(This excerpt about the Piper Super Cub aircraft is from the biography Edward Hadgkiss: Missing In Life, an aviation adventure available from Mac’s Fireweed Books in Whitehorse, Yukon.)

Edward Hadgkiss sold his Cessna 120, which proved too underpowered to haul heavy loads, and went into partnership with big-game-outfitter Stan Reynolds on a Super Cub, a small plane coveted by bush pilots as the ultimate in versatility for tough work. A former crop-duster bought from Mercury Air in Edmonton, the royal-blue Cub, with yellow trim, was rigged with a hopper and spray tank.

Ed would strap bundles of claim posts to the Cub's belly and use the quick-release mechanism to make air drops wherever mineral prospectors wanted to stake ground. The ingenious procedure saved prospectors piles of money in helicopter time. With the little athlete of the northern sky, Ed worked mining contracts, hunted lost horses, and flew air patrol during the Yukon's worst forest-fire season in ten years. Over three hundred men fought fires at any one time. The month of June, 1969, was the hottest, driest in history. Forests were tinder dry. The slightest spark in the dry bush was immediately a bad fire.

Helicopters and small aircraft, like the Super Cub, were flying forestry contracts. They flew fire patrols and guided bulldozers to wherever fire guards needed to be dug. Two Mitchell B-25 water bombers--one co-piloted by Ed--were brought in from Edmonton. Ed and Stan, burning the candle at both ends, brought in a substitute pilot from Whitehorse to fly the Cub, while Ed was flying other aircraft.

When rain conquered the fires in late summer, Ed went back to flying the Cub. With its drooped wingtips, the plane was a natural for spotting horses. Another outfitter, who had bought a herd of half-wild horses running on open range near the Takhini River, could not find his strays on horseback. He appealed to Ed and Stan, who willingly helped whenever a job required flying.

Stan, a sharp-eyed spotter, occupied the back seat while Ed piloted the Cub in slow motion over tall, charred groves of spruce snags, burnt by a million-acre forest fire ten years before. The sharp black sticks poked up wickedly close to the Cub's belly. Ed's habit was to keep an emergency-landing place in sight at all times in case of engine failure. This time the Alaska Highway was outside gliding range as the plane skimmed a few feet above the treetops.

Ed's biggest concern was always a fire breaking out while in flight. A fire grants no mercy to a small plane, a large jet or any size in between. To outrun a fire while in midair would be nothing short of spectacular.

The inhalation of thick smoke would suffocate the occupants while licking flames burned them to shriveled crisps. If by some remote miracle they managed to escape those two killers, deadly fumes emanating from melting plastic and other man-made materials were ready to finish the job. An airplane fire was too dangerous and merciless for even Ed to tamper with.

He and Stan, who loathed smoking and smokers, never allowed passengers to smoke inside their planes. The Cub could evaporate in a whoosh of flames.

The cloth covering, pulled tightly over the steel ribs, was varnished with a hard, highlyflammable coating. The waterproof fabric was durable and strong, sounding a resonant twang when thumped with the middle finger. But it would be fatal if the airplane's upholstery and skin came into contact with anything hot.

Stan, who had spotted the horses, pressed his mouth to the side window, and shouted audible instructions to the horseman below in an unrushed Pennsylvania drawl. The horseman understood Stan's message, waved and galloped away in pursuit of the herd, not noticing the airplane bank sharply and disappear to the west.

"Ed!" Stan yelled, pitching his voice above the Lycoming engine noise. "Something's hot! Something's burning!"

Smoke and the smell of heat quickly filled the cabin.

"What's on fire?!" The pilot hastily looked around, trying to determine the problem. At the same time, he noticed the Cub had gone out of balance, the trim control tab uselessly free-wheeling. With his left hand he shoved the throttle to full power, and kicked in rudder for a sharp turn for the highway.

It was usually fun flying this remarkable little airplane manufactured by Piper which could fly so slowly it practically hovered in the air like a helicopter. At this moment, slow was an unwanted quality, and they wished it would fly a thousand times faster.

Ed had come defiantly alive, his mental faculties instantly alert when he faced an emergency. Only an audience to court would have made him more vibrant. Often, he invited trouble to test his prowess to improvise his way out of a crisis. Challenges sprinkled spice into what otherwise might be a monotonously dull day. Ed did not like boredom. But a fire on board, in the air, was a bit much even for him.

They sweated the few minutes of time required to plunk the plane down on the highway and jab on the brakes. Two weak-kneed men rolled out to examine a gaping hole, the size of a dinner plate, burned through the volatile fabric.

"We were sweating blood." Stan sighed, breathlessly.

The battery was mounted behind the back seat where Stan had been buckled in. Somehow, the trim-control's steel cable came into contact with the electrical wiring that shorted out. The red-hot steel separated, and one end flipped against the back seat, setting the upholstery on fire; the other end flipped against the fuselage's interior wall, burning a hole in the plane's side.

The fire miraculously extinguished itself.

"I guess our time wasn't up," Stan said.

Ed was not nearly so philosophical. The plane had ironically just passed its hundredhour safety inspection.

When month end rolled around, the Cub, having racked up another hundred hours of flying time, needed another safety inspection.

Time pressed Ed and Stan. Both worked steady without much sleep. They were tired. Late July was hectic for an outfitter and his crew getting ready for a big hunting season that opened the first of August. Without fail, they were backed against time as the days on the calendar approached August.

Stan needed every airplane flying. Supplies had to be hauled to base camps. Hunters, who would soon arrive in Whitehorse on orange Canadian Pacific jets, had to be flown to Dawson City in Stan's plane, or by scheduled aircraft, and shuttled by Cessna 180 into the base camps. When a hunt was finished, the procedure was reversed. The feverish pace went on for several months.

Stan had been spending all the hunters' deposit money improving camps, building airstrips, buying airplanes, little tractors, boats, horses and hiring guides, cooks, wranglers and crews.

Everybody was working flat out. Planes were in the air round the clock, flying in supplies, fuel and equipment. Ed and the Super Cub needed to be in the air working, too.

To get the required inspection Ed rushed to Whitehorse, expecting to finish and return to Dawson before Stan noticed the interruption.

Ed anticipated no problems, for he knew how to work people to his advantage. He laid a solid groundwork of good relationships with those who came into his space, regardless of how much anyone irritated him. He tried never to burn bridges.

The engineer started the inspection as soon as the Cub was rolled inside the hangar. Scrutinizing the Cub, he pointed out several caved-in ribs atop the wing. Instead of passing inspection, the plane was grounded until structural work was completed. "Some people say aerobatics and flopping over on the top will cave in the top a bit," Stan explained. "It's common in the Cub. This was not much at all. This Cub had been on its back before. We could see that from the log book. But it had been passing inspections before.

"Once an engineer has grounded an airplane, you can't go to another engineer and get him to pass it. The damage has got to be repaired. So, there we were, really pushed. We needed the plane in the air.

"The airplane was going to be on the ground for days. The work had to be done by a B Engineer. There were very few around Whitehorse. Once into structural repairs, it's not just an ordinary thing. It's a little more complicated. They could see a week's work."

Ed phoned Edmonton. It would be faster and cheaper to fly to Custom Air, who promised to start repairs immediately. The federal transport department issued a special permit to ferry the Cub south.

The weather was bad the afternoon Ed filed a flight note to Watson Lake and took off. A flight note was more flexible than a flight plan.

On a flight plan, which is formal, the pilot estimates speed and sets an estimated time of arrival, called ETA. Should the pilot fail to close his flight plan at the end of the journey, an official search would be put into motion by the Rescue Coordination Centre within a half hour of the ETA at a destination airport serviced by air traffic control.

With a flight note, twenty-four hours would pass from the time indicated on the pilot's filed notification as his ETA before a search was started. A flight note could be filed for short spans or long periods of up to thirty days.

That was handy for bush pilots flying in remote areas. If the pilot failed to return by a specified date, then an official search would be launched.

"We used flight notes all the time," Stan said. "We never knew where we were going to be. We'd land on the highway. Gravel bars. Bush strips. Stop at highway lodges. Anywhere. Flight note is what we used. It was a common practice. It was convenient."

And they left word with family members or friends who knew the pilots' intentions and when to be alarmed by an overdue aircraft.

A pilot might be weathered in on a sandbar, eating sardines and waiting for slate-gray clouds to stop boiling. He did not want big search planes lumbering up from the Comox air base in British Columbia just because time had expired on a flight plan.

For the same reason, Ed did not want time running out on a flight plan, should he be stranded and have to make a highway landing.

Highway landings could be dicey. But Ed had lots of practice, both with and without the propeller turning.

Unless a pilot was in trouble and the situation considered an emergency, highway landings were taboo. Airports were built for airplanes to land on. Up North, remote conditions made highway landings no more legal, just acceptable, and often necessary.

Authorities mostly ignored them.

With the weather poor and Ed tired, he might only reach Watson Lake. But Ed loved to fly, and when he got in the air he was a determined demon in the cockpit.

The sky was forlorn, and the mountains bombarded by rain. He punched through the gray soup, flying under scud and dodging storms. He kept going.

Wherever he gassed up, he re-filed flight notes for another short leg of the journey ahead. He thrust on to Fort Nelson and to Grande Prairie. His eyelids were heavy when, in the early grayness, he descended into Edmonton's Industrial Airport.

Ed could keep sleep at bay forever, it seemed. He was an extraordinary person who could call for sleep whenever and wherever. When there was no activity, he would collapse and sleep with the confidence of a child.

In the woods, he would prop himself against a tree like Rip Van Winkle and snooze while his hiking mates figured out where they were. Ed did not get lost. He had a built-in navigational device, like a bird. His dad had it, too.

Instead of clashing in an argument over their position, Ed would sleep. In wintertime, his hiking friends were concerned that maybe his body temperature had dropped so low that he was suffering hypothermia. As soon as his friends decided which trail to take, Ed would wake up, fit and ready to go.

The Custom Air engineer, good as his word, repaired the damage but did not apply the final coat of paint. He said that when Ed got home he could put on the last coat and finish it off. Waiting for it to dry would just hold him up.

Within hours, Ed was homeward bound. If the weather held, he could push back to the Yukon as fast as he had sped down to Alberta.

At Grande Prairie, as Ed taxied in for fuel, the Mounties cornered him like two hawks at a gopher hole. They wanted to search the plane.

Ed was not naive. He knew they were looking for drugs and that his fast two-day travel itinerary on flight notes looked suspicious.

In the Yukon, he rubbed shoulders with drug-users. Marijuana and hash, filtering into Whitehorse, were sold openly in broad daylight on Main Street a block from the RCMP detachment and under the courtroom window. The courts were packed with drug offenders. Ed, and others, thought the offenses somewhat cute and flaunted their attitudes in the law's face.

He even implied he had puffed grass, although he loathed tobacco smoke. Potheads gathered inside small houses, taping cracks and crevices to prevent seepage of the acrid tell-tale odor that smelled like the burning of wet chicken feathers.

One of the most infamous havens was the house Ed called home when he was in Whitehorse.

Grande Prairie was the first red flag to indicate Ed and some of his Whitehorse friends had been under police surveillance for a while.

Ed was wearing crumpled, rumpled, grease-soiled clothing. His thick, black stubble was not yet a beard and gave him a seedy look. The black brush-cut was still growing out to the longer style of the day and stuck out like the feathers of an old, unpreened raven. Under heavy lids his eyes were red with strain and lack of sleep. He looked like what the police expected to find.

Ed, annoyed but not rude, was a master of wit, charm and psychology. Once, a Mountie had criticized him for a highway landing. "You must be a helluva pilot. Why can't you land at an airport?" he asked. Ed responded with, "Uh-h, I dunno," an expression used to accept blame and avoid animosity.

-------

About a year before, a young, polite policeman doing his job, had delayed Ed for coasting through a stop sign. The policeman asked for credentials and a mini-safety inspection of the forest-green Chevrolet half-ton.

Blow the horn. No horn. Turn on the lights. Missing tail light. No illumination of license plates. Flick the headlights. No low-beam. Brakes marginal. After several more infractions, Ed was asked to pull on the emergency brake and try driving forward. The truck nearly crashed into the federal building's wall.

"Does anything on this truck work?" the officer asked.

Ed answered, "Uh-h, I dunno", then twisted a dashboard knob. "The radio works." "I'm impressed." The constable conceded the radio was all that worked...and that not very well. A loose wire caused static. The policeman laughed while he wrote the ticket. On the day Ed paid his fine, the constable accepted an invitation to go for an airplane ride.

That was Ed's style.

-------

During his Grande Prairie detainment, he used similar tactics to talk himself out of a tight jam and into a bed-and-breakfast.

An officer, who had ransacked the plane, had only uncovered a Webley .455 handgun, nestled inside a cheap cardboard suitcase of survival gear. There was a heavier-thanusual crackdown on carrying concealed firearms in Canada; obtaining a handgun permit was sometimes difficult.

"Ed called me from Grande Prairie," Stan said. "He had to pay a fine. He spent the night behind bars. Knowing Ed, he probably talked his way into jail, telling the Mounties he didn't have any money to stay in a hotel.

"I think, possibly if you have a little fine and you're from out of town, the police would confine you. Ed had a handgun and did not have a proper permit. He paid his fine and came on home. I think they kept the revolver because I never saw it again. I remember him telling me it was a Webley army surplus that you could buy."

The Webley Mark IV was a six-shot British military handgun of First World War vintage, cumbersome, the balance bad, the grip not convenient, break action instead of swing on the cylinder.

"A revolver," Stan said, "is not that accurate for shooting something for survival. A rifle, or a shotgun, is much better. You can waste a box of shells trying to kill one ptarmigan or one rabbit with a handgun. And it was not enough to stop a bear. An experienced bushman will not carry a handgun for survival. You learn that. It sounds small, takes up little room in an airplane, doesn't add much weight. But a handgun is impractical."

Except for Ed Hadgkiss, nobody knew what transpired at Grande Prairie. The police denied the Super Cub was searched, that the Webley* was confiscated, that Hadgkiss paid a fine and scoffed that a wayward pilot could trick them into providing free overnight accommodation and food.

The police may have routinely spot-checked every aircraft landing that day. Or Ed may have been targeted for a search. Whichever, the incident generated three months of follow-up investigations and questionings before the police were satisfied and moved on to more pressing matters.

Nothing formal ever came from the investigations, such as files, and no charges were ever laid. The police had been looking into complaints lodged by individuals who were suspicious of Ed's flying so much at all hours of the day and night.

But Ed's eyes were opened, wide. The most important thing in Ed's life--flying--was at stake. Because of him, his best friends were in jeopardy. Stan stood to lose his airplanes, his clientele, maybe his entire outfitting business, as well as an impeccable reputation.

Ed snapped to attention and straightened up, fast. It all blew over.

Ed and Stan had a partnership and a gentlemen's working agreement in which Ed earned his own money with the planes, an arrangement that offered Ed independence. When he was not busy flying for Stan, Ed would fly for somebody else. He was tucking away a nice bankroll.

Hunters were shuttled into base camps by Cessna 180. The more airstrips Stan built, the more the need was erased to trail-in by horseback for three days into good hunting areas.

Ed met the hunters, mostly at Dawson. A few were met in Whitehorse because of transportation problems getting them to Dawson.

Stan had told his hunters he had airstrips, an airplane and a good pilot to fly them. Hunters, who liked to spend their time hunting rather than spending days horsebacking to the scene of the hunt, preferred paying a little extra to be flown into camp. And the clients trusted Ed as a pilot.

Pilots spend many spare hours on the ground, waiting. Ed would fill those hours however he could. Once, when overnighting in a bush cabin he baked his first raisin pie without a recipe.

Another time, a pilot recalled flying off to do some work. When Bill Trerice returned three hours later, Ed had built a cabin with only an axe for a tool.

In town Ed hung around the Downtown Hotel, waiting on hunters who stayed there. Ed would talk to people and drink gallons of coffee. He became enamored with a shy girl, employed as a chambermaid, and teased her about being behind a mop. She had turned eighteen on July 26th. Katherin Rheaume already had a serious boyfriend, Les Martlew, but she did not resist Ed's attention and charms.

-------

By now Stan had earned his pilot's license. He and Ed had grown closer in friendship, enjoyed the same things in life and thought in similar ways.

Although Ed was not a hunter and did not like killing, he liked eating the sheep or moose meat that Stan brought back.

Ed did not condemn hunting and understood that Stan had to harvest the large Ogilvie area by fanning out into outlying districts. To do that, Ed saw the need to build more airstrips and wanted to participate in the pioneering and wanted to work with Stan.

At the end of summer, Stan carved out another short airstrip in the Ogilvie Mountains. Ed, still going through Super Cub familiarization, decided to make a wheel landing. He came in with power, landing on the main two wheels. Everything happened too fast, there wasn't time to be scared.

Ed, the lone occupant in the Cub, which was equipped with extra-wide balloon tires and good brakes, touched the sensitive brakes with his heels. The weightless tail lifted like a feather and the engine-heavy nose went down.

The Cub, which had been wheels-up once before while crop-dusting, rolled over as easily and neatly as a tumbleweed in a wind storm.

The Cub was only slightly damaged but was a write-off.

The repair bill, plus the recovery cost, nearly equalled the initial purchase price. A Bell 206A Jet Ranger helicopter slung the wounded plane to the Clinton Creek airstrip near Dawson.

From there, Ed trucked the dismantled Super Cub south to Kamloops, British Columbia, for rebuilding. To help pay expenses, he negotiated a deal with a Whitehorse firm that was renovating the Regina Hotel to bring back a load of bathtubs.

Ed's special friend, whom he teasingly referred to as "Miss Mop", went along for the ride.

"My name is Kathy," she would remind him with false indignation.

After loading the bathtubs in Vancouver, they nipped over to Haney for a brief visit with Ed's parents and to see some of his friends.

* * * * * * *

The Super Cub is an excerpt from Jane Gaffin's illustrated, northern adventure Edward Hadgkiss: Missing in Life. It is available from Mac's Fireweed Books in Whitehorse, Yukon by calling the toll-free order line 1-800-661-0508 or visiting www.yukonbooks.com. Author contact is jane(at)diarmani.com or visit her at www.diArmani.com.

******* *Note: The Webley military surplus handgun was not confiscated by the Grande Prairie police. The handgun and permit were found in his belongings after he went down in the Harvard in 1969.

See related excerpts: The Cessna; The Percival Prospector ;The Harvard: Built to Crash; The Harvard: Cylinder with a History; and The Harvard: Rock of Eternity.

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