalo rests on the fact that the McBryans—all of the McBryans—play an integral role in running the airline, despite their seemingly vast personality and skill differences. “With most family businesses,” Mikey said, “everyone’s a welder or everyone’s a mechanic or everyone’s a fisherman. But with us, it’s different. My dad’s the only pilot, my brother’s the mechanic, my sister’s the people person, and my mom’s the accountant. So we all have our strengths and weaknesses, but we’re all so different. It’s almost like we’re not even family at all.”
    Though these differences may make for unusual moments around the Thanksgiving table, the McBryans have managed to blend their differences into a fairly tasty stew. Together they make sense. Take one piece out, though, and the result is incomplete. “We can’t do each other’s job at all, and yet we all can’t not work together,” Mikey said. “We all need each other for the whole thing to work.” In other words, Joe may not need Mikey to fly a plane, but Joe needs Mikey in order to fly the planes. It’s an arrangement that works well for the people of the North.
    Mikey struggles to identify exactly what his role is (I think “New Media Visionary” has a nice ring to it), even though the TV show calls him general manager. Either way, he has no problem saying what he isn’t. “I started as a pilot, and didn’t do too good. Then I tried to be a mechanic, and didn’t do good at all. Then I went into metalwork, but I wasn’t very good at that, either. That’s when I went to business school, I finally figured out what I’m good at.”
    When someone in the office up and quit and Joe needed a replacement to work up charter quotes, Mikey was handed the job.
    “Essentially it was because nobody else would do it; everyone else was busy fixing and flying the airplanes,” he told me.
    Not that Mikey needs to feel bad about anything on the work front. As far as I can tell, he has been the driving, on-the-ground force that has changed Buffalo Airways from a business to a worldwide phenomenon. Ice Pilots, of course, is the foundation of that genesis.
    After graduating from high school, Mikey went to business school at Red Deer College in Red Deer, Alberta, a city of some 100,000 people about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. Going to school in Red Deer was a no-brainer for him, given his close ties to the city. Buffalo maintains a hangar in nearby Penhold, which allowed Mikey to go away without really going away. “I was still under the umbrella,” he told me. “I was still in the Buffalo bubble.”
    Bubble or not, being away from the daily grind in Hay River and Yellowknife afforded Mikey an opportunity to focus on his business education, though the demographics of his school sometimes made it hard to stay focused. “We Hay River guys, we’re not the best-looking guys and all. But Red Deer College had four girls for every guy, because it was all nursing and business students. So we all had the hottest girlfriends!”
    One afternoon during his third year there, Mikey was sitting in a marketing class when he received a call from David Gullason, an executive producer at Vancouver-based Omni Film Productions. After introducing himself, David explained that he had recently read an article about Mikey and Buffalo Airways in The Globe and Mail.
    “David asked me if I wanted to be on television,” Mikey said. “I said ‘Yeah!’ ”
    “I had read about British tourists—they call them ‘propheads’—going to Yellowknife to see these old planes,” Gullason told me over the phone one day. “We were looking for an in-the-moment show that had elements of history and science, and this had both. And obviously there was this huge,