Inside Yellowknife Airport’s control tower

The thing about being in Yellowknife’s control tower? Sure, it’s not as busy as Pearson, but it’s different.

There’s a DC-3! There’s an Airbus! There’s a helicopter and over there, that’s a floatplane. That right there? That’s a military jet visiting. Oh, and those are some unexplained lights in the sky.

Wait, what?

It was about 11:15pm on a January night when Vincent Desjardins got that call. You might remember it.

“We’re looking at two lights dancing around here,” a Canadian North pilot told him over the radio as he sat in the Yellowknife tower, the only one on duty for the overnight shift.

Nobody figured out what the heck those pilots saw that night.

Desjardins can laugh about it now because the audio from the exchange – the dialogue could be lifted word-for-word from a UFO B-movie – shows him doing what anyone in his job should in that situation. He tries to help the pilots out, can’t figure out the issue, and hands it off to a higher power in Edmonton to take a look.

Desjardins is a flight service specialist. He isn’t an air traffic controller, but when that side of the tower shuts down overnight – there are no controllers in the building from 10pm till 7am – the lone flight service specialist is the point of contact for aircraft using Yellowknife Airport.

That means he gets the quiet of not-a-lot happening at 2am, but also some of the early-morning madness as the day’s first flights depart south. And, apparently, the twilight-zone UFO calls.

Because Desjardins isn’t an air traffic controller, he doesn’t order planes around. He provides information and helps out pilots, but he’s not there to instruct them. On that overnight shift, he relays commands from Edmonton’s tower if an aircraft needs a controller.

Adam Plooy, on the other hand, has been an air traffic controller in Yellowknife for coming up on two years now.

His first summer doing the job? That was the 2023 wildfire crisis and evacuation. Welcome to Yellowknife, please direct a few dozen water bombers and some evacuation flights while we try to keep that large fire away from your nice tower.

“We just kept showing up to work, separating airplanes and pushing as hard as we possibly could to fight the fires and keep the tower open,” he said.

Yellowknife Airport closed to regular traffic for much of the city’s three-week evacuation. Plooy said ultimately, whether it’s 100 grumpy sardines on the early flight to Edmonton or a slew of water bombers heading west toward a fire, the job is the job.

The job? He loves the job.

“I love absolutely everything about aviation,” he said.

“I love flying planes. I love learning about planes, reading, watching plane videos online… I’ve essentially monetized looking at airplanes, and that is the ultimate career for me.”

Plooy was assigned to Yellowknife by Nav Canada for his first posting after training.

“When I was in Grade 2, we were learning about the map of Canada. I was like, ‘Man, it would be really cool to live in the territories one day.’ And then I actually got the opportunity. I’ve lived in Yellowknife for two years now and I love every second of it,” he said.

(You can request a specific city when you finish training, but Nav Canada has the final say on who goes where. Once you move somewhere, you can elect to stay if you like it. Some of the seven controllers employed in Yellowknife have worked the same tower for a long time. By the way, Nav Canada says it’s always hiring.)

Normally, Plooy is on the top floor of the tower, where two controllers work the daytime shift with a bank of screens and a panoramic view of the airfield.

Even in the brief time Cabin Radio spent in that room, controllers handled an inbound flight with a medical emergency, scrambling an ambulance and ensuring the pilot knew where to go once on the ground.

A floor or two lower down, Desjardins has banks of similar equipment but he also has some old-school instruments at his disposal: a form of beaker for measuring rain, and what one colleague called an outdoor “school desk” on which sit instruments that help measure snow.

Once an hour, he steps outside, looks up at the sky for a few moments, then comes back in and records a weather report. “Ceiling: broken,” he declared to pilots on Thursday afternoon, which is not a maintenance complaint but instead means it’s cloudy without being overcast.

Nav Canada says it’s working on new technology that relies on a sort-of equivalent of GPS to make the job of guiding aircraft easier. Yellowknife, being Yellowknife, has occasional trouble getting away from pen and paper.

“Some of the fibre-optic line cut out last winter,” said Plooy, describing an experience NWT residents know only too well. “That knocked out our systems, at least for a little while. So we were out there handwriting strips,” he continued, showing off equipment that looks like a miniature 1970s airport departure board.

Aside from that kind of challenge, one of the tricks to being a Yellowknife air traffic controller is learning the sheer variety of aircraft you’ll encounter.

In Toronto, a controller might find themselves operating the aviation equivalent of a factory production line: a relentless flow of broadly similar aircraft performing near-identical manoeuvres to and from runways and gates.

In Yellowknife, you’ve got an Airbus A220 coming from Toronto that needs to be inserted into the same pattern as a Buffalo Airways Douglas DC-3 built more than 70 years earlier, plus maybe a Twin Otter and a Lockheed Electra.

Those aircraft don’t do the same thing and don’t travel at the same speed. Keeping them safely apart and timing everything right requires a mix of experience and computerized assistance.

“One of the challenges is mixing all of that different traffic together,” said Plooy, “including sometimes the military. Yellowknife is a great place to do training, because we get to mix in all that varied traffic.”

That includes water bombers.

If we ever have another fire season like last year, Plooy’s job will be to get them off the ground and five miles away from the airfield. At that point, aircraft fighting fires are guided from the air by other planes operating under the NWT government’s auspices.

“At one point, I think we had 20 different air tankers and close to half a dozen birddogs on the field,” he said of 2023’s operations (a birddog being a smaller plane that flies above the fires and does the coordinating).

“It was honestly a great experience working with those guys. They were absolutely incredible and they did a great job. It was a pleasure to work with them,” Plooy said.

“I think it was a great way to start my air traffic career, working through the fire.”