Without a word, with the plane at 4,500 feet, pilot Bradley Amos tapped something on the instrument panel.

Seven passengers -- including twin 8-month-old girls -- were in the cabin. Soon came a loud popping sound. The plane's single propeller suddenly stopped turning and the smell of engine smoke filtered past the seats. The Cessna 207 glided without power above the tundra in Southwest Alaska.

That was the low point of the Wednesday night flight.

Here's the highlight: Within what felt like two minutes, the plane was on the ground. The babies were safe and sleeping.

Their father, Quila Dock Jr., said the forced landing on the hard snow and grass was so smooth it felt like touching down on an asphalt runway.

The 31-year-old pilot stayed calm the entire time, Dock said. "He wasn't shouting or panicking, which made us feel good."

Dock was flying with his family from Bethel to their hometown of Kipnuk, four miles from the Bering Sea coast. The plane made it about halfway, going down roughly 15 miles from Tuntutuliak, where a rescue team scrambled to haul the passengers and pilot to safety on snowmachines.

No one was hurt, troopers said.

Now the airline, Bethel-based Yute Air, and the National Transportation Safety Board are looking to find out what went wrong. A Yute Air team inspected the plane Thursday, said director of operations Ron Dudley.

It had plenty of fuel, but the engine had seized.

"Until we can get at that engine, we won't know exactly what happened to it," Dudley said.

THOUGHTS DRIFT TO FAMILY

Yute Air flies daily between Kipnuk and Bethel, where Dock and his family arrived early Wednesday for a medical checkup for their youngest twins -- Karissa and Terissa.

After an early-afternoon appointment, Dock and his wife, Lucy Andrew, boarded the flight home, along with three other Kipnuk residents. There was an 8-year-old boy. A woman Dock figured was in her 30s. A man in his 50s.

The Cessna lifted off for the roughly 85-mile trip. Everything seemed fine until Amos, the pilot, started checking something on one of the instruments, Dock said. "He was tapping that oil pressure gauge."

Dock, who was celebrating his 43rd birthday that day, held one of twins. His wife held the other. The girl had started fussing.

The pilot would later tell the NTSB the plane began losing oil pressure at 4,500 feet and he tried to change course for Tuntutuliak, Johnson said.

But before long, Dock heard a loud pop. His wife and another passenger screamed a little. Not too loud, he said. He smelled faint smoke.

Dock's thoughts turned to his two other daughters, also twins. Two-year-old Michaela and Magdalena were at home in Kipnuk with their aunt.

Amos didn't say anything. He was too busy looking for a place to land, Dock said.

"He was just letting the plane fly down and he wasn't turning very fast. He was just turning very slow for the plane to get to that good spot," Dock said.

Dock put his right arm on top of his daughter as the plane was about to touch down in the tundra, but the landing was surprisingly soft. "The wheels were rolling good like we landed on the runway," he said.

Amos told dispatchers to put a helicopter in the air right away, Dock said. But that's not who was coming to the rescue.

SNOWMACHINERS TO THE RESCUE

Gabriel Olick, who has lived in Tuntutuliak all his life, had been checking his blackfish trap about five miles away early Wednesday evening. He saw a different plane -- he now thinks it was helping with the search -- flying back and forth.

Olick suspected something was wrong. He radioed home and learned of the emergency landing. About 15 minutes later, five snowmachiners from the village arrived, and the group made its way to the downed Cessna.

It was maybe 10 below zero, Olick said. The trip took roughly an hour as rescuers navigated around open water in the growing dark.

"Some creeks are still pretty thin, so we had to go slow," he said.

When they spotted the plane, it was in the bed of a long, dried lake.

"Not even a scratch," he said.

The pilot and passengers had stayed inside to keep warm. The search-and-rescue team brought them sweet, hot tea in a thermos.

"There was two infants, and I was kind of worried because it's quite a ways and it was rough and cold," Olick said. "Good thing those guys brought blankets and extra clothes."

The twins rode with their parents in a homemade wooden sled, wrapped under blankets and a tarp. Other passengers climbed on the back of snowmachines, arriving in Tuntutuliak roughly three-and-a-half hours after the forced landing.

"I think we stopped three or four times, just to make sure those babies were OK," said Olick, who credits the rescue team with preventing hypothermia among the passengers.

The group warmed up at the village public safety building before flying back to Bethel on two waiting Yute Air planes, said Village Public Safety Officer Wassillie Gilila.

QUESTIONS PERSIST

Dock, who made it into Kipnuk on Thursday, still has questions. Like why didn't troopers send a rescue helicopter considering there were infants on the plane?

"I wonder what they would have done if one of their kids was with us?" he asked.

Trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said the nearest available helicopter was in Anchorage and would have arrived well after the village rescue team. Snowmachines were faster, she said.

The NTSB will investigate the cause of the emergency landing. Meantime, it's up to the airline to bring the plane back to Bethel. That could mean fixing it there on the tundra and flying out or hauling it away with a helicopter, Dudley said.

The incident is the company's first total engine failure in memory, he said.

"The public needs to know that these engines are really dependable, but like any mechanical device that's highly stressed, once in a while, something catastrophic happens," he said.

The pilot, he said, "did a magnificent job of putting down a stricken airplane."