Bush Pilot previously reported that a plane crashed Sunday on Alaska's Kayak Island -- 49 miles southeast of the community of Cordova -- and the two occupants had to be rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. The downed plane, known to many as "Cuzoom," had a weekend filled with ups and downs. On Friday, the plane sheared off its left landing gear as it touched down in Valdez, then won the prestigious Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) competition the next day at the popular Valdez Fly-In, before crashing again on the grizzly-populated island Sunday.
Cuzoom, a Piper PA-18 Super Cub with so many modifications -- including a 238-horsepower engine supplemented by a canister of nitrous oxide and an 80-inch propeller -- that it is classified "experimental," won the alternate bush class -- the most competitive division -- of the competition with a takeoff distance of 43 feet and a landing distance of 35 feet, for a combined total of only 78 feet. That beat the next closest competitor, Randy Goza of Wasilla, by a combined total of five feet. The STOL competition is one of the premier events of the annual Fly-In.
The event ended on Sunday, and Cuzoom, owned by Mike Olson of Yakima, Wash., and piloted by Ed Doyle of Manhattan, Kan., took off back for the Lower 48, with Doyle's friend Dan Wild in the passenger seat. Olson, the owner, was flying home on a commercial airline.
Following the crash, the Coast Guard said the plane had suffered a hard landing after running out of gas, although that initial report may not have been accurate.
Bush Pilot contributor Rob Stapleton, who attended the weekend Fly-In, reported that Valdez had run out of aviation gas on Sunday, potentially due to mechanical problems with a truck bringing more fuel that Stapleton encountered while leaving Valdez on the Richardson Highway.
Era Helicopters in Valdez was the fueling station for this year's event, and Jan Gundersen, a helicopter pilot with Era, confirmed that there had been a brief shortage of fuel, but estimated that the time between when the fuel ran out and a truck arrived with more avgas to offload was around 15 to 30 minutes. He said that there was a line of planes at the pump when the fuel arrived, and they had to push some of the planes out of the way in order to allow the truck through.
Gundersen also said that it's always difficult to predict the amount of fuel needed to accommodate the many planes flying into Valdez on the weekend of the event, and that there are more every year.
"It's hard to tell just how much fuel we're gonna need," Gundersen said. "You can't just get fuel at the snap of a finger" in Valdez.
Gundersen also said that it was his understanding that the plane hadn't gone down because of a lack of fuel. "To the best of my knowledge," he said, "that airplane that went down on Kayak (Island), that wasn't fuel related."
Gundersen's assessment was partially confirmed by Cuzoom's pilot, Ed Doyle of Manhattan, Kansas. Doyle was flying the plane when it came down on Kayak Island, and said that although his first instinct was that the aircraft had run out of gas, it was probably due to another problem known as carb icing -- or carburetor icing -- caused by a mixture of water vapor and cold temperatures in the engine's carburetor. The problem is common in light aircraft such as Cuzoom. Aircraft are typically equipped with carburetor heating systems, manually controlled by the pilot, to prevent icing problems.
Cuzoom had made a hard landing two days before, in Valdez, likely due to the same problem, according to Doyle. In that instance, the plane was circling around before landing when the engine suddenly stopped.
"The engine absolutely quit," said Doyle, who was not piloting the plane in that incident. The pilot "couldn't quite make the runway, and got crossways in the gravel," shearing off the left landing gear, as Doyle recalls. They got the plane fixed that evening, and the next day, won the competition with Cuzoom under Doyle's control.
"We definitely had a better day Saturday than Sunday," he said.
Cuzoom had to wait in line for an hour and a half on Sunday before getting fuel and leaving Valdez around noon, Doyle said. He and Wild, who had made the same trip the year before, wanted to swing by Kayak Island on the way south to snap some photos of the lighthouse that sits on the island and maybe see some of the brown bears that populate the uninhabited piece of land.
After flying along the length of the island, the two spotted a stretch of beach that could make a good landing area, passing over it to survey for obstacles that the large tundra tires the plane was equipped with couldn't handle. That was when Doyle decided to make one more circle to check the runway.
"I was about two-thirds of the way through my turn," Doyle said, "when you could just hear a little 'miff' and it totally died." Doyle's first instinct was to reach for the fuel-tank selector, which allows the Cub to switch to the other of its two fuel tanks. Doyle said that they'd been the air for less than two hours, and a single tank had always previously been enough fuel for more than two hours of flying.
"A normal engine, you'd have plenty of time to reach down while the prop is still spinning," and switch between tanks, Doyle said. But because of the modifications to Cuzoom's engine and the size and angle of its propeller, Cuzoom's prop stopped spinning in seconds.
"Two words came out of my mouth," Doyle said. "The first was an 'Oh,' and the second one started with an F."
The plane came down on a stretch of beach only yards from a huge mass of washed-up driftwood. "I didn't know what to expect," Doyle said. "It plunked down, no particular bounce or anything." The left landing gear, much like in Friday's incident, was sheared off.
There was no structural damage to the aircraft, and Doyle hit the "911" selection on his SPOT transmitter, which allows others to track a flight in the air online. The 911 selection notifies Search and Rescue that an aircraft is in distress, and is meant to be used "in the event of a life threatening or other critical emergency," according to the SPOT website.
"There's been some controversy over whether we should have pressed the 911 button" on the transmitter, Doyle said. Neither he nor Wild had been injured in the crash, and he could have pressed the less urgent "Help" button on the transmitter. But, Doyle said, "we had no bear protection, no tent, and a little food, but we weren't prepared to be out there for very long."
A thread on the popular aviation forum Supercub.org discusses the merits of pressing the 911 button instead of the help button.
Exactly two hours after activating the transmitter, the Coast Guard arrived and took the two back to Cordova. The next day, Doyle and some friends returned to the island, lifted the plane off the ground with wingjacks, and repaired the landing gear. He said that there were several gallons of fuel left in the tank that he'd been using, but added that "I'm sure we'll never be able to say, 100 percent positive, that it was fuel starvation or that it was carb icing."
On Friday, he spoke from Yakima, Wash., where Cuzoom is based. They'd arrived in the city without further incident. He was getting ready to ferry another plane to Oklahoma. Despite the scares and setbacks, Doyle sounded optimistic about the plane and fond of the weekend's memories.
"We had our ups and downs along the road, but we came out on top," Doyle said. He didn't say if the pun was intended.
Ben Anderson is the editor of Bush Pilot. Contact him at ben(at)alaskadispatch.com.