By Laura Smith, Fox 11 online

Joe and Mikey McBryan have flown their DC-3 1500 miles from Yellowknife to Oshkosh, Wisconsin to take part in the largest gathering of Douglas DC-3 and C-47 aircraft in 60 years. Marking the 75th anniversary of this ‘workhorse aircraft,’ the weeklong festivities are likely the last time that more than 25 of these planes will be seen together – along with the pilots, mechanics, crew, passengers, and aeronautic fans who have deep admiration for this legendary flying machine. In addition to its life as a civilian , military, and cargo carrier, the McBryan's DC-3 boasts the added distinction of 'reality TV star'. Not bad for a plane invented before television itself.

Read full article at Fox 11 online

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By Lucy Preacher, Discovery UK

As usual in the UK, as the snow descends, things grind to a halt – especially the airports. Yellowknife, in Northern Canada, can afford no such luxury. As the gateway to that isolated part of the world, the airport must stay open in all weathers.

Read full article at Discovery UK

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By Alex Strachan, Edmonton Journal

It's summer in Yellowknife. There's an image you didn't expect to see in February, but that's how the high-flying docu-reality series Ice Pilots NWT ends its first season tonight.

Read full article at the Edmonton Journal

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By Adu Raudkivi, Eesti Elu (Estonian Life)

Ice Pilots NWT documents flying in the North West Territories in the winter (-40 below zero) with aircraft built before the Second World War on shuttle (cargo) runs from Whitehorse. The stars of the series are the aircraft.

Read full article at Eesti Elu

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By John Doyle, Globe and Mail

Once upon a time, History Television was devoted to stuff about, you know, history! Look at Wednesday’s listings and you’ll see Ice Road Truckers (History, 9 p.m.), followed by Ice Pilots NWT (History, 10 p.m.). Hours of drama about guys and their trucks or planes battling the elements. A good deal of Discovery’s programming follows the same pattern.

Read full article at the Globe and Mail

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Globe and Mail

Break out the champagne. History Television announced last week that Ice Pilots NWT was being renewed for a second season, which comes as grand news for those viewers already engaged in the lives of Yellowknife-based Buffalo Airways.

Read full article at the Globe and Mail

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By Elizabeth MacMillan, Northern News Service

A violent wind shear has come up on the approach to Tulita, threatening to wreak havoc as a plane approaches the short airstrip. In a split-second decision, two pilots turn the plane around, unable to land.

That's the television show based on Buffalo Airways, but on a recent trip to Deline, Norman Wells and Tulita, there was no near-death experiences, no mechanical failures, no relationship-ending blow outs. Shocking, perhaps, to the thousands of viewers of the History Television series Ice Pilots NWT, which debuted in November as the highest-rated Canadian show ever on the cable channel.

Read full article at the Northern News Service

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By Tanya Lester, Gulf Islands Driftwood

"Christmas is just around the corner, but Buffalo's crucial food and mail runs come to a halt. An engine seizure strands Scott, AJ and the C-46 plane, creating a chaotic chain reaction. Crusty mechanic Chuck must attempt a bare-handed engine swap in minus 30, and pressure from customers and co-workers pushes the whole company to the breaking point."

The above "Pre-Christmas Rush" episode summary for the Ice Pilots NWT series on cable television's History channel indicates how this show documents a lifestyle very different from anything that happens on Salt Spring Island.

Read full article at the Gulf Islands Driftwood

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By Alex Strachan, Canwest News Service

Ice Pilots NWT, History Television's bracing docu- reality series about a renegade airline that links remote communities across Canada's north using vintage Second World War-era transport planes, roared to a ratings record last week, with 459,000 viewers.

Read full article at the Canwest News Service

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By Paul Bickford and Daron Letts, Northern News Service

Although he admits he previously didn't know anything about reality TV, Joe McBryan is now part of it.

McBryan, the president of Buffalo Airways, joined many Hay River residents on Nov. 18 for the premiere showings of Ice Pilots NWT at the movie theatre.

Read full article at the Northern News Service

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By Greg David, TVGuide.ca

Scott Blue, a rookie co-pilot at Buffalo Airways, always thought that life at the airline – based in Yellowknife – would make a good TV show. So when History Television came calling, he wasn't surprised.

Hence Ice Pilots NWT, a 13-part doc that follows the six-foot-seven Toronto native and a motley crew of fellow pilots, mechanics and office staff who are a part of Buffalo Joe McBryan's business of flying Second World War airplanes around the frozen north.

Read full article at TVGuide.ca

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By Glen Schaefer, The Province

Reality TV has a mostly deserved reputation for artificially goosing the drama of the situations it depicts, but no embellishment was required of the Vancouver-based production team that spent nine months in Yellowknife filming the pilots and mechanics who link Canada's far-flung arctic communities with a fleet of Second World War-era planes.

Read full article at the Vancouver Province.

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Alex Strachan, Ottawa Citizen

Keep your nose down, never pull on it.

And, by the way, if you're thinking of planning your wedding destination, or you're thinking of flying off on a second honeymoon, have you ever considered the high Arctic?

Those are just some of the suggestions made in tonight's premiere of the wildly exhilarating new docu-reality series Ice Pilots NWT, about a crew of hardy, hard-ass pilots who fly 1940s-vintage DC-3s and DC-4s across 1.2 million square kilometres of frozen lakes and unforgiving tundra hugging the North Pole.

Read full article at the Ottawa Citizen

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Malcolm Parry, Vancouver Sun

Intercontinental flights aren't in the cards for the antique aircraft that are Omni Film Productions' vice-president Gabriela Schonbach's daily concern. But two of them still provide scheduled service between base-station Yellowknife and Hay River, N.W.T.

Read full article at the Vancouver Sun

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By Flannery Dean, Rogers Spotlight

You've got to pity the production crew of History Television's dramatic new documentary series, Ice Pilots NWT. Filmed in the glacial climes of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, a.k.a. "Canada's coldest city" with temperatures that can plunge to -51.C°, the inhospitable winter weather is palpable. Fortunately, this sacrifice of warmth isn't in vain. Ice Pilots, which documents the daily travails of the pilots and crewmembers at Buffalo Airways, a small but essential airline in the frozen north, is a fun and unique addition to the “dangerous/miserable job" reality show genre. The cast is character-rich, to say the least (just wait until you meet mechanic Chuck Adams) and the drama balances TV-worthy life-and-death moments with the petty aggravations and interpersonal squabbles that define modern employment.

Read full article at Rogers Spotlight.

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By Roxanne Hooper, Langley Advance

Last weekend Justin Simle was walking the beach in White Rock, soaking up the Indian summer rays and visiting with friends and family from Cloverdale and Langley.

On Monday, he was hoisting on his trusty parka as he disembarked from an airplane in the Northwest Territories – greeted by -10?C temperatures and blowing snow.

Read full article at the Langley Advance.

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By Alex Strachan, Vancouver Sun

The story may be apocryphal, but that doesn't stop the devil-may-care Buffalo Airways ice pilots in Hay River, N.W.T., from repeating it.

Airline founder Joe McBryan, or "Buffalo Joe" as he's better known, was flying a planeload of out-of-control hockey players, so the story goes. They wouldn't settle down -- any NHL coach can relate -- so Buffalo Joe pointed the nose of the 1940s-era plane skyward and flew it to 14,000 feet, where the boys passed out in the thinner air.

And a legend was born.

Read full article at the Vancouver Sun.

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Sarah Treleaven, National Post

The planes we fly are World War Two classics. They're flying tanks; they're so tough. These models were primarily transport aircraft - the smallest being the DC3, the midsize the C46 and the largest the DC4. Eisenhower remarked at the end of the war that the DC3 was one of the five things that won the war for the Americans. If it gets below -40 in the winter Air Canada's new planes stop flying to Yellowknife, but we're still flying our DC3s.

Read full article at the National Post

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Niagara Advance

A local man with an unusual job will be part of a documentary to begin airing next week on the History Channel.

Ian Bottomley is an "ice pilot" flying with Buffalo Airways in the North West Territories.

The Niagara District Secondary School graduate started his flying career with lessons at the local airport, and graduated five years ago from Moncton Flight College and the New Brunswick Community College with a Diploma of Aviation Technology.

Read full article at the Niagara Advance

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By Greg David, TV Guide.ca

Debuts: Wednesday, November 18

Who's in it: The pilots, crew and passengers of Buffalo Airways.

What's it about: This documentary series follows the pilots of the Yellowknife-based Buffalo Airways, which still flies Second World War airplanes to transport people around the north.

Reminds us of: Ice Road Truckers in the air.

The buzz: Since History Television is using words like "ice pilots," blizzards" and "frozen lakes," I'm going to go out on a limb and say this will be like Ice Road Truckers, but with airplanes. Does that mean I won't watch? Are you kidding?? I'll be glued to the set. The chance to see pilots dealing with crappy weather, loopy passengers and potentially dangerous cargo – all being shipped around in planes made in the 1940s – is a recipe for disaster. And great TV.

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From Wings Magazine

Production is well underway on a new 13 x 1 hr documentary series to air on History Television in Fall 2009. Ice Pilots NWT follows the adventures of pilots and would-be pilots at Yellowknife-based Buffalo Airways, an extraordinary little northern airline with the most unusual fleet in the world. Buffalo still flies big, piston-powered propeller planes that were first flown in World War II, classics such as the DC-3, the DC-4 and the Curtis Commando C-46. The series tells the stories of rookie pilots who come to Buffalo to earn their wings flying these vintage war birds through some of the harshest conditions on the planet.

Shooting commenced in Yellowknife in November 2008 and will wrap in August 2009. Specially-mounted cameras will allow viewers to ride along with rookie pilots as they fly old warbirds through blinding winter blizzards and smoke-filled summer skies in fire-fighting season.

"Ice Pilots NWT is an exciting addition to the popular new genre of observational/vérité documentary series that includes Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch and Ax Men," says Canwest's VP of Factual Content, Michael Kot. "We want to make this a really big series."

Ice Pilots NWT is produced by Omni Film Productions Ltd. in association with Canwest and with the participation of the Canadian Television Fund, the Rogers Cable Network Fund, the Province of British Columbia Film Incentive BC and the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit Program. The series is created and produced by David Gullason, and executive produced by Gabriela Schonbach, David Gullason and Michael Chechik.

About Omni Film Productions Ltd.
Vancouver-based Omni Film Productions Ltd. is one of Canada's most respected television production companies, producing top-quality programming in a wide variety of genres. Since 1979, Omni has produced hundreds of hours of television dramas, documentaries, factual and lifestyle series and children's programming, garnering over 100 national and international awards. (www.omnifilm.com)

Read full article at Wings Magazine.

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By Denise Duguay, d2tv

Many things are up in the air for CanWest, which owns, among other things, this and many other Canadian daily newspapers, as well as Global, E! and a load of specialty television stations.  The next big day in the ongoing financial crunch for the parent company will come some time later in June, when, according to Reuters citing the June 4 Globe and Mail report, a restructuring exec will be named.

More on point, perhaps, to you fellow television addicts, is that the E! channels, including the one in Montreal, are in limbo, with CanWest having put them on the block and having left the stations out of yesterday' smulti-channel fall-season preview in Toronto. E!, if you'll recall, had a major slate of U.S. comedies and dramas last fall (although, maddeningly, not all E! programs aired on Montreal's E!). The next few weeks will tell the fate of E! here and in Hamilton, Victoria, Kelowna and Red Deer.

But that's about enough of this depressing stuff. Television is for escaping. Here is the fall plan for Global and its specialty channels.

History Television

Ice Pilots NWT: This sounds like Ice Road Truckers or Deadliest Catch or any other of Thom Beers' working-men-as-heroes documentary series. Except these guys are pilots. In the NorthWest Territories.

Read full article at d2tv.

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Canwest announced today details of the 2009-2010 programming lineup across its Specialty channels. From Mark Burnett's exploration in Africa and Mike Dowse's outrageous new drama, The Foundation, to Chef Guy Fieri's foray into an exciting new live format, the primetime schedules offer an extensive lineup of engrossing new series, specials and blockbuster movies.

"As we head into the fall season, Canadians can look forward to another year of diverse, quality programming across all of our Specialty channels," said Barbara Williams, Executive Vice President, Content, Canwest Broadcasting. "With the addition of some of the most gripping series and movies the entertainment world has to offer combined with new and returning lifestyle favourites, our schedules have something exceptional to offer to everyone and will continue to drive Canwest's dominance and growth in Specialty television."

If no one else will do it, the Ice Pilots of Canada's Northwest Territories will. Renegade Arctic airline Buffalo Airways defies the cold and the competition by flying propeller planes from the Second World War on missions all over the Canadian North. Landing precious cargo onto remote airstrips at mine sites, water bombing forest fires and carving out runways on frozen lakes and rocky tundra, the Ice Pilots do it all, despite blizzards, breakdowns and crazy passengers.

Read full article at Yahoo News.

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