Nolinor's 737-200s: the last gravel-runway jets

Canada's Arctic mines are hundreds of miles from the nearest road. Their workers fly in for two-week rotations, their food and spare parts fly in with them, and the runways at the mine sites are gravel, because paving in permafrost is impractical. A modern jet cannot land on gravel: its engines sit close to the ground and would swallow stones, and its nose wheel would throw debris into them. The 737-200's gravel kit solved that in the 1960s with a ski-like deflector behind the nose gear, blowers on the engine nacelles that break up the vortex that lifts stones from the runway, and protective covers on the belly antennas and lights. Boeing offered the kit until production ended in 1988, and no later 737 can be fitted with it.

That leaves the 737-200 as the only jet airliner that can carry 100 people or 15 tons of freight onto a gravel strip, and Nolinor has built a business on it. Its aircraft are configured as combis, with a cargo section forward and seats behind a movable bulkhead, so one flight can bring a shift change and a week's supplies.

Nolinor is a family-owned charter airline founded in 1992 that flew Convair 580 turboprops before buying its first 737-200s from Royal Air Maroc in 2007. It has kept adding airframes as other operators retired theirs, and it maintains them in a large hangar at Mirabel, the former Montréal international airport that is now mostly cargo and industry. The aircraft are built in 1974 to 1982 and have been re-engined with hush kits to meet noise rules, though they remain far louder than anything else on the ramp. Routes run from Mirabel and Québec City to Puvirnituq and the Raglan nickel mine in Nunavik, to Iqaluit and the Meadowbank, Meliadine and Mary River mines in Nunavut, to Labrador and, on charter, across North America; the airline also flies a 737-800 and 737-400s on routes where the runway is paved.

The original 737 shape: a short, stubby fuselage with slim JT8D engines slung tight under the wing in long nacelles, no winglets and the old eyebrow windows above the cockpit on some. Nolinor's are white with a blue-and-gray tail, and the gravel-kit aircraft have a visible deflector plate behind the nose wheel and a tube-like vortex dissipator projecting forward from under each engine inlet. On the tracker they broadcast C-GNLK, C-GNLN, C-GNRD, C-GNLW and others with the callsign NRL, flying north out of Mirabel to airports with codes like YPX, YFB and YUT.