The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
The Nova Scotians who acted as lights in the storm
The funny thing is that Dimitri Neonakis cannot quite explain why he did what he did, other than to say that “in unprecedented times we sometimes do things that maybe we don't even think too deeply about.”
All he really knows is that last April, with the coronavirus raging everywhere, it was already bad enough in Nova Scotia. Then the unimaginable happened in Portapique, a onetwo punch which was almost too much for a locked-down province to handle.
“I wanted to show my support for the people of Portapique, and for everyone,” said Neonakis, 58, who was born in Greece but moved here 40 years ago when he married a woman from Nova Scotia.
So, late in the afternoon on the day the Portapique killer was gunned down, he headed for Halifax Stanfield International Airport. There he opened a fence and drove to the hangar where his SR Cirrus 22 four-seat aircraft sat.
It was so spur-of-the moment that he hadn't even filed a flight plan. When the air traffic controller asked what Neonakis planned to do he said, simply, “some sightseeing.”
Then he taxied out and took to the air, climbing to 2,500 feet where, as the setting sun turned the sky a reddish hue, he banked left and right.
‘WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS TOGETHER’
Neither he nor his girlfriend said much during the two hours that Neonakis traced the shape of a heart in his flight path over the community of Portapique.
“I just felt that I needed to send a message,” he said. “A message that we are here, and we will get through this together.”
He wasn't expecting the gesture, which he called “an old-fashioned smoke signal” and “a text in the sky,” to touch so many, and go viral around the world.
Yet he already understood the special impact that flight can have upon people.
The Dartmouth businessman — among other things he owns the Alexandra's Pizza chain — always wanted to fly. Twenty years ago, he started lessons at the Shearwater Flying School.
Then one day four years ago, Neonakis watched a mom struggle trying to get her disabled son into a wheelchair, which made him want to do something for children with special needs.
Since then, most every weekend he takes disabled kids and their families up in his airplane. On most of those hundreds of flights a child with special needs — anything from Down syndrome, or visual impairment to being confined to a wheelchair — sits in the co-pilot's chair.
Those Dream Flights run 40 minutes or so, which is long enough for the passengers to experience a thrill, learn something about aviation and perhaps gain a little selfconfidence.
Knowing this, the Portapique sky text doesn't surprise me, or that he has taken to the skies again and again in the hard days of 2020, with messages that shine like rays of light through the storm.
He isn't alone in this regard. The Nova Scotians who, in their way, helped light a way forward in the past year come in all shapes and sizes.
People like Amber Allan, of Hubbards, who used Facebook, then Zoom and finally a website, to keep her fitness classes going and helping people stay fit, and the Halifax Road Hammers who, in 30 groups of four in December, ran 14,000 kilometres to raise money for the homeless through Shelter Nova Scotia.
Like Whitney Kubas, owner of her eponymously named corner store in Port Hastings — the only place for 30 kilometres to get groceries — who kept operating, even making home deliveries during the pandemic, and Crystal Blair, who, at first, closed her restaurant because of COVID-19, but then reopened it for truckers in need of a bite, washroom, or shower.
Like Abdulwahab Jalab, the Syrian refugee who has been delivering groceries for seniors and the vulnerable during the pandemic. Like Amy Miller, the Bedford woman who launched a hugely successful hygiene drive for the homeless, and Rebeccah Raphael, the student from Halifax who launched a free tutoring service to help schoolchildren amid the pandemic.
MANY AERIAL TRIBUTES
Then there was Neonakis.
Using designs sketched out, back on terra firma, and a flight app on his ipad as a guide, he has flown the shape of Terry Fox, a father and daughter to celebrate Father's Day, and a Canadian flag to honour his true north strong and free home.
As a tribute to George Floyd, the African-american man whose shooting by police triggered the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, Neonakis followed a flight path in the shape of a raised fist — a gesture that drew the attention of television networks and newspapers across Canada and the United States.
What moved us, though, were symbols of heartbreaking events closer to home: the outline of the head of RCMP officer Heidi Stevenson, complete with her Mountie Stetson, who lost her life in the Portapique incident; a tribute, in the form of a Canadian Forces Snowbird aircraft, to Nova Scotia-born Jenn Casey, who died in an air crash in British Columbia; a large bird flying in the direction of Fredericton to commemorate the six lives lost after a helicopter from Halifax's HMCS Fredericton crashed in international waters; a flight path that spelled Dylan over Truro, the home of the missing threeyear-old Dylan Ehler.
In the final days of 2020, he took to the air again, climbing up to 6,500 feet. There was a bit of wind up there, he told me. But not nearly enough to stop him from tracing the shape of a Christmas candle, another text in the sky, which he called “to remember those we lost in 2020, and to light the way ahead in the fresh new year.”