Helicopters: The British Columbia Story

A.A. den Otter is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the author of The Philosophy of Railways.

This sequel to Helicopters in the High Country: 40 Years of Mountain
Flying (1995) focuses on the Okanagan Air Services (OAS), the very
successful B.C. company whose history is almost synonymous with
helicoptering in British Columbia.

The story begins in the summer of 1947, when Carl Agar, an Okanagan
pilot and businessman, and Alf Stringer, his engineer, recognized the
potential of the newly developed helicopter and set up a new business.
At first they used their Bell 47-B3 for spraying the valley’s fruit
trees, which was not very successful. The following year they put their
chopper to work in mountain surveying, forestry, and construction. These
ventures required Agar to adapt his newly learned helicopter-flying
techniques to the thin mountain air. Their big break came in the early
1950s when the Aluminum Company of Canada hired them to fly men and
construction supplies to the hydro-electric and smelter projects going
up at Kitimat. The OAS helicopters proved so successful that, by 1952,
the company was the largest helicopter operator in North America with
six pilots and engineers flying two large Sikorsky S–55s and four
smaller Bell 47-Ds.

This well-written book is filled with fascinating anecdotes, lots of
technical detail, many captivating pictures, and two useful appendixes
on the history of the helicopter. Among the stories, perhaps the most
dramatic is that of the Prinsendam, a cruise ship that caught fire in
October 1980. The rescue work, which involved plucking passengers from
lifeboats and depositing them onto nearby vessels, vividly illustrates
how important helicopter technology had become.