Veteran helicopter pilots make return trip to Yellowknife

Two veteran aviators who cut their teeth in the North recently flew together for the first time in more than 20 years on a trip to Yellowknife.

Longtime friends Don Depper and John Buckland began their decades-long helicopter careers as maintenance engineers, attending school together in North Bay, Ontario – along with Adam Bembridge, now president of Acasta HeliFlight – before working in Yellowknife. The pair then went to flight school together and returned to Yellowknife to work as pilots.

“In the helicopter world, Yellowknife seemed to be an ideal place to land because everything north of here is either fixed wing or helicopter-accessible only, so there’s a large mecca for helicopter operations,” Buckland said, adding the North was booming with exploration at the time.

“We were extremely busy but having lots of fun,” Depper said.

Buckland said he worked as a helicopter pilot for Echo Bay Mines, Great Slave Helicopters and Acasta HeliFlight over his roughly 40 years in Yellowknife. He has since retired and last summer he and his wife moved to Hinton, Alberta.

After a decade in the North, Depper returned south to work for the Canadian Coast Guard and the research laboratory of the National Research Council of Canada based in Ottawa. He is now semi-retired.

This past weekend, Buckland and Depper returned north, teaming up to fly a helicopter from Penticton, BC to Yellowknife thanks to some help from Bembridge and Ron Wood, who co-founded Great Slave Helicopters and currently owns Avialta Helicopter Maintenance Ltd.

Depper and Buckland said it was the first time they had flown together in more than two decades.

“There was a lot of moving pieces,” Buckland said.

Despite some concerns about bad weather, Depper said the weather gods smiled upon them. “Everything worked out perfect and [it was a] beautiful trip through eastern BC,” he said.

‘Quite an adventure’

Buckland and Depper said the journey was reminiscent of another trip they made 42 years ago. At the time, Buckland said, they were young pilots and Ritchie Rasmussen, then owner of Shirley Helicopters, gave them the opportunity to fly a helicopter from Toronto to Edmonton.

They made the journey over a single day, something they said would not be allowed today with modern aviation regulations that limit the number of consecutive hours a pilot can fly.

“It was quite an adventure and lots of question marks as to what the plan was and how we were going to get there, but we did manage it,” Buckland said.

Depper noted this was back before GPS, so they relied on a map and a compass. He said it was “pitch dark” when they landed in Edmonton.

“I don’t think we flew more than 60 miles between the two of us total before that time, so it was lucky we had stellar weather,” he said. “There was a little bit of, ‘OK, are we lost?’ ‘Yeah, sort of.’ But you know, we always found our way.”

Reminiscing about their time in the North together, Buckland and Depper said after the discovery of diamonds in the NWT, they saw Great Slave Helicopters quickly grow into one of the largest helicopter operations in Canada.

“It became a very first-class operation that a lot of people wanted to work for,” Depper said, expressing similar sentiments about Acasta.

Working with Great Slave Helicopters for 18 years, Buckland said he got to experience things he would not have been able to anywhere else, including coordinating operations in Peru, Chile, Brazil and Australia.

Buckland said today, it can be hard for young people coming out of flight training school to land their first job and gain enough experience to work as a pilot. His advice is to have patience, put the work in, and accept advice and mentorship from experienced pilots.

“We tried very hard at Great Slave Helicopters and also at Acasta to provide a launching point for young pilots to get going and [have] successfully done that for close to 30 years,” he said.

Buckland said helicopter flying and maintenance work is “a young man’s sport these days.” He encouraged people to take opportunities in the North, saying one benefit is the lack of trees on the barrenlands, making it easier to land.

“Coming up to Yellowknife and gaining experience here, it’s the best place to come,” he said.