A group of four friends are turning heads on Last Mountain Lake as they have converted an aircraft fuselage into an ice fishing shack.
Lee Saretsky was scrolling through Facebook Marketplace one day when he came across the airplane body. He and his friends contemplated whether to buy it or not.
“We sat on it for a couple of months, and then we pulled the trigger. We thought we needed to do this,” said Saretsky.
From there, the work began. They bolted the fuselage to a trailer and added skis to the trailer’s wheels for when it is out on the lake.
“It was already all gutted pretty much when we got it. There were no seats or anything, so we just cleaned out all the insulation and stuff, added some seats, a couple of heaters, and captain chairs and pulled it onto the lake,” Saretsky explained.
They also added four holes to the floor for ice fishing.
There is still some additional work that needs to be done to the airplane ice shack that the friends hope to do in the future.
“We might do something nice with the interior one day, we’ll see if we want to spend the time scraping all the spray foam and on and on. As of now, it’s a usable shack. We’re trying to fix the door up a little bit and that’s what all we’ve got for right now, I guess,” Saretsky said.
The fuselage is from a British Aerospace Jetstream 31. The markings on the plane are from Air Mikisew, which was a regional airline that operated out of Fort McMurray, Alta., from the 1960s until it was grounded in 2010 and went out of business in 2011.