Flying to Extremes: Memories of a Northern Bush Pilot

by Dominique Prinet

Overview

Recalling some of the most memorable escapades ever conducted in the Canadian Arctic with bush planes, Flying to Extremes takes place in the late '60s and early '70s from a base at Yellowknife, in the heart of the Northwest Territories. Beyond recounting so many near-mishaps, this book is also about colourful people: the trappers, prospectors, miners, adventurers and gold-ingot thieves who constituted the fauna at the main bar in Yellowknife in those days. For Arctic dreamers, there was always the flight to the Nahanni River, with its Deadman's Valley, hot springs, tales of lost or dead prospectors, the many airplanes crashed in pursuit of gold, and much more Nahanni lore. This entertaining book recollects Prinet's adventures as a young man while capturing the humour, beauty, danger and unique culture of northern communities, in the dramatic landscape of the Canadian Arctic. Readers familiar with the region and those who can only dream of visiting it will both find this title a nostalgic and captivating read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780888397553
Publisher:	Hancock House Publishers
Publication date:	06/01/2026
Edition description:	B&w ed.
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

In the 1960s, Dominique Prinet worked as a commercial bush pilot in the Canadian Arctic and High Arctic, on floats in the summer and skis in the winter, navigating with an astrocompass since this was long before GPS had been invented. He holds an airline transport pilot licence and has more than 5,000 hours of flying. The stories in this book describe some of the adventures he experienced in northern Canada. Dominique Prinet Flying to ExtremesFollowing classical studies in Paris, he took an electrical engineering degree from UBC and an MBA from McGill, paid for by his intensive flying in the Arctic. He worked as VP for Nordair while teaching microeconomics to MBA students at McGill for about 12 years. He moved to Vancouver in 1988 when asked to join Canadian Airlines as their VP Marketing, then went to Tanzania, in East Africa, to turn around the national airline and manage it for five years under a World Bank project. Dominique has climbed several 12,000-foot peaks in the Alps and the Rockies has crossed the Atlantic in a sailing boat and Nepal on foot, flown around North, Central, and South America in a private single-engine plane, and crossed Africa in a small jeep. Much later in life, at 70, he obtained his private helicopter pilot licence. He spent his retirement years as a sailing instructor and instructor evaluator and has published several books on celestial and coastal navigation.

Table of Contents

In Praise of Flying to Extremes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

1. Taking Off with a Bang. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2. Prospectors, Alcohol and Fights in Yellowknife. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

3. Picking up Trappers and School Kids in Fort Smith. . . . . . . . . . . . 47

4. Gold, Dead Bodies, and Airplane Crashes on the Nahanni River. . 61

5. The Most Atrocious Flight: Latitude 80° North in the dark at 60 below. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77

6. Mayday: Load Shift after Takeoff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

7. Sinking with a Floatplane in the Arctic Ocean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

8. In the Frozen Darkness of the Arctic Islands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

9. Crashing through the Ice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

10.Crazy Flights in December. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

11. Around the Pole with a Guitar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

12. Another Mayday: Totally Iced Up and Falling out of the Sky. . . . 212

13.Typical Insane Flights. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Epilogue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

Glossary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

Indigenous Names of Communities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

Index of Names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274

Other books published by Dominique Prinet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

Editorial Reviews

"Writing with clarity, humour and precision, Prinet flies us into a world of endless snow and ice and dim, grey winter days over a sparsely settled tundra. He recalls a desperate flight through terrible weather, his single-engine plane icing up and heading down, wondering whether he should wake the sports fishermen snoozing peacefully in the overloaded cabin amid boxes of fish and gear to tell them they're on the verge of crashing. While rescuing his bride from their plane as it sinks through ice, he meets an Indigenous trapper who drove his dog sled through the bush to find out why a plane had landed but not taken off. The adventures—and misadventures—of an Arctic bush pilot make for a bracing read!" —Honourable Pat Carney, Former Federal Cabinet Minister and Senator

From the Publisher