Some cool helicopters and jets at the Whitehorse airport
A few things stacked up yesterday to lure me into Whitehorse last night. First, I had seen two corporate jets I didn’t recognize when I was in town getting groceries, without a camera. Then a friend messaged me that four black helicopters had arrived. And finally I saw a post that the Titan Tavern & Geek Shop building has been painted like a stone castle, with a mural as well. So at about 6pm, I drove in for a look.
The larger of the corporate jets is C-FWSH, a 2019 Gulfstream G280 operated by Skyservice Business Aviation, a charter company based at Dorval, Quebec. They’re built in Israel, and in 2021 a new one cost $24.5 million.
C-GALN is a 1999 Cessna 550 Citation II, operated by Motion Air Charter from Lake Country, BC. There are a lot of Citation IIs for sale right now – this one would cost me about $1.5 million Canadian, or about $4,000 per hour to charter. Maybe I should start buying lottery tickets again 🙂
We see Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks coming and going from Alaska a few times a year, but it never gets old – they’re pretty awesome aircraft, especially when you consider that they went into service with the U.S. Army 47 years ago. The paint job makes the registration hard to see but I did see 94-26558, meaning it is a UH-60L that went into service in 1994.
I started driving to downtown, but was only about a kilometer away when two very large helicopters appeared, flying very slowly over the Alaska Highway! I pulled over to the shoulder and got a few shots.
From where I was it wasn’t easy to get turned around to get back to the airport, and I just missed the new helicopters parading slowly down the taxiway, but got a spot to photograph the parking and shutdown. These are Boeing CH-47F Chinook helicopters from Fort Wainwright at Fairbanks.
They have a great logo on the tail. They’re with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion of the 228th Aviation Regiment – the “Sugar Bears.” I’ve added one of their jacket patches below it.
Just as things were slowing down, Alkan Air’s newest addition, 1980 de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter C-GIWD, arrived. It’s had an interesting career flying all over the world, from Iceland to Africa to Australia, and perhaps Antarctica.
Okay, it was time to try to get downtown again 🙂
Yes, the Titan Tavern (etc) paint job is wonderful – a fun addition to the downtown streetscapes. Bill Oster, well known to local mural fans for many years, and Dustin Sheldon are the artists who have created this. It’s not quite finished – I’ll go back in a week or so to get photos to add to the Whitehorse murals page I started in 2017 and which is in need of a rebuild to show the current state of the art.
One final photo before I headed home – City Hall, which was looking very dated but not in a historic way, is in the middle of an $8 million facelift, scaled down from a $26.2 million rebuild that had been hoped for.
About The Author
