Bush Pilot

Recap: 'Flying Wild Alaska -- Era Alaska Rises Again'

In this week's episode of "Flying Wild Alaska," the Discovery Channel's reality TV show about bush pilots flying for Era Alaska, it's a little hard to tell what time of year it is.

When the episode opens, we're told that after 70 straight dark and stormy winter days in Unalakleet, the sun is making a comeback. There's some evidence of springtime, too, with water bubbling to the surface of some of Alaska's icy lakes and crevasses.

But at the same time, some Western Alaska villages are still locked in -30 degree temperatures, and the sea ice bordering the communities of Unalakleet and Little Diomede is still in good shape.

So what gives? Chalk it up to a bit of tricky -- and occasionally jarring -- editing.

A tricky landing on soggy snow

In Unalakleet, Jim Tweto, COO of Era Alaska, gets a call from a valued client, hunting guide Lance Kronberger, whose snowmachine has run out of gas some distance from his hunting camp. Kronberger is out trapping wolf and lynx during the winter months.

He tells Jim he's scouted a landing surface, primarily hard-packed snow atop a river with the potential for a bit of overflow -- water that has seeped up through or around the edges of an ice-covered body of water -- which could mean a tough landing for the experience Jim.

"Overflow can be a tricky situation," Jim says.

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The good news is that the off-airport landing means Jim gets to roll out his trusty 1969 Cessna 180 for its first flight of the season, a little earlier than he'd planned.

So Jim fuels up and heads for the Golsovia River, hoping to spot Kronberger and drop off a load of fuel that will allow him to remain at the camp for another two weeks.

The trickiest part of the landing is that Jim doesn't know the surface, and even a flyover of the proposed landing site doesn't reveal much. Kronberger marks one end of the proposed runway with his snowmachine and the other with his pack, and walks up and down it looking for weak spots. His foot cracks through the hard-packed shell of snow topping the ice below.

Jim spots a small area of potential water, but decides to go for it anyway, and he makes it look easy, his tires skipping across the slick-looking surface of the river where the wind has blown the snow away.

"There's not a lot of guys who have the relationship that I have with Jim, where they trust the guy on the ground," Lance says.

Frozen seas and frozen toes

After Jim leaves Unalakleet, a resident comes into the Era terminal waiting for a flight to Nome. He's had a recent encounter with overflow himself, having had his snowmachine plunge through a patch of shallow ice, soaking his foot in below-freezing temperatures for half an hour. In Nome, doctors will evaluate if he'll be able to keep his toes. They tell him they don't have to amputate -- but the toes might still fall off on his own.

The story (and the man's blackened foot) doesn't stop Ariel from going out the next day with her second cousin to check on crab pots in the Bering Sea. Riding out on snowmachines, they arrive at the first pot -- called a "prospect pot," they chop a broad hole in the ice with axes, shovels and ice chippers and drag up a pot containing two crab.

Ariel's cousin tells her that chum salmon don't make good crab bait, which surprises her, but not in the way you'd expect.

"Weird," she says, "I thought crab were vegetarians."

When Jim comes back from Golsovia, he asks Ariel for her help digging out the rope tiedowns for his 180, which are laying on the tarmac covered in a layer of snow and ice. He suggests a wire brush to avoid cutting or damaging the ropes, but Ariel suggests a bucket of hot water.

Jim seems impressed with her thought, and she fills a five-gallon bucket with water, pouring it on the buried tiedown. She manages to tug it out of the frozen ground.

"Guess you didn't graduate from the third grade for nothing,'" Jim jokes with her -- but all I could think was what a pain in the butt it was going to be to undo those knots they're going to tie out of the wet rope, which will probably freeze right after they get done tying them.

Jim isn't on the ground very long. His next stop is the small community of Koyukuk, which has been without power for several days -- and where Jim is flying a mechanic to check it out. Because the power is down, Jim first has to buzz the village to announce his arrival to the residents. Fortunately, someone hears them and cruises out on a snowmachine to pick them up.

Arriving at the power plant, Bob Havemeister with the Alaska Energy Authority seems pretty dumbfounded by what he finds. The village is experiencing an outage,because two of the three generators that typically provide power are offline.

Havemeister learns that several years ago, parts were scavenged from one generator to repair another, taking them down to two generators and leaving the other out of duty for years.

"That's just symptomatic of a small village not having a lot of infrastructure and qualified people to maintain a power plant," Jim says.

"This plant's about five years old," Bob says to Jim with dismay, "look at it." He seems taken aback by the low degree of maintenance at the otherwise new facility.

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The temperatures are still well below zero in Koyukuk -- another strange example of weather anachronisms for the time of year it's supposed to be -- so Bob has to get the generators back up and running, which he does by scavenging an old battery and an oil pressure sensor. He seems relieved but uncertain, and I get the feeling there will be other, more significant repairs to be done. With that relief, he and Jim head back to Unalakleet.

An aborted landing

Earlier this season, we watched two pilots deliver a load of vaccines to Little Diomede, a small community on an island west of the Seward Peninsula and only two miles from Russia. Little Diomede has runway etched into the sea ice and only accessible during the winter months.

In that episode, we were told that pilot Doug Doherty had to abort a landing at the island a few weeks before, due to his plane's wings being too low to clear the snowberms on either side of the ice runway.

Now, inexplicably, we see that aborted flight. Doherty has to make a vaccine run from Nome to Little Diomede, buffeted by turbulence on one side on approach to the runway and Russian airspace on the other side.

It was a strange choice to run this segment after we had already seen the vaccine be delivered -- it takes a lot of the drama out of Doherty's trip. The editors at "Flying Wild" love to cut to commercial right as the terrain warnings go off and the pilot braces to land in high winds or on a slick runway -- but the trick isn't very effective here.

Needless to say, Doherty aborts the landing and heads back for Nome, leaving the vaccine undelivered.

Hangar rash

In Palmer, Era's lead pilot in Barrow, Luke Hickerson, is leaving his wife and son behind to return to work. He flies a 208 north and touches down in Barrow, hoping to squeeze into the nice new -- and heated -- hangar constructed last season. He shuffles some planes around trying to make it fit in the space.

After "…trying to fit this Tetris puzzle together without bending up something that costs way more than my paycheck," Luke has to abandon hope of letting his plane spend the night in the hangar, resignedly deciding to de-ice it in the morning.

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The next morning, it's -30 degrees in Barrow, and to demonstrate, Luke throws a cup of hot coffee into the air, where the extreme cold and extreme heat combine to instantly evaporate into steam.

Luke gets the de-icing machine, inside of a crate, out to his plane, only to discover that there's no de-icing fluid inside. The other de-icer has been left out in the freezing temperatures, resulting in a low-pressure stream that will be ineffective at de-icing anything.

Luke has to decide if he should give the flight to another pilot. "The schedules get backed up, passengers start getting agitated and not leaving on time, the freight starts getting backed up," he says. He will miss out on the pay for the flight hours he misses if he lets another pilot handle the flight. Eventually, he begrudgingly hands it off to another pilot.

"The only person that's losing money here is me," he says.

While he's grounded, he decides to squeeze the 208 into the hangar, emptying it out first and aiming to fit four large planes into a hangar only designed for three. So does he make it while avoiding "hangar rash?" Well, see for yourself.

Back in Unalakleet, it's warmer, warm enough for the large Dash-8 aircraft to make its return to the Unalakleet terminal. Ariel and Jim debate about who should marshal the plane in.

Jim still remembers an incident from last season, when Ariel mistakenly told a pilot to park a plane facing away from the wind, rather than into it. After correctly pointing out which way the plane should face, she's pretty pleased with herself.

"Didn't graduate from the third grade for nothin'" she says.

Contact Ben Anderson at ben(at)alaskadispatch.com

Ben Anderson

Ben Anderson is a former writer and editor for Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2017.

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