Willie was a real legend in the Canadian Arctic. I met Willie when he bought the Lear 25 I used to fly and I consider that to be a real honour to have met the man. We as Canadians seem to shy away from recognising pioneers like Willie and I think it is time to change that.
I propose that all the people who knew Willie and would like to honor a great man petition Nav Canada or whoever is responsible and convince the powers that be to rename the Yellowknife Airport the Willie Laserich Memorial Airport.
Any supporters??
In memory of Willie Laserich
Moderators: lilfssister, North Shore, sky's the limit, sepia, Sulako, I WAS Birddog
In memory of Willie Laserich
The average pilot, despite the somewhat swaggering exterior, is very much capable of such feelings as love, affection, intimacy and caring.
These feelings just don't involve anyone else.
These feelings just don't involve anyone else.
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REDLINE AERO
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In memory of Willie Laserich
Excellent Idea.
He was a true gentleman, and will be missed.
If the Laserich Family is in agreement, I know that there are many here in the North that would be happy to help honour Willie.
He was a true gentleman, and will be missed.
If the Laserich Family is in agreement, I know that there are many here in the North that would be happy to help honour Willie.
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evilevilmonkey
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snaproll20
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Cat Driver
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The problem is this is Canada and it seems only politicians get airports named after them....
Willie actually helped build Canada and was productive so it would be Un-Canadian to name an airport after him.
However the Brian Mulroney International is more probable...remember Brian also had his hand into aviation.
Willie actually helped build Canada and was productive so it would be Un-Canadian to name an airport after him.
However the Brian Mulroney International is more probable...remember Brian also had his hand into aviation.
The hardest thing about flying is knowing when to say no
After over a half a century of flying no one ever died because of my decision not to fly.
After over a half a century of flying no one ever died because of my decision not to fly.
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Siddley Hawker
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I never met Willie Laserich, but I have friends who have, and I believe I'm the poorer for not having known the man. I think naming the airport at Cambridge Bay would be an excellent gesture. I doubt if it'll ever happen though. As Cat remarked, Willie wasn't a politician.
Cat, they're naming the airport in Baie Comeau for Mulroney last I heard.
When these things come up, I'm always reminded of the huge missed opportunity to commemorate Pierre Trudeau in concrete when Mirabel wasn't named for him. They were building the Big Owe in Montreal when construction of Mirabel was begun, and the price of concrete went from nine or ten bucks to thirty bucks a cubic yard, almost overnight.
Cat, they're naming the airport in Baie Comeau for Mulroney last I heard.
When these things come up, I'm always reminded of the huge missed opportunity to commemorate Pierre Trudeau in concrete when Mirabel wasn't named for him. They were building the Big Owe in Montreal when construction of Mirabel was begun, and the price of concrete went from nine or ten bucks to thirty bucks a cubic yard, almost overnight.
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rum-runner
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I think that the powers to be could maintain a trend that has already been started.Cat Driver wrote:The problem is this is Canada and it seems only politicians get airports named after them....
Willie actually helped build Canada and was productive so it would be Un-Canadian to name an airport after him.
However the Brian Mulroney International is more probable...remember Brian also had his hand into aviation.
The Inuvik airport is named after Mike Zubko..another old bush pilot/owner.
The Aklavik airpor is named after Fred Carmichael(and he isnt even dead) another bush pilot/owner.
I think CYCB would be perfect for Willie..
Just my guess ..but I bet that CYZF gets named after Max Ward..
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tripleittt
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I've never met the man, but I work with somone who knew him well and I have heard nothing but good.
Here is a pretty cool article I found:
http://www.imperialoil.ca/canada-englis ... willy.html
Willy Laserich
Northern pilot
SITTING BEHIND THE CONTROLS of his King Air, Willy Laserich turned to look into the back of his plane. On a stretcher lay a woman with a knife protruding from her chest that couldn't be removed until she reached the hospital for fear she would bleed to death. On another stretcher, a woman moaned with pain from a swollen appendix. Beside a man with a serious eye injury sat the medical-evacuation (or "medevac," to use the vernacular) nurse, cradling a baby who wheezed with bronchial pneumonia. Laserich gritted his teeth. This is a nightmare, he thought as icy winds of 60 kilometres an hour buffeted the plane, and the swirling snow reduced visibility to 45 metres. "We do the checklist twice," he told his son René, who was his co-pilot that day. "Nothing goes wrong that we could have prevented, ja?"
It was February 25, 1985, and Laserich was taking off from the airstrip in Spence Bay, N.W.T. (now called Taloyoak and part of Nunavut). He knew that the lives of the four patients depended on his flying skills. He revved the engines and headed blindly into the elements, struggling to follow the only reference point he could see – the grooves left on the runway by the snow grader. Moments later, the plane broke through the storm into sunshine.
"It was a risk, but a calculated one," is how the veteran pilot now sums up his most horrific medevac. Having landed at Spence Bay earlier that morning, he knew that 30 metres above the ground, the sky was clear, although there were still strong winds. Getting off the ground in the whiteout was tricky, but Laserich was highly experienced and knew the airstrip well. "There is bad weather, and there is dangerous weather," he says, "and in the North, it's critical that you know the difference between the two." The conditions that day were bad; had they been dangerous, he would not have flown.
Over the past 47 years, Laserich has made the equivalent of 800 trips around the world with a perfect safety record. Based in Cambridge Bay, N.W.T., 285 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, he has rescued stranded hunters, injured trappers and downed pilots. His winged workhorses have hauled caribou, whale meat and blubber, carried corpses to funerals, and transported hunting parties with sleds and dog teams that howled behind the pilot's seat. Flying in some of the planet's harshest conditions, his engines have iced up and shut down in mid-air, once forcing him to control a plunge from 2,000 metres and glide to a landing on a frozen river. He has dug his plane out of axle-deep muck and survived winter nights after emergency landings left him stranded on the tundra.
Often flying when no one else would take to the air, Laserich has many tales to tell
Laserich has flown nearly 5,000 medevac flights – sometimes as many as 35 in a single month. Even today, many remote Arctic communities have only a nursing station, and seriously ill or injured patients must be evacuated to a hospital that may be thousands of kilometres away.
Often flying when no one else would take to the air, Laserich has many tales to tell. He recalls the time he flew a man whose arm had been ripped off in an accident to a hospital in Edmonton. While the local doctor clamped off arteries and veins to prevent the patient from bleeding to death, Laserich readied his plane. The severed arm was packed in a suitcase full of ice and travelled alongside the patient.
And then there was New Year's Eve 1971, when Laserich flew 10 hours straight to race a woman with a detached retina – glaucoma had already taken the sight of her other eye – to Edmonton so that the surgery required to save the eye could be performed within the requisite 24 hours. On a happier note, the high-flying stork has caught up with Laserich six times while he was airlifting pregnant mothers to hospital. All the babies survived. "Everyone knows that if there is a way to get in," says Catherine Gall, a nurse who worked with Laserich for six years, "Willy will find it."
To many northern pilots today, Laserich was a childhood hero. "We'd hang out at the float-plane base and hope he'd take us up for a flight," says Joe "Buffalo" McBryan of Buffalo Airways. "Riding in Willy's Norseman was the equivalent of getting a box seat at a hockey game – he was our Wayne Gretzky."
• • • • •
LASERICH WAS BORN IN GERMANY in 1932. When he was 19, he set off for Canada alone. The following year found him working as a freighter engineer on Great Slave Lake, N.W.T. When the lake froze, he worked as an airplane mechanic. In 1957, Laserich got his pilot's licence in Edmonton, where he met British-born Margaret Bunce, whom he married the following year. The day after the wedding, the couple drove to Hay River, Alta., where Margaret's introduction to the North was a home with an outhouse and no running water.
Willy and Margaret were to have three children. They grew up in float planes, picked berries with Inuit elders, and learned to hunt and fish.
By the 1960s, Laserich was flying sick and injured people to hospital, but it wasn't until the early 1980s that he began making dedicated medevac flights, with a nurse accompanying him.
Tall and strongly built, Laserich is independent, outspoken and stubborn. Those traits have served him well behind the controls of his planes but have sometimes landed him in trouble with bureaucracy. Throughout the 1970s, he repeatedly applied for a licence to add Cambridge Bay to the roster of communities from which he could operate his business. Again and again, his application was denied. Laserich explains that not having the licence didn't affect his ability to fly into or out of Cambridge Bay. He simply couldn't base any operations there.
However, authorities deemed that he was operating from Cambridge Bay, and in 1977 Laserich was slapped with 205 citations for contravening regulations. One, for example, pertained to a trip he'd made from Cambridge Bay to take antifreeze (necessary to prevent heating pipes from freezing) to an isolated community. "People were in danger of freezing to death," he explains. He faced the possibility of more than $1 million in fines and a year in jail.
That fall, Laserich's two small companies, Altair Leasing and Adlair Aviation, were convicted on 138 of the citations but fined a total of only $5,000. Some of the remaining charges were dropped, while Laserich himself was convicted on a number of them. The judge, however, fined him only a token $250. In announcing his verdict at 3 a.m. on January 18, 1982, Judge Frank Smith said, "He's the stuff of the bush pilots of old. He is supplying a service that he is uniquely qualified to perform…." When Laserich went to settle his fine, he learned it had already been paid. Ironically, he'd received his licence to operate from Cambridge Bay the year before.
In the Adlair Aviation hangar in Cambridge Bay, Laserich slips on a navy blue flight suit, heavy white Arctic boots and his trademark orange toque. His son René, who is also a pilot with Adlair, is readying the plane for a medevac from Coppermine, N.W.T. The plane in question is Laserich's newest, a Lear jet, outfitted with the latest medical equipment. After decades of close calls in prop planes, he decided to opt for a jet, which can fly high enough to avoid most of the Arctic's dangerous weather and cuts flight times in half.
As Laserich prepares to return to Cambridge Bay after the medevac, the radio crackles: a woman in Holman, Nunavut, has suffered a miscarriage and needs to get to a hospital. "Guess we won't be home tonight," says René. The pilot shrugs and utters what has become known as a "Willyism" – "Take it as it comes, ja?" – Margo Pfeiff
Here is a pretty cool article I found:
http://www.imperialoil.ca/canada-englis ... willy.html
Willy Laserich
Northern pilot
SITTING BEHIND THE CONTROLS of his King Air, Willy Laserich turned to look into the back of his plane. On a stretcher lay a woman with a knife protruding from her chest that couldn't be removed until she reached the hospital for fear she would bleed to death. On another stretcher, a woman moaned with pain from a swollen appendix. Beside a man with a serious eye injury sat the medical-evacuation (or "medevac," to use the vernacular) nurse, cradling a baby who wheezed with bronchial pneumonia. Laserich gritted his teeth. This is a nightmare, he thought as icy winds of 60 kilometres an hour buffeted the plane, and the swirling snow reduced visibility to 45 metres. "We do the checklist twice," he told his son René, who was his co-pilot that day. "Nothing goes wrong that we could have prevented, ja?"
It was February 25, 1985, and Laserich was taking off from the airstrip in Spence Bay, N.W.T. (now called Taloyoak and part of Nunavut). He knew that the lives of the four patients depended on his flying skills. He revved the engines and headed blindly into the elements, struggling to follow the only reference point he could see – the grooves left on the runway by the snow grader. Moments later, the plane broke through the storm into sunshine.
"It was a risk, but a calculated one," is how the veteran pilot now sums up his most horrific medevac. Having landed at Spence Bay earlier that morning, he knew that 30 metres above the ground, the sky was clear, although there were still strong winds. Getting off the ground in the whiteout was tricky, but Laserich was highly experienced and knew the airstrip well. "There is bad weather, and there is dangerous weather," he says, "and in the North, it's critical that you know the difference between the two." The conditions that day were bad; had they been dangerous, he would not have flown.
Over the past 47 years, Laserich has made the equivalent of 800 trips around the world with a perfect safety record. Based in Cambridge Bay, N.W.T., 285 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, he has rescued stranded hunters, injured trappers and downed pilots. His winged workhorses have hauled caribou, whale meat and blubber, carried corpses to funerals, and transported hunting parties with sleds and dog teams that howled behind the pilot's seat. Flying in some of the planet's harshest conditions, his engines have iced up and shut down in mid-air, once forcing him to control a plunge from 2,000 metres and glide to a landing on a frozen river. He has dug his plane out of axle-deep muck and survived winter nights after emergency landings left him stranded on the tundra.
Often flying when no one else would take to the air, Laserich has many tales to tell
Laserich has flown nearly 5,000 medevac flights – sometimes as many as 35 in a single month. Even today, many remote Arctic communities have only a nursing station, and seriously ill or injured patients must be evacuated to a hospital that may be thousands of kilometres away.
Often flying when no one else would take to the air, Laserich has many tales to tell. He recalls the time he flew a man whose arm had been ripped off in an accident to a hospital in Edmonton. While the local doctor clamped off arteries and veins to prevent the patient from bleeding to death, Laserich readied his plane. The severed arm was packed in a suitcase full of ice and travelled alongside the patient.
And then there was New Year's Eve 1971, when Laserich flew 10 hours straight to race a woman with a detached retina – glaucoma had already taken the sight of her other eye – to Edmonton so that the surgery required to save the eye could be performed within the requisite 24 hours. On a happier note, the high-flying stork has caught up with Laserich six times while he was airlifting pregnant mothers to hospital. All the babies survived. "Everyone knows that if there is a way to get in," says Catherine Gall, a nurse who worked with Laserich for six years, "Willy will find it."
To many northern pilots today, Laserich was a childhood hero. "We'd hang out at the float-plane base and hope he'd take us up for a flight," says Joe "Buffalo" McBryan of Buffalo Airways. "Riding in Willy's Norseman was the equivalent of getting a box seat at a hockey game – he was our Wayne Gretzky."
• • • • •
LASERICH WAS BORN IN GERMANY in 1932. When he was 19, he set off for Canada alone. The following year found him working as a freighter engineer on Great Slave Lake, N.W.T. When the lake froze, he worked as an airplane mechanic. In 1957, Laserich got his pilot's licence in Edmonton, where he met British-born Margaret Bunce, whom he married the following year. The day after the wedding, the couple drove to Hay River, Alta., where Margaret's introduction to the North was a home with an outhouse and no running water.
Willy and Margaret were to have three children. They grew up in float planes, picked berries with Inuit elders, and learned to hunt and fish.
By the 1960s, Laserich was flying sick and injured people to hospital, but it wasn't until the early 1980s that he began making dedicated medevac flights, with a nurse accompanying him.
Tall and strongly built, Laserich is independent, outspoken and stubborn. Those traits have served him well behind the controls of his planes but have sometimes landed him in trouble with bureaucracy. Throughout the 1970s, he repeatedly applied for a licence to add Cambridge Bay to the roster of communities from which he could operate his business. Again and again, his application was denied. Laserich explains that not having the licence didn't affect his ability to fly into or out of Cambridge Bay. He simply couldn't base any operations there.
However, authorities deemed that he was operating from Cambridge Bay, and in 1977 Laserich was slapped with 205 citations for contravening regulations. One, for example, pertained to a trip he'd made from Cambridge Bay to take antifreeze (necessary to prevent heating pipes from freezing) to an isolated community. "People were in danger of freezing to death," he explains. He faced the possibility of more than $1 million in fines and a year in jail.
That fall, Laserich's two small companies, Altair Leasing and Adlair Aviation, were convicted on 138 of the citations but fined a total of only $5,000. Some of the remaining charges were dropped, while Laserich himself was convicted on a number of them. The judge, however, fined him only a token $250. In announcing his verdict at 3 a.m. on January 18, 1982, Judge Frank Smith said, "He's the stuff of the bush pilots of old. He is supplying a service that he is uniquely qualified to perform…." When Laserich went to settle his fine, he learned it had already been paid. Ironically, he'd received his licence to operate from Cambridge Bay the year before.
In the Adlair Aviation hangar in Cambridge Bay, Laserich slips on a navy blue flight suit, heavy white Arctic boots and his trademark orange toque. His son René, who is also a pilot with Adlair, is readying the plane for a medevac from Coppermine, N.W.T. The plane in question is Laserich's newest, a Lear jet, outfitted with the latest medical equipment. After decades of close calls in prop planes, he decided to opt for a jet, which can fly high enough to avoid most of the Arctic's dangerous weather and cuts flight times in half.
As Laserich prepares to return to Cambridge Bay after the medevac, the radio crackles: a woman in Holman, Nunavut, has suffered a miscarriage and needs to get to a hospital. "Guess we won't be home tonight," says René. The pilot shrugs and utters what has become known as a "Willyism" – "Take it as it comes, ja?" – Margo Pfeiff
