I am thankful we survived this flight

Until I began traveling around Alaska in small airplanes I was afraid of flying. One event I experienced during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race changed that. A pilot everyone addressed as Crazy Horse flew me over what is called the Farewell Burn, an area of more than 300,000 acres that had been cleared by wildfire.

We spotted a dog team making way across the open snow and Crazy Horse asked if I wanted to make a picture. I said sure and he immediately put the Cessna 172 into a precipitous dive toward the musher. I snapped the picture, dropped the camera and grabbed the hand-hold overhead and held on for dear life. It was in that moment I realized I was clinging for safety to the very thing that was going to kill me and that if we were going to crash there was nothing I could do about it. Over the course of almost two weeks flying along with the race, Crazy Horse and I had several more adventures but from that day forward I had taken a fatalistic attitude toward flying and it never bothered me again. It didn't even bother me (much) during another serious flight along the Seward Peninsula a couple of years later.

At the time I was spending the winter in Nome and had flown to Shishmaref farther north on the coast of the Bering Sea to interview famed dog musher Herbie Nayokpuk. I spent a couple of days with him and his family working on a story about his preparations for the Iditarod. After that I boarded a Munz airplane for the trip back to Nome in clear, calm weather. On the way we landed for a quick exchange in Teller, about halfway. After Teller we flew out south over Port Clarence and then east along the Norton Sound coast. A short time out the weather changed.

We flew through what looked like a dark curtain into what amounted to a whiteout only dark. The pilot was new to the air service on a check ride with a senior Munz pilot and I could often hear the senior pilot talking to the man at the controls, guiding and advising passing on advice gained in years of flying along that coast. When we flew into that cloud, I heard an exchange between the two but only picked out the word "beach."

Our course changed but since there was no landscape to observe the only way you could tell was by the adjustment to the airplane's attitude and altitude. We dropped and headed north until just a vague outline and a few drift logs identified the Seward Peninsula shoreline. These were our guiding landmarks leading us home. As we flew along occasionally the airplane would rise a few feet or drift off to the south and the landmarks disappeared. At one point the senior pilot had to elbow the one at the controls to make him aware he was drifting away from land again.

Except for that driftwood on the ground all around was a blank shroud of gray. The pilots were in touch with someone on the ground and at one point after an obvious conversation with ground control, I heard the senior pilot say out loud, "I don't care what they say, I think it's safer to go on than to go back."

At that point I pulled my tightly packed sleeping bag off the deck and hugged it in front of me. I had been told at one time or other this would cushion me in a crash and perhaps save my life. We pushed on in the gray void following that beach and gradually making our way east for what seemed an eternity, the sense of it being without landmarks I had no idea how fast we were going or whether we were making any progress. Then a couple of buildings appeared followed by a row of utility poles and this I knew. They led the way to a runway at Nome's airport.

Wind buffeted the airplane at that point and I heard the pilots talking about the advisory from the ground that there was six inches of slushy snow on that runway. With the airplane taking gusts from the side and dropping in altitude even more they aimed at the end of the runway. During the descent the runway looked through the windshield like it was rolling from side to side. Finally, the senior pilot, I recall his name was Victor, took the controls. As if magically the airplane steadied as he brought it closer to the runway.

Then in an instant, he set the airplane down, not like from a gradual flight path into a decelerating roll down the runway, but like a helicopter, straight down, bang, ground, stop. I don't think we rolled ten feet. Sheepishly I pushed the sleeping bag off my lap and back onto the deck. As we left the airplane I happened to bump into Victor and we looked into each other's eyes for an instant. I said the word, "nice." That was all that passed between us, but we understood each other at that moment. Then we had to push the airplane through the slush to move it to safety off the runway.

More adventures with Crazy Horse can be found here