Bush Pilot

Oddball Pilot: Don't ask, don't tell

The most recent Oddball Pilot post is from contributor Ross Nixon on "fire contract flying" in Alaska:

"Pack a bag and get to McGrath in the morning," the boss said. As ordered, the next dawn I flew one of our company Cessna 207s from St. Mary's to McGrath. Fire season always brings lucrative charters to air services in Alaska, and the state needed a single engine Cessna. There was no time to waste while over a million acres of muskeg endangered nothing by burning out in the middle of nowhere.

In McGrath, the ?ight operations people briefed me on the Alaska Department of Natural Resources aviation protocols. After the usual instructions, Mary (the lead dispatcher) asked me if I played a musical instrument. Having been suckered by the same query years before and unsure why she was asking, I lied: "Not really." She dropped the subject.

The remote wild?res were threatening a lodge and several cabins near a lake southeast of Sleetmute. My job was to shuttle ?re?ghters and gear between McGrath and the lodge's landing strip. The ?re people showed me a photo of the runway, saying it was in good shape.

They were wrong, of course. The airstrip was soft. A tree snag blocked the ?nal approach, forcing me to dive down for landings. During the ?rst landing, the plane came to such an abrupt halt in the soft sand that it felt as if it were equipped with an arrestor hook. On my first takeoff, loaded up with five smokejumpers and their gear, the wheels just about scraped the tree tops. I ended up slapping some extra ?aps down, which ballooned us up enough to clear the trees. It turned out that those who said it was a "good" strip had never seen the place; none of them were pilots, either. SOP became the carrier arrival and ?ap slapping departures.

To complicate things further, a sandpiper lived in the center of the runway. Sandpipers are shore birds that live on the ocean, which was hundreds of miles away. Ours obviously suffered some mental illness, but the firefighters adopted the bird and her egg family. They marveled at my ability to avoid their nest on my takeoffs and landing. But their admiration was unfounded, because I was so focused trying to get airborne or avoid the tree snag that I'd forget about their home during these critical phases of ?ight. Each time I got out of the plane, I'd check the eggs while their mother ran around screeching obscenities at me, faking like her wing was broken.

If they survived my takeoffs and landings, I hope the eggs hatched into birds that'd have more sense than to squat in the middle of a runway. There are millions of other acres–and 33,000 miles of coastline–Alaska for birds to mate and incubate under government protection without worrying about being crushed under the wheels of private enterprise.

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The McGrath charter duty was cakewalk compared to ?ying the line in St. Mary's. I was used to flying all day with no breaks, but that summer my duty day started at 10 AM. Dispatch ordered me to stay for dinner before a ?ight–it was steak night in the galley and they wanted their pilots "well fed." I'd been assigned a room at the fabulous old Tuskusko House. My wife Kate visited. There was even a bar in downtown McGrath where you could drink a cold beer at the end of the day.

The more I ?ew for the government, the more I liked global warming and lightning strikes, hoping the state would keep burning well into the winter. As I bombed around in the smoky haze and thundershowers, I pondered the musical instrument question from my initial meeting. Why the heck would anyone care whether I played an instrument when I was doing all this ?ying?

Sometimes I'd take out a harmonica and play quietly to myself at the B&B or out on the steps of the pilot shack when I was not watching the antics of the smoke jumpers. They were bored young guys, waiting for the next big ?re. They played a game of chance called "bad ?ips," where a ?ipped coin picked someone who'd do some sort of troll like act. One loser was forced to walk about all day on six foot long two by fours duct taped to his shoes. Another spent the day lying in a sleeping bag under the small footbridge, shouting out roughly in a voice from a Grimm's Fairy Tale: "Who is that walking on my bridge?"

Read the second half of Nixon's account at Oddball Pilot.

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