My first flight in a floatplane was sometime in the late 1970s. I don’t remember the exact year, but I remember the plane. It was a de Havilland Twin Otter—a big, loud workhorse of an aircraft that carried 10 fishermen, all our gear, a week’s worth of groceries and supplies and a 55-gallon drum of gas a hundred-some miles north to a lodge in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Flying in a floatplane had been a boyhood fantasy, so I tried to soak it all up: the aluminum ladder leading to the rounded hatch, miniature windows, unforgiving tube-frame seats, bulging cargo netting; all wearing the colorless patina of hard use. I peeked into the cockpit where a pilot in coveralls was fiddling with mysterious knobs and levers as the twin engines warmed up. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it was unbearably romantic in a steampunk sort of way. 

The flight from Winnipeg had been another first. We were in a Douglas DC-3, the sausage-shaped, twin-engine tail-dragger you’ll recognize from old newsreel footage of paratroopers in World War II and the early days of commercial aviation when flying was such a special occasion women wore dresses and white gloves and men sported coats and ties. I peeked into the cockpit here, too (this was back in the days when you could peek into cockpits without getting arrested), and if you’re old enough to remember the 1954 movie The High and the Mighty—the mother of all airline disaster films—you’ll understand why I expected to see John Wayne at the controls… 

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ABOVE Starting the morning right on Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Photo: Tim Romano