Keeper of the Tides
Izzy Ryan has made close to 1,000 trips to the Horizontal Falls and still gets goosebumps on the way out. This is the story of a pilot who chose the Kimberley over every other place he could have landed.
WORDS Catherine Best
Izaak ‘Izzy’ Ryan didn’t plan on staying in the Kimberley for good. A twenty-something New Zealander with a pilot’s licence in his pocket since before he could legally drive, Izzy had spent two years buzzing over the Whitsunday islands and was looking for his next adventure. He found it in Talbot Bay, landing floatplanes in the eye of the second-largest tides on the planet. “I had never seen colours like what we get over here in the Kimberley; the pindan oranges, the beautiful greens contrasting against all the turquoise blues of the water. It was incredible,” Izzy says. “I hadn’t seen anything like that before, and it was very different to anywhere else I’ve flown in the world.” Broome is a transient place. Full of backpackers and holidaymakers riding the dry-season good times. But for Izzy, something stuck, like the red dirt that clings to your boots. A season turned into five years. Soon Izzy was the head pilot at Horizontal Falls Seaplane Adventures (HFSA), leading a team of 17 pilots and six aircraft, and showing trainees, who had their wings but not yet their ‘floats’, the ropes. Flying to the Horizontal Falls (Garaangaddim) where HFSA operates a range of half-day, full-day and overnight experiences, is unlike flying anywhere else in the world. Firstly, there’s no tarmac – the runway is water. Secondly, that water is part of a colossal tidal system that rises and falls up to 12 metres twice a day. That’s islands and two-billion-year-old cliffs being sucked beneath the waterline and exhumed on repeat. Add to that cycle the force of that tidal movement, the constant gravitational push and pull of an unfathomable volume of water, and Mother Nature sure knows how to make Kimberley pilots earn their stripes.
“The tidal effect is like a constant treadmill moving underneath you in all different directions,” Izzy explains. “Up here is basically like nowhere else in the world. And then when you go and throw a seaplane on the water and the tides it takes quite a large amount of skill and experience to really nail your docking to get in and off the pontoon.” “As water is forever moving, we do not have brakes. When docking the aircraft at our pontoon, the tides can be moving at up to 20km/h, which makes the docking challenging… imagine trying to parallel park your car on a moving treadmill!” Long before the first plane takes flight at 6am, Izzy and his team are already hard at work. Checking tides and weather forecasts in the dry, conditions are predictably moderate with clear skies and very light easterlies and getting a handle on which direction the ‘treadmill’ will be moving when the seaplane hits the water. It’s a constant monitoring process that begins in the days before take-off and continues throughout each flight rotation, because the Kimberley is a fickle beast – reshaping the ‘runway’ on each take-off and landing, with an intensity dictated by the moon. “We live and breathe tides,” Izzy says. “During our preflight planning, our pilots are trained to assess the weather along the route and at our destination, as well as the tides for take-off and landing. As we have the largest tides in Australia, we must assess and build our situational awareness. We use a mixture of marine forecasts as well as aviation meteorological sites to paint the picture.” Guests fronting up at the airstrip are blissfully unaware of the precise planning and logistics that go on behind the scenes. For them, this flight is a bucket-list experience, something they have dreamed about for years. When the time comes to finally clip on a life jacket and board the 12-passenger Cessna, guests are typically feeling… excited.
"We make sure our pilots are experienced, passionate and personable with all of our guests to make them feel comfortable in the aircraft,” Izzy says. “Once they actually get up in the air and they get out towards the falls, quite honestly, you get everything. I’ve had people crying with joy, they’re so excited to be there.
It’s repetitive but addictive ‘work’. Izzy is also smitten with the Kimberley lifestyle. Living in small-town Broome, everything is “five minutes away”, and he can be at the gym, chilling at the beach or catching up with friends when the day’s work is done, which is by early afternoon when working the dawn shift. “I’m a really keen fisherman and freediver. I do a lot of boat activities outside my flying boats, and for us here with our operations, we often get the neap (low range) tides off. So, we get a few days over neaps, when there’s no tidal flow, and that means it’s really good weather for fishing and boating and diving, which kind of works perfectly for me because then on my days off, I’ve got the best conditions there are to go diving and fishing and do all the things I love doing.” The off-season (November to March) brings extended opportunity for rest. And catching up on lots of paperwork. But when the temperature stabilises and muggy, tempestuous days give way to clear, temperate skies, Izzy is itching to get back in the cockpit and return to the falls. “Going back, it’s like a romance story, you know, you’re catching up with an old mate again.”Bay and elsewhere in the Kimberley – and the flight is still the stuff of goosebumps. “I think the coolest part is when we’ve got those morning flights, and you’re flying right out to the falls first thing at 6am. You get airborne, and you just start to see the sun rise over the horizon as you’re climbing up into it, and it’s dead calm, it’s super smooth up there.”
Wicked offices. Izzy has had a few. After gaining his pilot’s licence in his hometown of Wellington at age 16, the young aviator went to commercial flight school at Motueka near the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. Soon, Izzy was an instructor, teaching students how to fly before he was even out of his teens. “A lot of my students were older than me, which was really strange,” he laughs.
It wasn’t until he moved to Canada that Izzy learnt how to fly floatplanes, based at a fly-in fishing lodge in northern Ontario. “It was pretty exciting, just flying a little bug smasher around in the wild Canadian bush.”
Moving to Australia, Izzy settled in Airlie Beach, flying seaplanes over Queensland’s Whitsundays to the likes of Whitehaven Beach, Hayman Island and even the outer Great Barrier Reef. He was living the high life. Quite literally. But soon the Kimberley called.
“It [my decision] was either coming over here and doing the seaplanes with Hori Falls, or it was going towards the [big commercial] airlines,” Izzy says. “I definitely always saw myself trying to move over this way. I really love the idea of smaller towns, and getting to fly up here in the Kimberley was definitely a big bucket-list item for me.” Today, Izzy manages the largest fleet of seaplane pilots in Australia and is training the next generation of pilots. “In the last few years we’ve started our trainee program; we’ve been bringing more seaplane pilots into the industry, myself and Adam [Holt], Aviation CEO, and that’s been huge because it’s been really hard to find seaplane pilots out there who have got experience at the moment, because the airlines are coming through and swooping everyone up really young. “So, we started a traineeship program which brings pilots in, we provide them with a float rating and teach them how to fly floatplanes. From there, we start to move them over to the falls and show them how we fly to the Horizontal Falls, and the machines we fly here, which has been really cool. “We’ve brought in six new pilots over the last two years, which is, gosh, it’s just about a quarter of the entire industry of [Australian floatplane] pilots.”
The pilots’ training is not purely in aviation. It’s also about connecting with people and place. From the moment guests step onto the tarmac, the pilots are not there just to fly the plane; they’re tourism professionals giving guests the time of their lives. Sharing stories about the unique geography of the Kimberley, Traditional Owners, early pastoralists and the local economy. And, of course, those awe-inspiring tides – the second largest in the world, surpassed only by Nova Scotia in Canada. It’s repetitive but addictive ‘work’. Izzy is also smitten with the Kimberley lifestyle. Living in small-town Broome, everything is “five minutes away”, and he can be at the gym, chilling at the beach or catching up with friends when the day’s work is done, which is by early afternoon when working the dawn shift. “I’m a really keen fisherman and freediver. I do a lot of boat activities outside my flying boats, and for us here with our operations, we often get the neap (low range) tides off. So, we get a few days over neaps, when there’s no tidal flow, and that means it’s really good weather for fishing and boating and diving, which kind of works perfectly for me because then on my days off, I’ve got the best conditions there are to go diving and fishing and do all the things I love doing.” The off-season (November to March) brings extended opportunity for rest. And catching up on lots of paperwork. But when the temperature stabilises and muggy, tempestuous days give way to clear, temperate skies, Izzy is itching to get back in the cockpit and return to the falls. “Going back, it’s like a romance story, you know, you’re catching up with an old mate again.”
THE DETAILS
The Horizontal Falls is one of Australia’s most extraordinary natural phenomena — and the only way to experience it properly is from the air and on the water. Horizontal Falls Seaplane Adventures operates half-day and full-day tours from Broome, Derby & Cygnet Bay with overnight options available for those who want to stay a little longer.