Special Sections

Richard Harding

 

BORN: Nov. 4, 1939
BIRTHPLACE: Des Moines, Iowa
SOLOED: 23 years old
MARRIED: 1965, to Sharon
FAVORITE AIRCRAFT: Cessna Conquest

Before he was senior vice president of PenAir, president of the Medallion Foundation and had a name synonymous with aviation safety in Alaska, Richard Harding was a young Alaska pilot on a training flight, seeing Nelson Lagoon for the first time.

It happened at 10,000 feet, looking out the window during a flight between King Salmon and Cold Bay. The training pilot at the time pointed out the window in the general direction of the village, at the little dot below them. That was the extent of his initial airport check training.

Later, when Harding started flying to Nelson Lagoon on his own, he was appalled by what he found: The runway was too narrow, leaving part of the plane hanging into the sea grass. The undersides of the wings would turn green from cutting through the weeds. There was a hole at the beginning of the runway large enough to fit a plane.

"I thought, 'What a god-awful place,'" Harding recalled.

He landed there for years. Every time he arrived, a jeep with giant wheels wrapped with rope for traction, would come out to meet him, driving out across the swampy ground to pick up and deliver passengers and parcels. Then one day, the jeep didn't come.

"So I thought, 'Well, I'm going to walk into town, I've never been there before,' So I walked and there was a little ridge there, and as I was standing on the ridge, I could see where the airport was," Harding said, smiling. He had been landing on an old abandoned road for years. The actual airport wasn't visible from the air because the marking panels had faded and blended in with the swamp.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nobody ever said a word. They would just get in, fasten their seatbelts and never ask why he always landed there.  

His 38-year flying career is full of stories like that—all-Alaska, adventure-packed tales that embody the way flying in the 49th state used to be. But his decades of Alaska aviation experience span other things, too, including major safety milestones in an industry notorious for its perils.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, in November 1939, Harding wanted to fly from the time he was a child. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in hopes of joining the pilot program, something his recruiter had promised was doable, then spent four years traveling the globe as a mechanic. He saw Spain, Italy and all over the United States. It wasn't until he left the service in 1962 that he was finally able to fulfill his dream.

He earned his pilot's license in Burbank, California, working his way through the various licensing levels. In the spring of 1970, he took a seemingly part-time job in Alaska.

"I told my wife we were just going up for the summer. She says, 'That sounds good,'" Harding recalls. "It took her 38 years to get back."

"We landed in Sitka, the first place I'd ever been in Alaska, and I thought, 'This is what I thought Alaska was like.' And then we ended up in King Salmon … " It was flat, far from the mountains,  surrounded by scrubby pines and had one 14-mile dirt road to Naknek.

Harding worked for PenAir, the first and only job he ever had in Alaska. The company had opened its King Salmon base in 1965, and Harding cut his teeth flying across the wilds of Southwest Alaska.

"We started out as a rural bush carrier," Harding said. "If somebody wanted to go somewhere, we'd always say 'yes,' and then we'd have to figure out how we're gonna do it later."

He landed on beaches and other rough surfaces. He flew in and out of King Salmon in various precarious conditions, and at the end of that first year, after experiencing many I'll-never-do-that-again events, he emerged a better pilot, he says. Eventually, he began to notice something.

The way Harding saw it, many Alaska carriers kept significantly higher safety standards than required by the Federal Aviation Administration, while other carriers were just barely sneaking by. For the average airplane passenger, though, there was no way to tell the difference before boarding an airplane.

Once, Harding was assigned a PenAir charter to fly the musician Johnny Cash to a hunting camp down the chain. After Cash and several friends arrived in their jet, Cash left in the private plane sent by the hunting lodge. Half an hour later, Harding took off with the friends and the bags. When they arrived at the camp that night, the famous musician was nowhere to be found. The next day, they learned his plane had gotten lost in the Aleutian weather, and he was forced to spend the night at Port Heiden. As it turned out, it was one of the hunting camp pilot's first trips to the Aleutians, Harding said.

Cash had a choice of which plane to get into but had no way of knowing the plane he got into operated under different FAA rules than the other, said Harding. The pilots had different operating experience and FAA requirements.

In Alaska skies, experience and safety precautions are important. Eventually, the latter sparked the creation of the nonprofit Medallion Foundation, which relied, in part, on concepts Harding carried over from a military risk assessment program. The tenets of the pilots risk assessment form are the same, he said.

"The only thing we took off of [the military form] was small arms fire at the end of the runway," Harding said. "We don't usually have that."

The Medallion Foundation was formed by the Alaska Air Carriers Association in 2001. They provide guidelines for operators to establish a system safety culture within a company and periodically monitor participants. Harding would go on to serve as the foundation's president and board member for the next 10 years before retiring from PenAir. It was just one chapter in a career studded with safety advancements and other improvements to Alaska aviation.

He worked with equipment manufacturers to improve safety and navigation controls for Alaska's unique conditions. Through various safety committees and other groups, he worked to install lighting on Alaska runways and weather cameras at Alaska airports. He was also involved in the ADS-B Capstone Project that was the test bed and precursor to NextGen navigation which is now becoming the standard for airline navigation worldwide.

Throughout his decades of flying, he racked up more than 30,000 flight hours. That's where he stopped keeping track, at least: By now, he reckons it's somewhere closer to 34,000. He's flown a Piper Super Cub, Saratoga, Navajo, Aztec and Cherokee 6; a Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner; a Grumman Widgeon; a Cessna 150, 402 and Conquest. That Cessna Conquest was his favorite, he says.

ADVERTISEMENT

He remembers the days of flying to Dutch Harbor via Cold Bay using Visual Flight Rules (VFR)—fly down to Cape Sarichef on Unimak Island; take a heading; head for Akutan Island; look at your watch, take another heading; follow the island around, look for Priest Rock, then Mount Ballyhoo.

"And that's how we got in and out," Harding said, adding that IFR instrument approach minimums at the time were more than 2,000 feet; seldom adequate for that airport.

Despite the risks, he flew through his aviation career without a single serious accident. On one occasion, when an engine quit on the way out of Perryville, Harding spent a night on the tundra, but with no injuries and little damage to his plane, the rough landing was determined by the FAA to be an "incident." The Cherokee 6 was hauled out by helicopter, a new landing gear was installed at Port Heiden and the plane continued on its way.

These days, Harding is back living in California, but he never really left the pilot life behind. For the past three years, he's returned to Alaska in the summer to complete airport inspections for the State of Alaska; a contract he and his partner secured through their current business, Aviation Risk Solutions. While he no longer flies for PenAir, he still finds himself spending months in the air, still bound for destinations in some of the furthest corners of Alaska.

"So I guess, yeah, I still fly," Harding said with a smile.

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.

ADVERTISEMENT