Anchorage Daily News

The engines purred, pulling the commuter airplane through a blowing storm as it flew a holding pattern Thursday evening, waiting to touch down in Nome.

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Outside her window, the only thing Heidi Graber could see was a vast white expanse. Where did the sky end and the earth begin?

A moment later, with her back broken in three spots and her pelvis fractured, she, the pilot and four others aboard had the answer.

"It was just completely out of nowhere -- ran straight into the side of a mountain," Graber said in a telephone from her Nome hospital bed. The 34-year-old school counselor from Teller who was flying into Nome to catch a connection to Anchorage for vacation said she was the most seriously injured in the crash about eight miles northeast of Nome.

The aircraft, a Piper PA-31-350 operated by Frontier Flying Service, had hit hard on the slope of Newton Peak. Despite the violence of the collision and the sudden stop, all aboard survived, according to Alaska State Troopers.

The pilot, Harland Hannon, last made contact with control in Nome at roughly 6:20 p.m., when he advised that flight 8218 was inbound and, because of the deteriorating weather, requested to be put in a holding pattern to land in turn.

When the flight wasn't heard from again, troopers and Nome Volunteer Fire Department Search and Rescue began a search.

Hannon could not be reached for comment Friday, but National Transportation Safety Board investigator Clint Johnson, who was just beginning his investigation, caught up with the pilot while he was on a layover in Anchorage, on his way to Fairbanks.

During a brief interview, Hannon told Johnson he left Brevig Mission and initially reached about 5,500 feet, Johnson said. The flight to Nome is short, perhaps only a half-hour. But in that time, the weather thickened and the ceiling lowered, Johnson said. Soon Hannon was facing flat light and a white-out, he said.

"He said the next thing he knew, he was pretty much on the ground and the airplane had crashed -- didn't even see the ground coming," Johnson said.

Inside the plane, across the aisle from Graber, passenger Johnee Seetot, 53, had been taking a nap on her way to a family funeral in Nome. As she looked outside earlier in the flight, Seetot had seen land and what appeared to be the Snake River, she said by phone Friday from her hospital room in Nome.

"I just put my head against the window pane and I dozed off," Seetot said. "And the next thing I was over the seat with a big bump on my head and I said, 'What happened?' "

The smell of gas filled the cabin and passengers immediately feared fire, she said. That never happened. But then the six people realized they were alone, stuck on a mountain, although in the distance they could see a road below, said Seetot, who hoped to be discharged from the hospital Friday night.

Alerted by an emergency locator beacon on the airplane, the small army of searchers faced fast-worsening conditions, which forced an Evergreen Aviation helicopter to turn back from the search. It took nearly three hours to find the wreckage.

Up on the mountain, the survivors saw a couple of lights glimmering in the distance: two snowmachines drifting through the dark. The stranded people shined flashlights down the slope. But it wasn't until a passenger doused some clothes in fuel and lit them that they caught someone's attention, Graber said.

Perhaps two miles away, in the shadow of the mountain, Dexter resident David Olsen was at home watching the search unfold when he saw a light begin flickering beyond the search teams.

"We were just watching because the search teams were on the other side of the river, and when we spotted it I gave search and rescue a call," Olsen said. "At the time it looked to be like a flare."

It was about 8:50 p.m. when searchers got the call, and following the light, searchers reached the aircraft to find everyone alive, said troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters.

And pretty happy to see them.

"I was so grateful. I had this terrible fear of having to spend the night out," Graber said. "I knew we would all be OK, but having to wait until daylight for them to start searching again -- I was just so grateful that they didn't give up. And they were all so good. They really took good care of us."

With her broken back, Graber said, she had to be carried out and loaded into a sled, which hauled her out to Beam Road about a mile away. The survivors were taken to Norton Sound Hospital to be examined, but Graber and Seetot were the only two hospitalized, according to troopers.

Doctors there told Graber she might have chronic back pain, but she isn't paralyzed, she said. She was hoping to be released early next week.

The NTSB's Johnson said the Federal Aviation Administration sent two investigators from Fairbanks to examine the wreckage, which remained at the site Friday.

The aircraft, built in 1984, was not equipped with a voluntary system called Capstone that would have given the pilot a dynamic display of the terrain features below and an alarm if its altitude got too low, he said.

"That's exactly what that equipment is designed for," he said. "A lot of the operators in Nome, Bethel and that area use Capstone, but unfortunately, this was not a Capstone-equipped airplane. That probably would have been a very, very useful tool in this type of an accident."

The full investigation could take a year to complete. Frontier Flying Service did not return several calls seeking comment Friday.

Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.

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