PALMER — Dave Oberg, the veteran Regal Air pilot who died in the Alaska Range in late September, was looking for decent weather before he crashed.
Steve Perrins, a hunting guide who owns Rainy Pass Lodge with his wife, heard his friend on the radio as Oberg flew out of "really snotty stuff" on his way up.
Oberg was over the mouth of the Happy River on his way to an airstrip on the other side of the pass that marks a high checkpoint on the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
Perrins told Oberg there was a low fog or cloud bank to the north but he could see the Long Lake Hills along the Skwenta River — about 10 miles away — so it looked like there might be a way through up the southern end of the valley.
"He said, 'Yep, I see. It really opens up here good,'" Perrins recalled Friday. "It's a lot better than what I just came through."
The lodge owner told his friend he was welcome to find a warm dry place to hole up if it didn't look good on the other side.
"And 10 minutes later he was gone," Perrins said.
Oberg died in the crash of the wheel-equipped Cessna 206 that occurred around 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 24.
[Regal Air pilot killed in crash near Rainy Pass was longtime Alaska aviator]
The plane hit the side of a mountain at about 4,700 feet near the end of a valley about three and a half miles southwest of the mouth of Goodman Pass, according to a National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report released Friday.
Oberg was carrying about 400 pounds of lumber to the airstrip, and picking up two passengers there.
The loss of the 67-year-old pilot shocked the aviation community. Oberg flew commercially for years, for Regal since 2002, and also taught an aviation class at Service High School.
Regal's senior pilot was flying the same route about 20 minutes behind Oberg the day of the crash, according to the NTSB report. The two talked about the weather, and the other pilot asked Oberg how he was avoiding the clouds.
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He lost communications with Oberg at 10:30, and assumed he'd headed into Rainy Pass and lost radio contact, the report said. The senior pilot turned back at Long Lake Hills, where he didn't feel comfortable flying into the low clouds that had gathered.
Perrins said when he heard that, he was surprised. The hills had been visible from his lodge 20 minutes before.
He doesn't know what happened to his friend, but maybe it was one of two things: Either he thought he was in Goodman Pass, or was trying to follow a ridge to Hells Gate, an area pilots use to get over the mountains when they can't get through Rainy Pass.
Rainy Pass Lodge has used Regal, and flown with Oberg, since 2005, Perrins said. Everyone in his family had flown with him, too. Oberg recently told him he was trying to spend more time with family.
"He must have been in between layers. The clouds were moving a lot," Perrins said. "He was just too trained to do something stupid."