Photographer takes classic plane on trip around Labrador
An award-winning Canadian artist, pilot and aerial photographer flew his small aircraft to Goose Bay recently to re-enact part of a flight across North America and the Atlantic to Europe that took place 64 years earlier.
Louis Helbig lives in Melbourne, Australia. His photographs have received national and international recognition over the years.
During his recent trip to Labrador, he took photographs of the shoreline and along the Trans-labrador Highway between Forteau, Mary’s Harbour, William’s Harbour, Goose Bay and Wabush/labrador City.
“I flew out over the pack ice and the icebergs and took pictures of the ice flow activity, unbelievably spectacular,” Helbig said during a recent phone interview.
According to Helbig’s research, a man named Peter Gluckmann famously piloted the historic two-seater Luscombe (which Helbig now owns) across the Atlantic from San Francisco to his hometown of Berlin, Germany, and back, in the summer of 1953.
Gluckmann’s return to Berlin was of special significance, as he had fled the city as a teenage Jewish refugee in 1939, Helbig said.
“He became a watchmaker in San Francisco ... and an amateur pilot and he bought this aircraft,” Helbig said of the plane he purchased in 2013.
Helbig said Gluckmann got special permission from the American ambassador in London to fly via the air corridor, making the plane the first private, civilian aircraft to land at Berlin Tempelhof Airport after the Second World War..
It is one of few private aircraft to land in Berlin between 1945 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain in 1989, Helbig said.
“At the time Berlin was a completely bombed-out city. It didn’t get rebuilt until many years later,” he said.
Until recently, Helbig said, Gluckmann’s 90 hp plane was the smallest aircraft to have ever crossed the Atlantic.
Gluckmann detailed the trip in “The Flying Magazine” in January 1954.
He ended his story by telling his readers that the only trouble he encountered was a broken wheel. He’d only changed the spark plugs twice, he wrote.
“I changed the oil twice and I must admit I never even had to tune up my motor. These little airplanes really do prove themselves dependable. If you take care of them and fly them with reasonable care, you can do anything you like with them,” Gluckmann wrote.
Six years after his flight across the Atlantic, Gluckmann set a world record for the first solo flight in a single engine plane around the world (in a different aircraft).
He and his plane disappeared into the Pacific Ocean in 1959 or 1960 while he was trying to set a long-distance record from Tokyo to the U.S.A., Helbig said.
Helbig is a commercial pilot who gets his love of flying naturally. Originally from William’s Lake, B.C., his father was a pilot who also few small planes.
“The flying I do is to take my photos and do my art,” he said.
Helbig’s recent trip to Labrador was not only to bring the plane (which now has a Canadian registration) back to where it made history more than six decades ago, but to see a part of Labrador that he hadn’t already seen. (He has been to Labrador West in the past for skiing trips).
For more information on Helbig visit his website at www. louishelbig.com