by Rex Terpening
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"...I have never read a better book about what it was really like to be a mechanic and to fly with legends of Canadian aviation history - I could not put it down - the stories were wonderfully told, full of accurate detail and great humor."
-Denny May, Canadian Aviation Historical Society (Canadian Aviation Historical Society )"...Now in his 90's, Rex writes an excellent story. A trip to Inuvik with mail stops en route, keeps you wondering when the next crash, or rough landing will happen, and what ingenious repairs will entail."
-Tom Lymbery, Mainstreet (Mainstreet )"...Terpening, who has always been as fascinated by photography as by aviation, had the foresight to take a folding Kodak box camera along on those runs. He snapped pictures of the great pilots he flew with, the hardy little planes with their bent props, and the legendary Northerners he met. Keeping a pencil handy, he also filled a series of pocket notebooks with details of each photo, but he modestly stops short of calling this record a journal."
-Rebecca Wigod, Vancouver Sun (Vancouver Sun )"...Part aviation history, part history of the North. Good to read where it is nice and warm."
-Annie Boulanger, Burnaby NOW (Burnaby NOW )"...Terpening is one of the last of the air engineers who flew with the bush pilots and shared the hazards they faced. Now in his 90s he writes with the insight gained from a lifetime in aviation." ---Edgar Dunning, Delta Optimist (Delta Optimist )
-Denny May, Canadian Aviation Historical Society (Canadian Aviation Historical Society )"...Now in his 90's, Rex writes an excellent story. A trip to Inuvik with mail stops en route, keeps you wondering when the next crash, or rough landing will happen, and what ingenious repairs will entail."
-Tom Lymbery, Mainstreet (Mainstreet )"...Terpening, who has always been as fascinated by photography as by aviation, had the foresight to take a folding Kodak box camera along on those runs. He snapped pictures of the great pilots he flew with, the hardy little planes with their bent props, and the legendary Northerners he met. Keeping a pencil handy, he also filled a series of pocket notebooks with details of each photo, but he modestly stops short of calling this record a journal."
-Rebecca Wigod, Vancouver Sun (Vancouver Sun )"...Part aviation history, part history of the North. Good to read where it is nice and warm."
-Annie Boulanger, Burnaby NOW (Burnaby NOW )"...Terpening is one of the last of the air engineers who flew with the bush pilots and shared the hazards they faced. Now in his 90s he writes with the insight gained from a lifetime in aviation." ---Edgar Dunning, Delta Optimist (Delta Optimist )
Crash landings were part of the job in the early 1930s, when Rex Terpening started out in arctic aviation. As an air engineer for Canadian Airways in the Northwest Territories, Terpening took the right-hand seat in the cockpit and flew "on operations" daily, warming the oil and the engine on winter mornings, refuelling, and inevitably mending both engine and aircraft when things went wrong. Terpening's beat stretched from Fort McMurray to the Arctic Ocean, and his remarkable bush-flying stories tell of planes wandering lost over unmapped muskeg, perilous rescue missions to retrieve stranded missionaries, dogged searches for downed flyers lost on the Barrens and emergency landings in blizzards on nameless pothole lakes. But there is humour, too, in tales of a drunken wolverine, a planeload of rambunctious sled dogs and a trip in a tiny Fairchild with a Catholic priest and the wife of an Anglican minister. And there are vivid evocations of the sheer joy of flying over the Arctic's raw beauty.Rex Terpening not only kept a meticulous journal from which these stories are derived, he carried his camera everywhere, snapping pictures of downed machines, their step-by-step resurrections, the men who flew them and those who fixed them. Most of those men and machines are gone now, but they live on in Bent Props and Blow Pots.
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