ODDS`N’SODS — Vicissitudes of the airborne geologist

I had just been delivered back to an exploration base camp after a near disaster on the Ontario-Manitoba border. When the Bell J2 helicopter came home after being repaired, it immediately left to provide air support for another section of the field crew, about 100 miles to the east.

The helicopter operated normally for about a week. But, during a refueling stop, the pilot noted that the drive shaft to the tail rotor was slightly bent. The machine stayed on the ground until another drive shaft could be acquired and flown in from Toronto. We were fortunate in that we lost only a week of helicopter support. We were able to shift our dependency to a Cessna 180 and get on with the job.

With the helicopter in the air, things went smoothly for about two weeks.

However, at another refuelling stop, the pilot noticed a crack in the engine mount. More calls were made to Toronto, as well as to Texas, where the helicopters were manufactured. The Bell engineers there had no record of the engine mounts giving way and, when a replacement was delivered, it was accompanied by a Bell engineer. The helicopter became airworthy once again.

It was now mid-September — time to fold up the operation and head back to civilization. As is always the case, there remained a few select outcrops to be mapped and sampled, some of which had been missed during the summer and were considered potentially important pieces of the overall, unfolding geological picture. I drew the short straw and had the good fortune of checking these outcrops on the way south; my geological interest was running high and it seemed like a nifty assignment.

The pilot and I left early because we knew we had a long day ahead of us. As the day progressed, we had the fortune of securing easy access to most of the outcrops requiring examination. We had finished our scientific endeavors by 4:30 that afternoon and were cruising west over Sandy Lake to the Hudson’s Bay store and our last refuelling stop before heading south. Because of a 30-mile-per-hour wind, the pilot had levelled the aircraft at about 30 ft.

above the rolling surface of the lake.

About eight miles from the Hudson’s Bay store, I felt the machine suddenly lose power. The next thing I knew, we were sitting on top of the lake.

The surface of the lake was too rough to make an attempt to taxi across it.

Besides, the granite walls on either side of the narrow bay provided no access to the shore.

The pilot did the only thing he could do — he mustered up all the power that was available to us, broke the floats free of the lake, and flew the machine the final eight miles to the Hudson’s Bay store on an air cushion between the rotor blades and the lake surface.

There was no fancy circling to finesse a landing. The pilot slapped the machine down on the embankment in front of the Hudson’s Bay store and cut the power. He got out his trusty oil can and squirted each of the cylinder heads.

Even to my untrained eye, it was clear that we had been operating without three cylinders.

When the engine was torn down later in the week, it was revealed that a piece of exhaust valve about the size of a thumb nail had broke loose and demolished two cylinders and damaged a third.

Discretion being the better part of valor, I left the pilot and his helicopter about an hour later and caught a Beech 18 aircraft sked run back to civilization.

— The author, a consulting geologist and frequent contributer to this column, resides in Thunder Bay, Ont.