GCI president reflects on tragic day

"There weren't many people in the Nushagak (River). The weather was crap in terms of being rainy and cold and not sunshine-fishing weather, but everybody was limiting out on silvers," said GCI president Ron Duncan, a longtime Stevens friend who joined the regular getaway on the Agulowak River north of Dillingham.

Stevens had arrived Saturday with his guests. A time of good food and old friends and poker games, Duncan said.

The telecommunications chief executive talked to reporters Friday in a series of short interviews, his first since Monday's plane crash that killed Stevens and four others, including a senior GCI executive and her teenage daughter. Duncan offered a new vantage point on the shocking accident.

"All of these people being involved make it very, very difficult for us here at the company. For my family personally and for the extended family," Duncan said.

Stevens was a regular visitor to the GCI lodge over the past 20 years, Duncan said, sometimes bringing Senate colleagues or policy makers to go fishing.

"In the early years before the federal, the executive branch rules got too restrictive, we had FCC chairmen and other critical telecommunication policy makers out there." He said the trips exposed decision-makers to Alaska issues firsthand.

The company has since brought family members of those involved in the crash to Anchorage, Duncan said. The outcome of the trip was horrible, he said, "But it's part of the life we choose to lead out here."

Here's how Duncan, a pilot who aided in the rescue, described the day of the crash:

On Monday morning pilot Theron "Terry" Smith encountered turbulence flying between Dillingham and the lodge. An early silver salmon fishing trip would have to wait.

The pilot said, "Everybody would be sick by the time we got to the river," Duncan said. "We didn't like that idea, so we spent the morning around the lodge."

"Senator (Stevens) worked in his BlackBerry, camped on the Wi-Fi. Other people sat in front of the fire and people kind of relaxed," Duncan said.

After a late lunch that ended after 2 p.m. or so, Smith announced weather conditions were good enough for a run to the river fish camp, Duncan said.

Eight people, along with the pilot, got in the de Havilland Otter to make the trip to the Nushagak, which can take 25 to 45 minutes, depending on the weather, Duncan said.

The chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday that the manager at the lodge told crash investigators that an e-mail was sent to the fish camp saying the plane was on the way.

Shortly after the Otter carrying Stevens and the others left, Duncan and his physician wife, Dani Bowman, went for a plane trip of their own.

The weather was windy and turbulent as the couple flew a roughly 60 mile radius -- almost certainly but unknowingly coming within a couple miles of the site where the Otter had already crashed, Duncan said.

"The conditions were changing exceeding rapidly," he said. "Weather was changing in and out. ... But it was a flyable day, there's no question about that. It was probably one of the best, most flyable days that we'd had out there."

The couple landed back at the lodge between maybe 4:30 and 5 p.m., he said.

Sometime after 6 p.m., Duncan said he was told the airplane had never reached the river. "We learned that when we called to ask what time they'd be coming home for dinner."

Asked why it took so long for anyone to realize the plane was missing, Duncan said the fish guide service at the camp was expected to call if the group didn't arrive.

"The normal procedure would be ... if they hadn't shown up, the fish camp would call and say, 'Hey, were are they?' "

After a series of fruitless phone calls trying to locate the plane, an informal search began.

"My wife grabbed her medical gear, threw it in the airplane and we went out join the search," Duncan said.

Another pilot radioed that he'd spotted the plane, and Duncan flew his plane to the site.

"We saw a wave from the wreckage. My wife said, 'I've got to be down there.' "

The couple flew to Aleknagik, and Bowman was transported to the crash site by a helicopter pilot who had already taken a GCI employee to the scene, Duncan said. Bowman would spend the night there with the survivors along with a pair of paramedics.

Duncan flew back over the crash site, but weather quickly turned -- the clouds dropping and driving him from the area, he said.

A Pave Hawk helicopter arrived by midnight, but no one was able to land until early the next morning.

Back in Dillingham, Duncan the next morning could hear Bowman, his wife, over the radio giving directions from the ground to a rescue helicopter trying to reach the scene. "(She was) saying 2 o'clock, 500 yards. 1 o'clock 500 yards," he said.

"We stayed in Dillingham until the last of the bodies had been recovered," Duncan said.