Jack Pickup

Harold Jackson Pickup (17 January 1919 – 11 February 1996) was a physician responsible for providing health care to remote communities in British Columbia while based out of the village of Alert Bay.

He was sometimes known as the "Flying Doctor of British Columbia".

Harold Jackson "Jack" Pickup was born on 17 January 1919 to William Samuel Pickup and Dorothy Mary Aylward.

He had one sister, Zoe.

Two years after he was born, the Pickup family relocated to Fort William, Ontario.

Pickup graduated from high school early, at age 16.

Jack Pickup attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and graduated in 1942 as a surgeon and general practitioner.

Though he intended to serve as a physician in the Royal Canadian Navy, Pickup was instead relegated to working at the tuberculosis sanatorium in Fort William for the remainder of the Second World War.

Pickup briefly worked in Ontario, and had a practice in Dryden.

The village of Alert Bay purchased a decommissioned military hospital formerly operated by the Royal Canadian Air Force in Port Hardy and transported it to Cormorant Island by barge in 1947, creating St. George's Hospital.

Advertisements circulated across Canada for a doctor willing to service not just the community but more than a thousand isolated communities across Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia as well, an area of over 10,000 km2.

Jack Pickup became very interested in the job in 1949 despite never having been to Alert Bay or even knowing where it was.

Two days after Pickup arrived in the village to consider the opportunity, the doctor who had until then been caring for the community disappeared, prompting Pickup to take the position for a five-year term.

Upon arrival in the region, Pickup encountered difficulties transporting injured patients to the hospital in Alert Bay, as far as Kelsey Bay (60 mi from Alert Bay) to the south and Bella Bella (100 mi from Alert Bay) to the north.

With sea travel proving too prolonged and land travel too difficult, Pickup made the decision to take flying lessons and become a pilot in order to better tend to his patients.

His lessons were taken over the course of a three-week leave of absence and in September 1950 he received his pilot's licence flying a Luscombe 8A at Vancouver International Airport.

With little time left to acquire a plane, Pickup looked at three available floatplanes before purchasing a Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser (CF-EFC) for $3,500; he had also considered a Stinson Reliant and a Republic RC-3 Seabee.

After purchasing the aircraft he flew the 1500 mi to Kenora to receive his floatplane endorsement, and then flew back to British Columbia and returned to Alert Bay.

The trip to and from Ontario took Pickup twenty hours across five days and required nine stops on lakes and rivers for refuelling.

On the return flight Pickup used the Yellowhead Pass between Jasper and Tête Jaune Cache to traverse the Rocky Mountains, following the Thompson and Fraser Rivers to the ocean and often flying lower than the granite cliffs on either side of the region's valleys.

Along the way, Pickup used telephones to check in and allow others to monitor his progress westward, as there was no radio aboard his plane.

Pickup continued to use the Piper for three years, and its red and yellow colour scheme made it the best-known airplane in the region.

Though he eventually installed a radio in its cockpit, the only signal he was usually able to pick up was from RCAF Port Hardy (now the Port Hardy Airport).

Pickup would later remark that the Piper was his favourite to fly.

Pickup became embroiled in a protracted two-year battle to convince Revenue Canada to accept money spent on maintaining and fuelling his aircraft as legitimate tax expenses; ultimately, he became the only doctor in Canada to be allowed to expense 80% of his air travel costs.

In 1953, after 300 hours of flight, he sold the plane and upgraded to a Waco AQC-6 (CF-CCW) biplane for $6,000.

Pickup took the Waco on test flights between Vancouver and Nanaimo before returning with it to Alert Bay, where it would continue to service the communities tended to serve Pickup for 27 years under the name "Big Red".

In 1954, Pickup became a founding member of the College of Family Physicians of Canada.

The Waco sank after striking a submerged log on take-off in 1958, but was soon raised and Pickup adopted a sideslipping technique for landing.

As the most established pilot in the community, Pickup helped Alert Bay Air Services train their first pilots and acquire their first aircraft - a floatplane variant of the Cessna 170 - in 1958.

In 1970, he purchased a Republic RC-3 Seabee while Bird Red was undergoing repairs and used it in place of the Waco for four years.

Pickup earned a reputation for his expertise at flying, and became a legendary pilot to the communities he serviced.

In the 1970s, he served as mayor of Alert Bay for six years.

Among other things, the Alert Bay Air Services provided medevac support for injured or killed loggers in remote areas in the region, and continued to do so after being amalgamated into Air BC along with a number of other aircraft companies in 1980.

Pickup also became a part-owner of Altair, a short-lived aircraft company in Pitt Meadows, where he had his own aircraft serviced.

In a 1997 interview he suggested that most of the stories ascribed to him were untrue, citing one story in which he flew wearing nothing on his feet but slippers as particularly egregious as he "never owned a pair".

An account by former Alert Bay dispatcher and pilot Villi Douglas tells that Pickup managed to evacuate a sick lighthouse keeper from Pine Island and achieve an inexplicable take-off in spite of massive swells.

In another story relayed by Pickup himself, he had been forced to take a sick and intoxicated man from a remote camp to the hospital in Alert Bay, but was forced to take off at night.

After take-off his patient regained consciousness and attacked him twice before Pickup knocked him out with a fire extinguisher and transported him the rest of the way to Alert Bay.

Pickup racked up thousands of flight hours across 31 types of planes over the course of his career, almost always conducting take-offs and landings on water.