Filmmaker flies 2,300 km in the wrong direction
Traveller sees levity in Arctic misadventure
As he walked up the tarmac and onto a plane at Yellowknife Airport, Winnipeg filmmaker Christopher Paetkau had an eerie feeling that something was wrong. He had already confirmed his flight and boarding pass twice — at the airport and gate — but he wanted to check that he was on the right plane one last time.
As he passed a First Air flight attendant, he asked, “Is this flight going to Inuvik?”
“Yes, eventually,” the attendant said.
“Funny response,” he thought, as he settled into his seat and sent a few lastminute texts.
He was only half-listening when the pilot welcomed the passengers, but he recalls catching the words: “flying Rankin, Iqaluit.”
“That’s weird,” Paetkau thought. Iqaluit is in the opposite direction of Inuvik. “But northern flights do this — they go on milk runs every now and then.”
He reasoned that flights sometimes have to stop in multiple communities, and he had confirmed his destination three times. What could go wrong?
So the plane headed for a destination 2,300 kilometres in the wrong direction and Paetkau unwittingly embarked on a tour of the Canadian Arctic.
Two hours later, when the plane landed in Rankin Inlet, Paetkau asked another flight attendant when they could expect to get back up in the air and heading toward Inuvik.
“She was like, ‘What are you talking about? We’re not going to Inuvik. We’re going to Iqaluit,’ ” he said.
She took Paetkau to talk to the attendant who confirmed his flight and she was shocked. She thought he was joking.
The flight attendant told Paetkau that the person who boarded before him had said, “Hey, when do we get to Hawaii?”
“So everybody coming on board were making jokes like this all the time — except that I wasn’t,” he said.
When the pilot got wind of the mix-up, he was dumbfounded.
“He said this had only happened to him once in his career decades ago,” Paetkau said. “It happened to a dog that was sent in the wrong direction.”
The crew took Paetkau inside the Rankin airport to try to find him a flight to Inuvik. His only option was to fly the rest of the way to Iqaluit, take a flight back to Yellowknife and then fly another 1,100 kilometres to Inuvik.
At first he was upset by the mix-up, but Paetkau said he cheered up once he realized that the only thing he could change was his reaction.
“I could have been upset and that would have taken a lot of smiles off people’s faces,” he said. “So initially I was the joke, but then I became in on the joke.”
He also became good friends with the flight crew, particularly with the flight attendant who had misunderstood his question.
“I would love to get ahold of her,” he said. “If she’s out there, I’d be absolutely happy to have a chat with her.”
His bad luck finally ran out when he bumped into an old friend taking the same flight to Yellowknife. “She asked me what I was doing there and I said, ‘Oh my god, what AM I doing here?’ ” Paetkau said, adding that the pair got to sit together.
In a statement, First Air spokesperson Dan Valin said the incident is being investigated.
“Although we are happy that Mr. Paetkau was able to ‘make the most of the situation’ in his words and that we were able to make his unexpected journey as pleasant as could be with our staff, we take this matter very seriously,” he said.
Paetkau said the mix-up started with some chaos at the airport. When he arrived, computers at the First Air kiosk were down and staff were manually entering people’s ticket information. When he got to his gate, there was some “chaos and confusion.”
“I heard final boarding calls for three different flights, all at the same time. All three were going north or northeast,” he said. They also all appeared to be departing from the same gate. When he went up to show his boarding pass and ID, he was told to come back in 15 minutes. He sat down until he saw a group of people get up to board, and, thinking it was the final call for his flight, he followed them. No one stopped him at the gate.
The detour put Paetkau and his crew behind schedule in Inuvik, where he is working on a short film on the Tuktoyaktuk highway, but he says the experience was his “all-time favourite mistake.”
“There’s been nothing close to flying almost 2,300 km in the wrong direction, on the wrong flight, with the right boarding pass,” he said. “It was a little life lesson.”