One of our most memorable visitors was George Vose, who came to Iqaluit back in 1999.  George didn't fly his Cessna 172 up here from his home at Taurus Mesa near Alpine, Texas. Despite having logged tens of thousands of flying hours, he said he wasn't all that keen on the long flight over Hudson Strait in a single engine plane.  And he said he just wanted to have a look around, to see the landscape he remembered hearing about as a school boy in the United States.

Terry's 1999 visit to Iqaluit was our first introduction to the RANS-RV6. And Terry's was a beauty. He won an outstanding workmanship award at Oshkosh in 1998.

That's Terry on the right, with Pat Nagle after Terry took him for a quick flight around the Iqaluit area.  Terry's thing at the time was speed records. He set one between Ottawa and Iqaluit on his trip here.

We've seen Arnim Stief come through Iqaluit a couple of times. In the photo on the left, he's seen with Thomas Stalzer.  In 2004, they were in Iqaluit ferrying a Cessna Cardinal from the rebuild in the U.S. to Stalzer's aircraft rental company EC-FLY in Mallorca, Spain.  EC-FLY rents to private pilots, so look him up if you're heading that way.

Armin also stopped by again in 2006, ferrying this new Cirrus for a German fractional ownership company.  And we bumped into him again in 2009, when he was flying with a group from Germany to the airshow at Oshkosh.

Ras Nielsen has owned this beautiful Beech 18 since the 1960s. He stopped by Iqaluit on a refuelling stop on a trip from Seattle, Washington to the Stauning Air Rally in Denmark in May of 2007. This airplane really turned heads here in Iqaluit.

You can read the story of their adventure on his blog, which also has some great pictures of the trip. Click HERE and HERE, as well as on the picture at the left for more views of the Beech. (photos courtesy of John Graham).

Christian Science Monitor reporter Brad Knickerbocker wrote a series of articles in that paper in 2000, covering a trip around the world in a Cessna 182. The series was called Small Plane, Big Planet.   Unfortunately, their great website no longer seems to exist at CSMonitor.com.

Uwe Thomas Carstensen did a two part 'round the world trip in 2007. He arrived in Iqaluit in some rather bad weather on September 6, 2007. His website contains a trip report on the adventure, including photos of the Churchill, Manitoba to Iqaluit, Nunavut section.

Because of the length of the runway, the cold winters, and proximity to Europe, Iqaluit is a popular destination for cold weather testing of new aircraft.  In the last few years we've seen the Boeing 777, new helicopter designs from Eurocopter, and of course, the Airbus A380.  The largest passenger plane in the world, the A380 dwarfed just about everything when it underwent cold weather testing in the winters of 2006 and 2007. This photo from Airliners.net.

Something you don't see lined up at the fuel station everyday in Iqaluit - float planes. The nearest water here is Frobisher Bay. Salt water, high tides, and pretty rough if the wind is blowing.  As a result, float planes are few and far between.

But that didn't stop these intrepid amphibs from stopping by on a sunny Sunday in July 2008.  You'll see a Cessna 210 out front, a beautiful deHavilland Beaver, and a Bushhawk. We've even seen a Lake Amphibian once or twice.