Getting to Holman, NT

One of the lesser known communities in the Northwest Territories is Holman, ICAO code CYHI. Located on the same island as Cambridge Bay, the town is not visited by any regular airline service, yet no communities in the far north with air strips are completely ignored. It's a fair bet that Ken Borek Air makes occasional stops here, and I wanted to duplicate a likely flight.

Ken Borek Air uses the DHC-6 Twin Otter for flights to smaller communities, but when cargo carrying is important, or there are a lot of passengers, the best choice is the DC-3. Borek Air has several DC-3 upgraded with modern avionics for safer flying. These planes offer conventional radio navigation tools -- you can hold a VOR outbound radial with the autopilot -- and dial an altitude. So I chose the DC-3 for my flight, updated with Marc Beaumont's "dc3_pan3" panel from Avsim, a splendid add-on if you plan to use the Borek Air DC-3, also available for download on Avsim.

I started out from Inuvik, CYEV. I know Borek Air visits there (or at least it used to), and there are connections to Inuvik from further south. There is a defined air route from the YEV VOR to Paulatuk, which continues on to Holman. Consulting the enroute chart for northern Canada, ENR_LO5, shows the first leg has an outbound radial of 035 degrees, and the second is 054 True. Armed with this information, I fueled up my DC-3 and taxi'd out to runway 5 at CYEV for take off.

The 035 radial worked as promised, providing a clean, true course to CYPC more than 200 miles away. The leg from YPC to HI, both NDB stations, was not so easy. The good news was that the YPC NDB has a range of 70 miles, and the HI also, meaning that about 140 of the 154 mile leg is covered by radio nav.

I set out around 12:30 noon, in full daylight, expecting to make a day landing at Holman, but such was not meant to be. The trip lasted about three hours because of 20 knot headwinds, and I didn't arrive until 3:30. Well, of course, at this time of year, dusk is deepening into night at these latitudes, so I had very little daylight to use. The gravel runway has a VASI, though, and medium edge lighting, so it was not really difficult, and by 4pm I had trundled onto the gravel parking ramp and shut the engines off.

It's not the sort of trip you want to make every day, but it does give a good feeling of accomplishment to finish a journey with such minimal navigation aids along the way. All in all, it was a good trip, and the old DC-3 is still a good bird.