About once a month during filming, the cast and crew of the B.C.-based action-adventure series Arctic Air headed north to Yellowknife for several days of exterior filming.

The location work — in a production schedule that ran from July to December — was both a reality check and a bonding experience for the cast and crew, says actor Pascale Hutton.

“Our show is so tight as a group,” says Hutton, back for a second season playing northern pilot Krista Ivarson. “We’re like a roadshow — we’re travelling together, we’re staying at the same hotel, and in our off hours we’re all eating in the same lounge. It’s created a very cohesive unit.”

The CBC series also stars Kevin McNulty as Krista’s father, airline patriarch Mel Ivarson, and Adam Beach as Bobby Martin, their business partner and Krista’s on-again, off-again love interest.

Interiors are filmed in Lower Mainland soundstages that also house the airplane cockpits for flying scenes that are later digitally enhanced with arctic vistas out the windows.

This year’s schedule started with a full 10 days filming up north, for a forest-fire adventure story that opens the new season Wednesday.

“We had so many mosquitoes, horseflies and other insects that I have never even seen before, they’re literally swarming around your face,” says Hutton, who shared scenes with a helicopter hovering nearby.

“The blades turning on the helicopter actually kept the bugs away.”

The first episode involves a forest fire that imperils some of the show’s fictional pilots, and Hutton says the real flames tended by the special effects crew helped the performances as well.

“The environment and the terrain and the elements up north play so heavily into the storylines, it informs so much of who these characters are. We really cannot fake that, we have to film in Yellowknife for that reason. You wouldn’t be playing the bugs, you wouldn’t even think about that.”

Another thing she and her castmates didn’t have to think about as the second season began filming was the requirement that they look like they know what they’re doing when they’re pretending to fly in that studio cockpit.

“They put us through this crash course (before the first season) but we were still learning as we went on,” says Hutton. “I’m more comfortable pretend-flying now, so that was a big thing.”

Hutton came to the role after a busy career that included a Gemini award for her recurring role as a call girl turned police informant on the Vancouver-set TV drama TV’s Intelligence.

She had only met Arctic Air co-star Beach just before filming began on their first season, and they were playing characters who had known each other since childhood. They’ve since become friends, she says, which helps them on-screen.

The arctic setting has helped keep the show from devolving into a workplace soap opera of shifting romantic partners. First-season plots involving mining and aboriginal issues continue into the second season.

“There’s a sense of fun through all of it, which is good because that’s what real life is,” Hutton says. “It’s a juggling act for sure for the writers, but when the mix is right it really captures what a work-family airline dynamic would actually be like.”

By filming’s end, Hutton and her castmates were experiencing another side of arctic life on their trips up north.

“It’s definitely still etched into my bones. We were filming in minus-30, minus-35, right into your bones — there was no warming up.”

Film crews set up heated tents at exterior locations to keep themselves warm between set-ups. Up north, warm is a relative term, Hutton says.

“You would walk into the tent right after having been out filming, and you’d think it was so much warmer. Then you’d go over to your water bottle and it would be ice.”

On the plus side, they probably saved a few hours of getting made up to look cold.

“Everyone in the cast and crew had icicles hanging from their eyelashes,” she says. “No make-up required.”