Morrie Jewell is Forest Patrol Ltd.’s longest serving pilot, having joined the team in 1988.

A line pilot with Forest Patrol, J.D. Irving, Limited’s aerial firefighting unit, Morrie has been with the unit for 36 years. He's been a pilot for 47 years.

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” he said, reflecting on his long career. Now, some of the younger pilots on the team come to him for advice, he added, noting, “It’s kind of two generations now.”

During wildfire season between the end of April and the start of October, Forest Patrol’s team of pilots are at the ready to supress forest fires when they occur, operating out of the main airbase in Juniper, NB. The highly trained crew can launch in as few as 15 minutes, and with new aircraft purchased in 2023, the team can now be on site of a forest fire anywhere in New Brunswick within 60 minutes.

Morrie hadn’t always wanted to be a pilot.

“I’m not really an aviation guy. It’s just what I happened to do,” he said. While airlines and bush flying never appealed to him, Morrie said he was drawn to the elements of aviation found in jobs like Forest Patrol. He used to see the planes over Prince Edward Island when he was younger.

“I thought I might like to do that. It might be fun,” he said, adding he likes the career for the flexibility it affords him in the off season.

Over the last four decades, there have been changes to the job, Morrie said, technology being one of them, with parts of the work becoming less labour intensive. The schedule has also changed, Morrie noted. In the early days, pilots could go home only when forest conditions were wet enough, and the fire hazard was low. Now they have scheduled days off.

But some things remain unchanged, he added.

“The flying is pretty much the same.”