Andrew Williams (b. 1941)

Andy Williams was born in Wales. He was an Outward Bound instructor and mountaineer who worked at research stations in Antarctica and northern Quebec.¹⁾ He was a former Royal Marine commando and pilot.²⁾ From 1967 to 1979, the High-Altitude Physiology (HAP) Study looked at altitude sickness and talented pilots like Andy Williams, Dick Ragle, and Phil Upton landed and took off throughout the icefields.³⁾

In 1972, Williams was hired as a pilot to run the high camp on Mount Logan.⁴⁾ He became the Kluane Lake Research Station manager in 1973. Within a year, in addition to running daily operations and overseeing field logistics, he was routinely landing at the HAPS camp on one of Mt. Logan's plateaus. There was little margin for error and Williams successfully completed nearly 200 flights, making eleven trips in 1980 to position the equipment needed to take the first ice core from Mt. Logan's Northwest Col. Williams could land the plane almost anywhere and created a family atmosphere in the camp. He earned co-authorship on some of the scholarly papers but was more comfortable on the landing strip.⁵⁾

In 1981, Williams bought his own plane to service the Institute and started Icefield Ranges Expeditions. He retired in 2011 at age seventy and turned the business, now called Icefield Ranges Expedition, over to his daughter and her husband, Sian and Lance Goodwin.⁶⁾

Andy Williams was inducted into the Order of Polaris in 2014. He was one of the world's premier glacier pilots for more than forty years. He mastered short take-offs and landings using a four-passenger Helio Courier airplane on uneven patches of ice and snow at elevations as high as 6,000 metres. He claimed that when he started, he didn't know enough to realize that landing at those altitudes was a silly thing to do.⁷⁾