Free Flying On Instinct by L. D. Cross Page A

kit and ran over to where the two victims and some trappers had taken shelter from his violent landing. Two charred and oozing bodies were lying on makeshift litters. McConachie bandaged them while Green bandaged the plane. With the four men on board and ready to go, McConachie realized he didn’t have enough room to take off. There were no brakes on the wheels to hold back the plane while he revved the engine, so he reverted to the old rope-around-a-tree technique. When the plane reached full power, he stuck his arm out and made a chopping motion. A trapper lifted his axe and chopped the rope. The plane shot forward and lifted off to fly to Edmonton.
    In the mid-1930s, Natives help bush pilot Grant McConachie (fourth from left) make emergency repairs to an undercarriage strut of his fish-hauling bush plane. library and archives canada c-061897
    There was no downtime for McConachie between assignments. Only a busy bush pilot made money. It was time to start flying fish again. Along with the colder weather came fog, and just as McConachie was about to take off early one morning he saw his Uncle Harry coming out of the mist. While on the train from Toronto to Vancouver, he had impulsively got off to see his nephew. They chatted forsome time as tiny water droplets built up on the propeller blades and turned to ice. McConachie didn’t notice the problem until he was halfway down the runway. He knew he didn’t have enough speed to take off, but he had no room to stop either. Slowly the plane lifted off the ground, but it had no power to climb. McConachie just missed the smokestack near the CN railyards, then electric power lines appeared directly in his path. He turned sharply, but one wing clipped the ground and the plane cartwheeled end over end. Rollinginto a ball to protect his head, he waited for the gas tanks to explode, wondering if he would look like those burned men he had evacuated from Oboe Lake. The plane stopped rolling in a field. All was silent. Then he heard the noise of people and vehicles. As McConachie moved to get a better look, the pain was instantaneous. Small wonder—his legs were bent at unnatural angles, it hurt to breathe and metal was sticking out of his thigh. First responders gave him whisky, and by the time he was pulled free of the wreckage the pain had lessened. In hospital, the X-rays showed 17 leg fractures, broken hips, plus shattered fingers, ribs and left kneecap.
    After two months of recuperation, McConachie still limped badly. The reconstructed knee would not bend. He decided to be his own doctor and asked some barroom buddies to bend it for him as he placed it over the edge of a table. It hurt like hell and swelled up like a balloon, but now he could move it a bit. Months later, the knee buckled as he lifted fuel drums out of his plane, but after the pain subsided he had almost full flexibility. He would need it on his next assignment, when he flew a team of prospectors to an abandoned gold mine in the Stikine Range. Dodging sharp peaks and landing in deep snow on Two Brothers Lake, he and his passengers had to tramp the snow down with their snowshoes to make a runway so McConachie could take off to fly back to Edmonton.
    On the airfield in Edmonton, McConachie was hit witha bombshell. Uncle Harry and his business partners were in trouble; in fact, they were bankrupt. McConachie’s planes were slapped with liens, and Independent Airways was grounded. McConachie managed to smooth-talk the creditors into releasing one plane so he could barnstorm to pay off the debt. The plane crashed. The cardinal rule of bush flying is that you always pick up everyone you dropped off, but McConachie now had no way to pick up the prospectors at Two Brothers Lake. After six frantic weeks trying to beg, borrow and do anything short of stealing a plane, he was able to fly in with a mining company team and pick up the emaciated prospectors, who could barely stand. When he went to the hospital to