Pete Haggland

BORN: Nov. 13, 1942
BIRTHPLACE: Fairbanks, Alaska
SOLOED: 17 years old
MARRIED: 1970, to Phyllis Reid
FAVORITE AIRCRAFT: All of them. Widgeon is probably the most fun.

"I became interested in flying while leaning on the fence at Weeks Field. The North Star Bakery on 12th and Barnet was a good place to get a fresh donut and listen to the pilots' stories when the weather was bad," said James Peter "Pete" Haggland, a Fairbanks resident of more than 70 years and a pilot who has flown planes in Alaska for almost as long.

Haggland caught the pilot bug early, recalling his days as a boy walking the five blocks from his house to Weeks Field and spending hours, head tilted, watching airplanes come and go. He started working on planes when he was just 14 and his love affair has continued into his golden years, as he now helps curate the history of aviation in Alaska as the director of the Pioneer Air Museum in Fairbanks.

In 1939, Pete's parents Paul and Margaret Haggland moved from Seattle to Alaska with their infant twin sons, John and Paul. Three years later Pete was born and the Haggland family settled into Alaska life with three boys.

After high school, Pete started working full time in aviation, starting his career in operations for Pan American World Airways. He began logging dual instrument time and practicing with the Instrument Landing System (ILS) under the close supervision of one of his mentors, Warren Meyers.

"Warren let you pull the hood down only after you squeaked it on the center line—that was some valuable training," Haggland said.

Haggland earned his commercial license in 1967 and his instrument rating in 1968 in Portland, Ore., and soon returned home to Alaska, buying Tanana Air Taxi with his brother Paul. Haggland was in charge of loading and fueling the aircrafts and logged grueling hours, flying between 60-70 hours a month in a C180, as well as flying a Navajo routed to Bachner's A/C for maintenance in Fairbanks every 21 days.

The long hours with little sleep took a toll on his personal life—his girlfriend at the time often complaining that she didn't like it when he came to town because all he could do was sleep.

But, such is the life of a pilot. Eventually Pete met a woman who loved life in the air as much as he did and in 1970 he married Phyllis Reid. The two built their home with an airstrip on Chena Ridge, ensuring they would be up above the ice fog that can envelop the city.

During the 1970s Pete jumped on the oil boom bandwagon, working and flying between North Slope oil drill sites. In 1974, he purchased a Widgeon with extended tank ranges, allowing him to fly up to six hours at a time. He logged close to 3,000 hours supporting different camp sites.

"We were at Umiat with the Navajo one night when I got a call from a flight service in Bettles—it was a nice clear night north of Bettles," Haggland said. The cook's son had been hurt in a car accident. "I picked him up and called in on the radio and asked the crew to get him a seat on the Pan American flight [to Seattle]."

When they arrived in Fairbanks, they all jumped into the readied planes, flying the hurt boy all the way down to Seattle. The boy's father was so grateful for Pete's help that for eight or nine months after that, every time he flew into his camp, he insisted on feeding him.

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s the Haggland brothers continued to fly. They moved their air taxi company to Fairbanks International Airport renaming it Alaska Central Air. Their brother John joined the family business doing maintenance and scheduling routes from the Yukon River down to Ruby, Tanana and Galena. Eventually Paul sold Alaska Central Air and Pete purchased his Grumman C-1 in 1993.

For the next ten years, Haggland flew all over the state for various flying services delivering fuel.

In 2008, Randall "Randy" Acord, Alaska aviator, historian and one of the founders of the Pioneer Air Museum passed away and a few years later, Pete took over as the director.

"Randy Acord had 160 three-ring binders full of photos with no description or labels. Some of them were personal and others were aviation, all mixed together," Haggland said, explaining that he painstakingly pored over Acord's files. "I got a call that two more file cabinets were found and when I got to the the house, they were talking about two different ones—so I ended up with four file cabinets."

During one of his hours-long searches through those file cabinets, underneath a mountain of papers and records, an aluminized cloth envelope stuck out to Haggland. Much to his astonishment, he realized it was a piece of Carl Ben Eielson's aircraft, the Hamilton.

Eielson is recognized as one of the state's first aviators and Eielson Air Force Base is named in his honor. Eielson was the sole pilot of the Farthest North Aviation Company and flew the state's first mail service from Fairbanks to McGrath in 1924. His plane crashed while attempting a rescue mission in Siberia, which killed both him and his mechanic, Eric Borland.

"They had a cracked Fairchild 71 gear and needed a welder," said Haggland of how Acord acquired such a valuable piece of the famous pilot's plane. Hutchinson had cut this piece out of the Hamilton while he was there.

Haggland believes preserving the state's aviation history is important and he and his colleagues have volunteered many hours sifting through old pilot records that logged pilots' flights.

"Things like that took five years with interns to catalog—everything has been a large undertaking," Haggland said. The project is ongoing. "I approached the state museum at Juneau and asked for guidance on how to store the photos. Their historian, Scott Carlee, came for three days and he wrote up an assessment, which started us on the road to documenting everything."

Haggland said the help and advice were invaluable and that they follow the process the state's historian gave them religiously. Despite the tedious work, it has been worthwhile. He said that some days he finds a box or items that have no name or documentation and he just has to figure out how to categorize it.

"You know Pollack Air Service in the 1920s early 1930s? We have one of their Fairchilds at the museum and over in one of the glass cabinets was a shoe—a ladies semi-high-heeled shoe with absolutely no documentation," said Haggland. "People asked me what significance it had and I would say I did not really know. Lo and behold, I found a tiny little piece in a newspaper article about Pollack. When they got married, they jumped in their airplane and on their honeymoon their engine quit. That is what [his wife] was wearing when she walked back 13 miles—in that shoe."

Haggland spends more of his days now on the ground than in the sky, working with the volunteers at the museum and teaching the next generation of Alaska's pilots about the state's aviation history at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He still likes to reflect on his days as a pilot and is honored to be nominated to the Living Legends program—to be counted in with the other pilots he looked up to so long ago.

"I have not seen all of the places to fly in Alaska," Haggland said of his 51 years in the state. "Alaska was such a great place to fly and I like to think that I provided a good ride."

This story first appeared in the 2016 edition of Alaska Aviation Legends Magazine, a partner publication with Alaska Air Carriers Association. Contact the editor, Jamie Gonzales, at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.