Bush pilots are to Alaska what Pony Express riders were to the Wild West. For nearly 100 years they have tamed America’s last frontier by combining the raw survival skills and courage of explorers with the savvy and gut instincts of saloon poker players. Each decision a bush pilot makes is a calculated risk in a wilderness filled with hazards. A misread river, engine failure or a sudden storm might result not only in the loss of an aircraft, but also in the loss of life.
Bush-pilot lore celebrates the humor, quick thinking, grace under pressure and flying skills that sum up what it means to be an Alaska bush pilot. Here are a few of the pilots and their stories.
Archie Ferguson
Rescued by a swearing parrot
The period from the 1920s to the 1940s was the Golden Age of Alaska bush pilots. Aviators like Noel Wien and Carl Ben Eielson made frequent headlines with their pioneering firsts. Their notoriety made the era’s most colorful bush pilot, Archie Ferguson, feel a bit cheated. If you didn’t know of his own exploits, he made sure to remedy that in a hurry.
The Saturday Evening Post once described Archie as “the craziest pilot in Alaska.” Many of his colleagues thought the label too kind, and for good reason.
For Archie, sin and service were the same, as long as the job got done. He acknowledged that he never attended flight school because he was always too busy flying. He lived his life as he typically landed his airplane-in a borderline-controlled crash. Archie crashed better than anyone alive-about 24 planes in his flying career, 12 of those in one year. Like a charmed cat, he walked away from every one.
Perhaps his most memorable crash-landing is the one known as “The Rescue of the Swearing Parrot.” The dean of Alaska bush pilots, Bud Helmericks, was a friend of Archie’s and likes to tell the story. [pagebreak]
Archie would never admit it, but there were two heroes to the story-Archie of course, and a parrot he had purchased from a group of sailors, who had reportedly taught the bird every cuss word known to man. The bird and Archie flew together often, and the two conversed in the same colorful language.
On one trip from Fairbanks to Kotzebue, Archie and the bird were flying in pilot Maurice King’s plane. King had his hands full with some of the roughest turbulence either pilot had ever encountered. The plane dropped and rolled violently. The parrot went berserk, screaming and screeching. Archie tried to control it, to help King focus on the flying, but to no avail. They eventually made it, but the parrot hated Archie thereafter, always biting and cursing him. A short time later, Archie’s dog somehow caught and ate the bird.
What probably irritated Archie beyond measure was that even after it was long dead, the ill-tempered, foul-beaked parrot actually saved his life.
Years later, Archie was flying freight and two passengers from Fairbanks to Kotzebue, along the same route he had flown with King. It was midwinter, and he was at the controls of a plane that was icing up heavily and suddenly stopped flying. The plane dropped below tree line, bounced over the frozen tundra, hit a tree and ripped off a wing. The impact tore the engine from its mounts and flung it into a snowbank. Engine oil splattered across the cockpit and onto Archie, who was unconscious with a broken arm.
[pagebreak] His two passengers were unharmed. They thought Archie was dead until he woke and surveyed the situation. It was 20 below zero, and they were more than 200 miles from Fairbanks with one sleeping bag and no food.
Archie’s first concern was for his passengers. He placed his arm in a sling and started to chop trees to build a snow shelter. He also attempted to repair the radio. After two days, with no rescue in sight, his passengers were depressed and hungry. Archie announced tt he was going hunting. He soon returned, saying he had found a bear den and needed their help to kill the hibernating bears.
Archie chopped off a thick branch to use as a club to bludgeon the bears and gave an ax to the others to finish them off. He cleared away brush from the bear den and crawled inside, his companions timidly following. Lacking enough room to swing his club, he suddenly began to punch the bears.
“There’s two of them,” he yelled. “Oh, bejeezuz, here they come!”
The passengers lost their composure and half ran, half stumbled back to the safety of the plane. Archie hobbled back and chided them to return to the den so they could have some bear stew that night. They refused, never knowing for certain whether there were actually any bears in the den.
Archie finally rewired the circuits of the broken radio. He slowly warmed the frozen battery to coax just enough power to transmit a simple yet revealing sentence: “Tell King I’m down where we had trouble with the parrot.”
The battery gave out, but not until after his dispatcher received the cryptic message and passed it along to King. King, who had been searching for Archie since the plane ditched, never forgot the area, the parrot or the turbulence, and immediately flew to the wreckage to rescue his friend.
Another one of Ferguson’s crashes that is worth recounting is the time he managed to shoot down his own plane. It was during his first aerial wolf hunt. Because of his bad aim he blasted the tip off his plane’s wooden propeller and crashed. He chopped off a similar length of propeller from the other side and managed to get the plane airborne again. [pagebreak] Larry Suiter
a life-and-death struggle for control of his plane
Larry Suiter has flown in the world’s worst weather on the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island. Yet his most terrifying moment as a pilot didn’t have anything to do with the weather, the terrain or a mechanical failure. It was because of a passenger.
He had just landed on Nonvianuk Lake and loaded two anglers and a guide into his Cessna 206. The angler who was riding copilot weighed about 350 pounds, while the two men in back were an easy 220 each. The temperature was in the upper 80s, the lake was flat calm and the plane was loaded with fuel.
“It’s going to take me a while to get airborne,” Larry told his party. “We have plenty of lake. I’ll get us on step, lift up one float and pop the other, and we should be airborne.” The 206 has a yoke on the passenger side. Larry warned Carl, the angler seated there, that it would be coming back toward him on takeoff.
All was going as planned. When Larry pulled back on the stick, the copilot yoke dug slightly into Carl’s midsection. Not wanting it to come back any farther, Carl grabbed it and held it in place. Larry couldn’t level the aircraft and was losing control.
“Let go of the yoke!” he yelled. “Dammit, let go!”
Carl didn’t respond. Larry threw a hard punch into Carl’s left shoulder, and he finally released his grip.
The plane, now in a slanted, nose-up attitude, was in trouble. The stall buzzer screeched.
“I was in crash mode,” Larry recalled. “All I could do was drop the nose and feather it a bit.”
The plane slammed flat on its floats, and water geysered up past the wings.
“Why did you grab the yoke?”
Larry asked.
“Why did you hit me?” asked Carl, rubbing his shoulder.
Larry shut down and checked the aircraft to make sure no bolts were sheared from the impact.
Neither Larry nor Carl said a word to each other until Larry taxied to the end of the lake and they were once again ready for takeoff.
Before throttling up Larry turned to Carl and said with all seriousness, “You so much as move your hands, and I’ll punch your lights out.”
“I’ll do better than that,” Carl said. He buried his hands under his seat belt, locking them in place. [pagebreak] Gayle Ranney
when Santa flew into a Christmas typhoon
Gayle Ranney’s U.S. Postal mail contract for 2000 required her to deliver Christmas boxes and cards to the remote villages along the Prince William Sound coastline. For adults and kids alike, the 60-year-old veteran bush pilot was Santa Claus. Because of the extremely short Alaska days, she had less than five hours to make all her stops and return to Cordova.
Shortly after the 10 a.m. sunrise, her Cessna 185 was fully loaded and she was heading across the open water of eastern Prince William Sound. The small islands looked beautiful even in the cold gray fog, but Gayle knew that looks can be deceiving. Foul Pass, Lone Passage, Dangerous Passage and Mummy Bay were the landmarks below her. They had earned their names thanks to a dangerous mix of tide, wind and weather.
Gayle saw the gray line of a snow squall headed her way. Wet snow sticks to aircraft wings and makes flying impossible. She radioed dispatch that she was going to wait out the squall, then landed and taxied into a semi-protected cove on Green Island. She knew most snow squalls blow through in a couple of hours.
The clouds thickened and visibility worsened. By twilight, the squall had turned into a full-fledged storm. She would have to spend the long winter night in the plane.
Maintaining an airplane for a night on Green Island would be a grueling task for a pilot half Gayle’s age. Every couple of hours in the dark, she pulled and pushed the fully loaded plane any way she could to reposition it in the constantly changing tide and wind. She had numerous hazards to contend with. Mud suction could keep the plane from floating on an incoming tide, sinking it. Wave action could lift and drop the plane onto shoreline rocks, puncturing the floats and sinking the aircraft. Gusts could drift her plane into the trees and crush a wing.
The aircraft’s half-submerged floats were showing the weight of accumulated snow. In the dark, during the howling storm, Gayle climbed up and out onto the slippery aluminum wings. The wet, driving snow soaked her skin. One misstep and she could slide headfirst into the ocean, be knocked unconscious and drown. Throughout the long winter night, despite the bone-numbing cold, she methodically cleaned off the wings and fuselage with one sweep of her arm at a time.
The 50-mph winds created a chill factor that hovered around 5 degrees. She had no heat in the plane, no food, no hot drinks and no dry change of clothes. The next morning she was unable to establish radio contact with any other aircraft or dispatch. But the weather had improved and the gusts had died down a bit, so she decided to chance a return to Cordova. BR> “I’ll do better than that,” Carl said. He buried his hands under his seat belt, locking them in place. [pagebreak] Gayle Ranney
when Santa flew into a Christmas typhoon
Gayle Ranney’s U.S. Postal mail contract for 2000 required her to deliver Christmas boxes and cards to the remote villages along the Prince William Sound coastline. For adults and kids alike, the 60-year-old veteran bush pilot was Santa Claus. Because of the extremely short Alaska days, she had less than five hours to make all her stops and return to Cordova.
Shortly after the 10 a.m. sunrise, her Cessna 185 was fully loaded and she was heading across the open water of eastern Prince William Sound. The small islands looked beautiful even in the cold gray fog, but Gayle knew that looks can be deceiving. Foul Pass, Lone Passage, Dangerous Passage and Mummy Bay were the landmarks below her. They had earned their names thanks to a dangerous mix of tide, wind and weather.
Gayle saw the gray line of a snow squall headed her way. Wet snow sticks to aircraft wings and makes flying impossible. She radioed dispatch that she was going to wait out the squall, then landed and taxied into a semi-protected cove on Green Island. She knew most snow squalls blow through in a couple of hours.
The clouds thickened and visibility worsened. By twilight, the squall had turned into a full-fledged storm. She would have to spend the long winter night in the plane.
Maintaining an airplane for a night on Green Island would be a grueling task for a pilot half Gayle’s age. Every couple of hours in the dark, she pulled and pushed the fully loaded plane any way she could to reposition it in the constantly changing tide and wind. She had numerous hazards to contend with. Mud suction could keep the plane from floating on an incoming tide, sinking it. Wave action could lift and drop the plane onto shoreline rocks, puncturing the floats and sinking the aircraft. Gusts could drift her plane into the trees and crush a wing.
The aircraft’s half-submerged floats were showing the weight of accumulated snow. In the dark, during the howling storm, Gayle climbed up and out onto the slippery aluminum wings. The wet, driving snow soaked her skin. One misstep and she could slide headfirst into the ocean, be knocked unconscious and drown. Throughout the long winter night, despite the bone-numbing cold, she methodically cleaned off the wings and fuselage with one sweep of her arm at a time.
The 50-mph winds created a chill factor that hovered around 5 degrees. She had no heat in the plane, no food, no hot drinks and no dry change of clothes. The next morning she was unable to establish radio contact with any other aircraft or dispatch. But the weather had improved and the gusts had died down a bit, so she decided to chance a return to Cordova.