Flying the Seward Peninsula

Round and round and round she goes! Where she'd stop, we didn't know. I was the co-pilot on this flight where we crashed on take-off from Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island. I had eight of my eighth graders with me. Long story, and there was luggage flying all over as we spun down the runway. The kids were crying, but none of us were hurt. Vic Olsen, our pilot, thanked me for not grabbing for the wheel. "What would I have done with it?" He said he'd had to cold cock people for that in the past. I was too busy digging my toes into the floor to think about grabbing the wheel. (No, I am not a nervous flyer. I've flown and crashed with some of the best of them.)

My friend Kitty Delorey Fleischman posted this and the picture on facebook today.

My comment was, "I've never had an uneventful flight on the Seward Peninsula, which is the general area she's writing about.

So, I thought I would relate the story of a flight I took there. It was during the 1981 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. I had paid to join a flight along the whole race with a TV reporter and cameraman. This was in another small airplane, a Cessna 206 as I recall. With the racers heading toward the finish we had landed at Elim on the south coast of the peninsula for an hour or so before heading west toward Nome. As we progressed, the weather began to deteriorate until we flew into not quite a white-out, but a pretty thick gray-out. Darrell, the pilot, had never flown along the peninsula before so he handed a chart to the reporter who was sitting in the co-pilot seat. We had to pass three major geographic promontories along the way named Topkok, Bluff and Cape Nome. We passed over the village of Solomon and the reporter identified it. I added the quip, well it's Solomon or Savoonga, which as Kitty noted is on an island quite a way to the west in the Bering Sea.

Summers in those days I earned my living as a boat captain so I had a fair knowledge of navigation and I was the only one in the airplane who had ever flown along this coast before, so I kept a close watch and listen to what was going on in the pilot seats. I am not going to name him because this reporter went on to do several nationwide reports on a major network and there's no sense embarrassing him. He got one land mark ahead of himself. I thought he had named the first one too soon but held my tongue as we proceeded into the gray. But as we passed the second one, he told the pilot that was Cape Nome. An airplane flying to Nome on a westward course rounds the cape and then turns northwest toward the town.

Darrell started to make that turn and I couldn't stand it any more. I tapped him on the shoulder and when he pulled his headphone back I said as calmly as I could, "Darrell, we have not passed Cape Nome yet." He reacted the way you hear pilots react to an order from an airport controller. He immediately banked to the left and flew farther out over the water. The minute he righted the airplane again Cape Nome came into view. We had been within a mile or two of the huge rocky bluff and heading straight for it.

Once past the cape we turned toward Nome and landed without further event. As we descended from the airplane Darrell and I stared at each other for the briefest instant and said it all with our eyes and raised brows without a word. We both knew we came damned close and nothing more had to be said.

Another one: I am thankful we survived this flight