The opening scenes of the Mollyco survey plane and the somewhat battered float plane bought by Mancuso flying through the wilderness, inspired me to go and have a flying lesson. I love the whole movie but in particular the first 30mins. The Canadian wilderness looks so spectacular, I want to go there.
shareHalf a year after the movie was released, I was copilot on a Cessna 206 from Anchorage, Alaska to the Seattle area by way of the Al-Can Highway and the Frasier Canyon. We encountered a crashed aircraft on a high bluff in the Yukon and had a fuel pump failure at Fort St. John. It turns out the former was a twin-engine plane that weeks before had crashed in bad weather while transporting one prisoner; the pilot perished and the prisoner went for help and managed to lose footing and slide 300 feet down a rock face but still managed to get into town for help. The latter was after almost landing on the wrong runway, going around, lining up, landing...and then the engine just quit on rollout.
The Cessna was a salt-water dunk that we'd patched together; the windshield was cracked all the way across at the wing root and held together with several holes drilled along both sides of the crack, chicken wire and RTV silicone (the maps still got soaked when we hit a rain squall outside of Northway, Alaska). We were doing COM work with a handheld and the plane had no electrical, meaning no nav lights or flaps.
Those scenes are just breathtaking.
What do you think this is, a signature? It's a way of life!