Merlyn Carter Bush Pilot

For fifty years, flying floats and skis, Merlyn's planes crashed into trees, broke through lake ice, twice flipped and once exploded. Merlyn always walked away. Some called him lucky, many called Merlyn their best friend until a June day when he lost a battle to the jaws of a bear.

Bush Pilots Mayday is a true life adventure based on the logbook entries and the recollections of fellow pilots. Ken flew a Cessna for 17 years into various places in Northwestern Canada, the Yukon, and Northwest Territories. His aircraft was equipped with a minimum of radio gear and all his navigation was done with the map and compass.

A nail-biting tour whooshing through the Arctic air alongside the legendary ice pilots, whose story created an international television sensation. Based on the top-rated TV show now airing on History Channel and Global TV in Canada, and in eleven other countries around the world, The Ice Pilots follows a group of pilots in Yellowknife, Canada, and the extraordinary adventures of the most unorthodox flyboys on earth. Renegade Arctic airline Buffalo Airways defies the cold and the competition by using World War 2-era propeller planes to haul vital fuel, supplies and passengers to remote outposts across the world's last great wilderness of northern Canada. From rookie pilots trying to earn their wings in dangerous conditions to vintage planes that flew over Normandy on D-Day, The Ice Pilots brings its readers on an engaging romp through Arctic skies. The intrepid Michael Vlessides -- the writer behind Les Stroud's bestselling Survivorman books -- braves bone-chilling temperatures, treacherous landings and iconic owner "Buffalo" Joe McBryan's famous temper to capture behind-the-scenes stories about the ice pilots, the crew, the passengers and the communities they serve. Weaving in history about bush pilots, plane crashes and the north, Vlessides has crafted an entertaining, informative narrative about aviation: the lifeline of this remote and icy world.

They were nicknamed Snow Eagle, Flying Knight, Bush Angel, Punch, Doc and Wop. They worked in open cockpits and flew through cold, snow and fog without the benefit of radios, maps or weather reports. They flew over the Barrens, frozen lakes, boreal forests and mountain ranges by dead reckoning and line of sight. They landed on makeshift runways, glaciers, muskeg, tundra and glassy lakes. Comrades of the wilderness, they were Canada's early bush pilots. L.D. Cross brings us the incredible stories of the brave and enterprising pilots who rolled back the boundaries of western and northern Canada, delivering mail, medicine, miners and all the supplies needed by frontier settlements. Flying such planes as Curtiss, Bellanca, de Havilland, Fairchild, Junkers, Norseman, Stinson and Vickers, they were the off-roaders of aviation, venturing where no others dared to go. Climb into the cockpit with these pioneering pilots for an exciting trip into Canadian aviation history.

Blue Skies, Green Hell, a thriller written by a bush pilot's wife, is a riveting tale set in the 1950s when pioneers of the sky flew single-engine aircraft over unforgiving wilderness and impenetrable jungle in Venezuela. Marilyn and Frank live in a place called the last frontier on the Orinoco River where he establishes a multiaircraft service that flies food, supplies and medicine to remote and inaccessible communities. Together they challenge the odds and take the exhilaration of flying to new heights. Their world is fierce weather with no weather reports, aircraft with limited range radios, and planes with six basic instruments. A search and rescue effort ends when they make a forced landing in no-man's-land. A flight to Miami turns sour as their twin-engine C-46 conks out over the Caribbean. Best friends die in fiery crashes. A stone age Indian appears where he shouldn't be. This is drama from the cockpit of vintage aircraft.