Accidents have killed 17 people in Alaska since June, even as longtime pilots say it's never been safer to fly in the expansive, pilot-rich state.
While the barrage of high-profile crashes -- including the death Monday of former Sen. Ted Stevens -- has stunned Alaskans and swung a spotlight on aviation safety, the death toll isn't unheard for Alaska's busy summers, even in recent history.
More than 20 people died in the summers of 2003, 2004 and 2007, according to National Transportation Safety Board records.
After a benchmark safety year in 2009, when fewer people died in aircraft accidents than in roughly half a century, the resurgence of crashes this summer has given pilots pause.
"We're all replaying events in our past that could have potentially turned out bad," Adam White, a pilot and president of the Alaska Airmen's Association, said after Monday's crash.
"Sometimes it takes these kinds of events for people to stop and think, maybe I shouldn't be doing things the way that I have been," he said. "Maybe I ought not to load the airplane quite as heavy. Maybe I should wait a few more hours even though I think I can make it now because the forecast says it's going to improve."
Four days after the accident that killed Stevens and four others north of Dillingham came news of yet another crash. Rescuers on Friday found two people dead in the wreckage of a Piper PA-18 near McGrath.
The deaths overshadow a larger trend, with the FAA reporting a general decline in total accidents over the past three decades.
Pilots and aviation experts say a combination of new navigation systems, better runways and a growing professionalism have dramatically reduced accidents since the barnstorming days of gonzo bush pilots and pipeline construction.
"The culture of aviation has changed 180 degrees," said Richard Harding, who began flying for Pen Air out of King Salmon and later became president of a federally funded nonprofit that offers pilot training and safety audits.
He got his start in the era of the so-called "bush pilot syndrome," he said.
"It was a macho, bravado occupation to be in and pilots used to do risky things -- and pilots that did that were looked upon as great pilots and heroes."
While there are still a few old-school holdovers, most pilots would rather be considered true professionals, he said.
The number of people killed in aircraft crashes in the state dropped from an average of 80 a year in the 1970s to about 23 a year over the past decade, NTSB records show.
There's still plenty of room for improvement.
Despite its meager population, Alaska is among the four states with the most crashes. Being a pilot was twice as deadly as commercial fishing between 1990 and 2008, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Alaska accounted for more than one-third of U.S. air taxi and commuter crashes over that period.
LITTLE IN COMMON
As with the nation's busy highways, some number of accidents can be expected in a state where most of the more than 200 villages can't be reached by any road, weather can rapidly build between faraway destinations and tiny, single-engine planes act as taxis between small towns and hubs. No other state depends on small planes as much as Alaska.
The latest crashes have little in common.
Stevens and four others died Monday when a vintage de Havilland Otter crashed into a mountainside north of Dillingham.
About a week before that crash, a cargo plane went down in Denali National Park, leaving three dead and sparking a small wildland fire. Three days before that, a C-17 cargo plane crash killed four on a practice run for the Elmendorf air show.
Also this summer:
• The pilot of a de Havilland Beaver died July 23 in a crash about 5 miles from Ketchikan.
• A Piper PA-18-135 struck a tree May 14 about 12 miles north of Willow before hitting a wooded area and killing the pilot.
• Passersby pulled a family from a burning Cessna 206 that struck a building June 1 in Fairview after takeoff from Merrill Field. A 4-year-old boy died in the crash.
• A helicopter "caught a skid" and crashed at a cattle ranch June 19 on Unalaska Island. The pilot was killed.
WEATHER, FATIGUE
In a 1995 study of aviation safety in Alaska, the NTSB found that planes flying under visual flight rules in poor weather was the state's biggest safety problem for aircraft, one that could be remedied by getting better weather information to cockpits.
Pilot fatigue was "a detriment to safety" and pilots were under pressure during peak tourism times to fly long and often on commuter and air taxi flights, the report found.
Inexperienced pilots working long hours may also play a role in the state's high death rate, suggested a NIOSH survey of Alaska air carrier operators and commercial pilots published in 2006.
And historically, the practice of paying pilots by the trip or by the hour rather than a regular salary may have contributed to accidents, said Carl Siebe, a board member for the Alaska Aviation Safety Foundation. "If they want to get a paycheck, they have to fly."
Harding, the former president of the federally funded aviation safety group the Medallion Foundation, said that practice has become less common.
"It may still be going on someplace but I'm unaware of anybody that does it," he said.
As for the "Bush syndrome" -- once defined by the NTSB as "an attitude of air taxi operators, pilots and passengers ranging from their casual acceptance of risks to their willingness to take unwarranted risks" -- pilots said that attitude is disappearing.
Alaska Airmen's Association board member Steve Pannone remembers trying to reach Nome from Port Clarence in the early 1990s and watching as the tail of the plane picking him up thunked on the ground after landing because it was so overloaded.
"I told the pilot, 'You're going to end up in a ball of aluminum and I'm not going to be in that one,' " said Pannone, who said he convinced the pilot to remove a few hundred pounds.
But over time, he said, people stop flying with air carriers known for taking risks and the industry as a whole has grown more professional.
"You look at the amount of hours that are flown in Alaska over the year and you look at the ratio of accidents to hours flown, and getting in your car and driving to Eagle River is numerous times more dangerous than hopping in an airplane and flying to Talkeetna for lunch," Pannone said.
Still, pilots in Alaska were involved in twice as many accidents per 100,000 hours flown than the comparative national rate for general aviation between 2004 and 2008, according to aviation data analyzed by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association's Air Safety Foundation.
CUTTING CRASHES
Pilots say testing of a new aviation navigation program in the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta and later in Southeast has also reduced crashes.
The system shows pilots a moving map of the terrain around them, as well as weather updates and the location of nearby planes -- all from the cockpit. It's part of the FAA's plans to change the nation's air traffic control system from one that relies on ground-based radar technology to a GPS-based system.
The program reduced accidents among planes equipped with the hardware by 47 percent between 2000 and 2004 in the Y-K Delta, according to the FAA.
"Sen. Stevens was instrumental in providing the funds to the state of Alaska to make that happen," Siebe said. The system will be required nationwide in certain aircraft and airspace by 2020, said Leonard Kirk, assistant director of aviation technology at the University of Anchorage Alaska.
More than 400 aircraft in Alaska have the hardware, which can cost between $14,000 and $100,000 to install depending on the plane, he said.
Deborah Hersman, National Transportation Safety Board chairman, said Thursday the plane Stevens was on was not equipped with the technology.
Daily News reporter Lisa Demer contributed to this report. Additional information from The Associated Press.
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Pilot killed in ultralight accident near Eklutna identified
By KYLE HOPKINS
khopkins@adn.com