WATCH ABOVE: His around-the-world journey in a small helicopter came to a crashing end in the Canadian Arctic. For two days Canada’s military searched for the Russian pilot. They found him just in time and he has quite the story to tell: surviving polar bears and the cold. Mike Drolet reports.
A Russian helicopter pilot says he had to fight off polar bears while spending nearly two days on an ice floe on the open water of Canada’s arctic.
Sergey Ananov was on a solo, around-the-world flight when his single-engine aircraft went down about halfway between Iqaluit and Greenland in the Davis Strait.
As his aircraft sank into the frigid waters, he zipped up his suit and escaped to a nearby ice floe.
“Then I swim to the nearest piece of ice that was like 50 metres away. Climb to the ice and then start my… survival,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
There he stayed for over 30 hours, wearing a soaked suit on a floating piece of ice nearly 15 metres in diameter.
“I thought that one day is maximum,” he said. “I thought I could not even survive the first night. But I survived the first night and I survived all the next day until the very late, in the evening.”
“I understood that time matters. It is the only factor that matters,” he added later.
But he wasn’t alone. The wind blew smaller pieces of ice until there “was a field of ice” and he watched polar bears swimming for food make their way towards him.
“I tried this technique instinctively on the first bear. I just hid under the life raft, I made the bear come as close as possible, like one or two metres, and I hear his roar,” he said. Then I jumped out of my… suit, and I attacked the bear. Literally, I attacked him. So I run on him and at this moment he turns back and runs from me.”
Ananov said that while trapped on the ice floe, he thought of Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway but “thought how lucky was he to find himself in a tropical situation.”
He says he even had an extra fuel tank that he nicknamed Wilson after the volleyball in the film.
Rear Admiral John Newton told The Canadian Press that the search and rescue co-ordination centre was notified Saturday afternoon after an on-board beacon indicated Ananov’s aircraft had descended to sea level and stopped moving.
Ananov was at first not very hopeful he’d survive. He gave himself a day and said his rescue was delayed due to fog blocking the view of rescue planes.
“I quite understood that it is possible for me to survive there, but I gave myself just one more day,” he said. “I need to remain alive until the fog disappears, and the weather conditions allow them to see me.”
That night the fog lifted and he used the last flare he had to try and contact a rescue team.
“That was my last hope. And they saw that.”
A watchkeeper with the coast guard vessel Pierre Radisson, which had set out from Frobisher Bay to find Ananov, spotted the flare and sent a rescue helicopter to look for him. By that time, Ananov had been trapped on the ice floe for roughly 32 hours.
The attempt was risky, even by military standards, according to Newton who said Hercules planes usually trail helicopters over the ocean in case they go down.
But Ananov, who spent 32 hours trapped on an ice floe, is willing to do it again. That is, if his wife and kids let him.
“My relatives, my wife, my children, were very nervous when I started that and I exactly proved their worst expectations,” he said. “Now I want them to forgive me for this hard time I gave to them during this day and also for permission to do it again.”
Ananov is a journalist by training and said he might write a book about his journey – but only if he finishes the trip.
– With files from Mike Drolet
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