Ian Ross: A Life in the Air

“I’m a better pilot than I am a driver,” laughs Ian Ross. He quickly adds that he “probably shouldn’t say that.”

In reality, the 52-year-old Salmon Arm native was airborne by the tender age of 15, a good two years before he obtained his driver’s license. By 16, he’d graduated from private to commercial flying and was eventually racking up hours for Caribou Air in Kelowna, handling a little charter work and doing a lot of fire protection patrol. When this didn’t prove to be enough for a young Ian Ross is a former bush pilot (Brandon Williams)man with a taste for adventure, Ian decided to tackle the wildest of blue yonders.

“There were more opportunities,” he recalls, about his eventual move to the Northwest Territories. “And I wanted to fly bush planes. It’s more challenging, and you do a lot of things that are more fun than just looking for forest fires.”

And so Ian took to hot-dogging it over the vast canopies of Canadian wilderness that only a privileged (and brave) few have ever seen. Predictably, Ian views it as the greatest education a pilot could receive, reflecting on his time there in a voice that’s steely but soft.

“It’s certainly not for everybody,” he says, with some understatement. “It’s a lot of hard work, because you’re by yourself, and there’s lots of freight and cargo, lots of different situations, and trappers and dogs, external loads. Plenty of times you’ve got something hanging off the outside of the airplane. Floats in the summer, skis in the winter. Lots of different kinds of flying.”

Furthermore, Ian would regularly find himself without radio contact for endless miles in all directions. Any pilot would have their instincts honed by the situation. “You really had to line up your ducks, so to speak,” says Ian, “because of fuel and weather issues, water hazards, all those kind of things.”

While he never had a problem, he admits, “Aviation is something where you never stop learning. The more that you can experience, the better you are at your job.”

The father of three finally returned to B.C. a year ago, and took up a position with Harbour Air shortly after. It’s a relatively sedate new role for Ian, but no less welcome. “I really enjoy it,” he mentions. “It’s a super bunch of people we move around, very friendly.”

And does he miss the cavalier life of the bush-jockey, commanding the skies above an immense and rugged no man’s land without a safety net? Ian laughs again. “I’ve obviously been doing this for a long time and the thrill of going in the air is not so huge anymore,” he states. “The people you work with make the difference.”