Aviation Memorabilia Newsletter

Referring to NetLetter #1473, Terry Rea wrote,

Hi Folks,

These photo's sure bring back memories for me! I worked for Nordair (CF-NAB and CF-NAQ) and PWA (CF-PWE and CF-PXB) @ YRB (Resolute Bay, NWT (now Nunavut)) in 1969 and 1970 with Roger Hill before I transferred to ATC (YVR Tower - Retired 2017).

YRB was a busy Arctic airport those days; we also had 4x PWA Hercs (CF-PWX, CF-PWO, CF- PWR and CF-PWN) based there in winter for Arctic resupply missions to the DOT Met Stations (YIC YMD + Mould Bay + Alert NWT).

I remember working the PWA Royal Tour charter aircraft in July 1970 and met Prince Charles coming off the B-737; we were born the same day November 16, 1948. We are both 73 years young!

If interested, click the YouTube link for a nice clip with my Lifetime Achievement Award from BC Aviation Council.

Before the COVID shut things down, I enjoyed get-togethers with the 'Quarter Century Club', with other lifers in aviation; lost contact and hoping we can resume our quarterly meetings. Do you have any contact info?

Editors' Note: The 'Quarter Century in Aviation Club' has ceased operations but, we believe, many members are NetLetter subscribers. We would certainly enjoy receiving more stories from former members.

Referring to NetLetter #1472, Mike Ronan wrote, 

I happened to spot a mention of a very long flight for a Boeing 767.

From the newsletter: ... "The longest scheduled nonstop flight by an Air Canada B-767 was Toronto to Tokyo, which lasted 13:45 hours and covered 10,324 kilometres.”

I quickly realized that I had the privilege of being the captain on that very flight, and I will be happy to provide a few details! It was not until today while reading The NetLetter that I had any knowledge that this flight was the longest scheduled flight for a B-767!

This caused me to crack the old logbook, and I see that this flight departed on November 13, 2004 arriving in Tokyo Narita on the 15th with a B-B time of 13:58.

The crew for the flight was made up of 4 pilots: Denis Potvin, Peter Thompson, Randy Scheffel and myself.

I do remember the flight planning stage. We sharpened our pencils as we entered into several discussions with the dispatcher who had to do a fair bit of “ballet” with the figures. We found that we could only depart YYZ by bumping all air cargo as well as much of the baggage due to our 'FULL TANKS' situation.

The route took us pretty far north over places like Deadhorse and Utqiagvik up on the Beaufort Sea along the north shore of Alaska.

I recall taking a very close look at weather conditions and runway-in-use at Narita prior to committing to overfly Sapporo on Hokkaido and, now satisfied that our fuel state was good, we continued to our planned destination.

We landed just inside the 'legal reserves' for fuel, but the “insufficient fuel” warnings were present on our panels on final approach! This was due to a runway change and the need to take a long vector to the south of NRT prior to our landing towards the north on arrival, and the unusual requirement to extend the landing gear very early, (there is a procedure at this airport that states that the landing gear must be extended prior to crossing the shoreline). By dropping the destination alternate of Haneda from the FMC this FMC "nag" was quickly put out.

Due to nice tailwinds, the return flight was quite easy at 12.3 hours.

Four years later I moved on to fly the B-777 and this route became quite easy as I have flown it many times and truly enjoyed the very long range of the newest Boeing.