United 777 visits Yellowknife,

 

March 31, 2004 1:51 PM

 

Beach boys fix wounded wing in Yellowknife

Tanned mechanics excite would-be surfer girls

  Nathan VanderKlippe CanWest News Service

March 26, 2004

United Airlines mechanics prepare a replacement engine for the Boeing 777 stranded since Friday in Yellowknife. CREDIT: Nathan VanderKlippe, CanWest News Service

(Boeing 777 stranded since Friday in Yellowknife). CREDIT: Nathan VanderKlippe, CanWest News Service

YELLOWKNIFE, NWT - The airport manager's phone won't stop ringing in Yellowknife this week.

And a disproportionate number of the callers are women who are smitten, it would seem, by a team of bronzed California aircraft mechanics who breezed into the Arctic to fix a broken United Airlines jet.

"I don't know what they're doing downtown but they're sure meeting up with the girls," said Michel Lafrance, laughing at an e-mail he has just received from a woman eager for a tour of the crippled Boeing 777 parked on the Yellowknife tarmac.

"Met her in the bar, now she wants to visit the plane," he said.

A city of 18,000, Yellowknife has the kind of gossip network usually seen in small towns. And it's not every day a plane the size of a 777 pulls into the airport. This one had an engine shut down last Friday midway between Frankfurt and San Francisco.

Mix in some stereotypes about unwitting southerners meeting the North's murderous cold, and the town is a-gaggle and a-giggle about the plane and the men fixing it -- who arrived in the Arctic wearing nothing but T-shirts and shorts, then beat a quick path to a Yellowknife outfitter for proper winter clothes.

Or so the rumours go.

"That's a big exaggeration," said Ken Weaver, who outfitted the dozen mechanics with neck warmers, hats and boots after they discovered their winter gear was too thin to fend off the cold in the North, where a resurgence of winter has brought with it wicked windchills around -50 C.

"They didn't come here in their Bermuda shorts," said the owner of Yellowknife's Weaver & Devore.

That's not to say the rumour mill is completely wrong. Mechanics on United's field services team actually take arctic survival training in Anchorage, Alaska, and train to operate in more remote and more northerly places than Yellowknife.

It's part of preparing for the inevitable equipment failures on a growing number of flights taking routes over the Earth's poles.

Every day, as many as 40 flights pass near Yellowknife. Occasionally, one will land with a sick passenger or an equipment problem.

But it's hard to prepare for mornings at -43 C, when the temperature in San Francisco is 15 C.

"It sure gave them a wakeup call," said Curtis Mercredi, who took most of the mechanics on their first snowmobiling and ice fishing trip as they waited for a 7,000-kilogram replacement engine to be trucked to Yellowknife.

"They'd never even driven on a frozen lake before, so they were kind of scared," he said.

"They couldn't believe the ice was actually hard enough to grow four feet thick, and kind of amazed that it actually does thaw out during the summertime. It was a whole new different world for them."

Many of the 259 passengers, who were stuck in Yellowknife for about seven hours while United flew up another plane, had the same reaction.

One Iranian woman couldn't speak English. When she heard the passengers applaud after the one-engine landing, she assumed they were happy because the plane had arrived three hours early.

 

"At first she thought she had landed in San Francisco and she was trying to go out to see her children," said Kayhan Nadji, a Yellowknife architect who speaks Farsi and was called to the airport to help the woman.

"She said, 'I remember my son told me it's very warm and don't bring warm clothing. But it seems full of snow here.' "

Some passengers were put on buses to tour Yellowknife. Several Mounties in red serge uniforms were made available for photos.

The mechanics were too busy installing the new engine Thursday to be interviewed.

Still, it hasn't been all work. So far, they've sampled northern delicacies like muskox and Arctic char and taken late-night tours to see the northern lights.

"They're absolutely enamoured with the place," said Wally Krutz, manager of line maintenance with United.

nathan.vanderklippe@globaltv.ca

) The Edmonton Journal 2004