Some companies can boast international connections. But in just 20 years, one Slave Lake firm says it’s grown from having one helicopter to a fleet of 13, and worked in a handful of countries, sending employees and equipment all the way from the North Pole to Guatemala in the south.
Remote Helicopters has left footprints in many locations, and one of its helicopters returned last week from a month-long job on Baffin Island.
It was an interesting time, says pilot George Reid, and included having polar bears shot mere feet from where he was sleeping. And it required him to ‘sling’ a back-hoe onto a job site near the Arctic Ocean.
Reid says they had ‘some idea’ of what the job would be when they were told the helicopter would have to be able to ‘sling’ a 3,000-pound weight on a hook. In fact, the 3,000-pound ‘item’ was the body of a backhoe that crews had taken apart for the move. To make the move possible, they removed the bucket from the front end, the hoe from the rear, and finally the tires, creating four separate parcels for the chopper to lower onto site.
Reid -- who had co-worker Jack Roberts along as his engineer – was hired to shuttle a crew of scientists into a DEW (Distant Early Warning) line that had been abandoned and needed to be cleaned up and reclaimed.
Their job was to set up a 24-person tent camp at the former site so scientists could study the location and plan reclamation exercises. The ‘team’ consisted of scientists from Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa, says the pilot, plus nine Inuit polar bear ‘monitors’, four camp staff and a project manager.
Reid was flying a Bell 204 chopper that can carry up to 10 people. But his passengers had to meet the Remote crew in the Baffin Island town of Qikiqtarjuaq – about 135 nautical miles from the DEW line site that was located 6.5 miles inland from the Arctic Ocean. That’s because the Remote team had just room enough for themselves, some personal gear – and several barrels of aviation fuel to help them make the journey. To say that the trip was an exercise in logistics was an understatement at best.
In fact, the chopper tank holds only enough fuel to last 2.5 hours. But ‘service stations’ are few and far between in the barrens of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Baffin Island. That meant the men had to plan their journey in four-hour hops that would allow them to refuel regularly. Sometimes they found locations to refuel, and when there was no fuel to be had, they relied on their ‘saddle’ tanks inside their machine.
They left Slave Lake Sept. 10, arriving at Qikiqtarjuaq three days later.
“Friday the 13th,” Reid says with a grin.
The journey was anything but simple. For one thing, choppers cannot fly ‘as the crow flies’ – taking the most direct route. Instead, single engine helicopters can only fly above land. So they leap-frogged from filling station to filling station. In a manner of speaking.
From Slave Lake they headed to Fort McMurray, Stony Rapids, Kasaba Lake, Baker Lake, Hays River, Commitee Bay, Hall Beach. Igloolik, onto two unnamed way points before continuing on to Longstaff Bluff, Dewar Lakes and finally Qikiqtarjuaq – 1,900 nautical miles and 21 flying hours later.
A fuel shortage added to their challenge, he added, meaning that it “took a whole company” to locate the necessary fuel in all the right places along their route.
The men sent their necessary gear, equipment and parts ahead by commercial craft through Ottawa, and waited for three days after they arrived.
With passengers and equipment ready, they began to shuttle their load into camp.
The region is “in full summer” mode, says the pilot, with temperatures ranging between –2C and 9C while they were on site. Reid says they did receive about three inches of snow about two weeks ago, “but it all went” in a matter of days.
The pilot says he was surprised to see so much open water this late in the year, but their Inuit guides that also acted as ‘polar bear monitors’ said it’d soon appear. “We saw icebergs floating by all the time,” he added.
The tent camp was surrounded with ‘bear fence’ that set off an alarm if the white beasts managed to evade the ‘monitors’.
“Four wandered right by the camp” without giving the human interlopers a sniff, he added. But one night in town before the crew headed to their remote site, “they shot two polar bears less than 30 feet from where I was sleeping” at a location in the town.
A few bears passed by the camp – but were a couple of kilometres away, and didn’t show any threatening signs, he added. Two ‘monitors’ kept watch by night and one kept an eye on the tent camp during the day, he said, “and one of the monitors always accompanied the scientists” who went out scouting for debris and signs of buried refuse.
The pilot says he was delighted with the frequent sightings of Arctic ‘wildlife’ such as caribou, whales, seals, and Arctic hare at their camp.
He says the crew of scientists was planning the cleanup of the site that was one of many in the Arctic that were handed over to the United States to operate sometime the 1960s.
“Quite a few have already been cleaned up. There used to be lots, but now they just have them every 200 miles or so. Most are unmanned and run remotely.”
Reid leaves Slave Lake later this month for his ‘winter job’ for an Arabian company in the United Arab Emirates. This year the job will take him to Yemen for what he hopes will be a “six and six tour.” That means he’ll work for six weeks then have as many off.
He was looking forward to a warm winter. Temperatures in Yemen last week, he said, were about 35C by 5:30 in the morning.

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