Seaplanes along the Inside Passage: The Highs and Lows of a Modern Bush Pilot
194
Seaplanes along the Inside Passage: The Highs and Lows of a Modern Bush Pilot
194eBook
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Overview
"Having accrued nearly twenty-four thousand hours of experience as a commercial pilot, author Gerry Bruder shares the highlights (and darkest moments) of his career. From abrupt engine failure while airborne, to ferrying a diverse array of passengers, to surviving flights in dangerous weather conditions, is a tell-it-like-it-is inside story of aviation life. Highly recommended." -James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review-The Aviation Shelf
What is it about Alaska that can make a young journalist from the East Coast abandon his career and become a bush pilot? Bruder's fascinating first-person account answers that question and lets the reader share his experiences as he becomes seasoned as a seaplane pilot flying the rugged terrain of Western Washington, British Columbia, and Southeast Alaska.
The life of a bush pilot in southeast Alaska is filled with the exhilaration of having unique access to one of our last great spans of wilderness, balanced with physical discomfort, extremely long hours, and heart-pounding danger. Gerry Bruder gave up a promising journalism career to pursue his passion for flying. This true-life adventure provides readers with a fascinating firsthand account of the highs and lows of a modern bush pilot.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780882409993 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Alaska Northwest Books |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 194 |
| Sales rank: | 891,508 |
| File size: | 481 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 8
PRESSURE POINTS
Scattered puffs of scud hung in the Harris River valley like ragged balloons, the only remnants of heavy rainfog that had blocked this and other routes across Prince of Wales Island all morning. Now, in early afternoon, the rain had stopped and the associated fog had lifted into an overcast. Beneath it, visibility was good all the way to where the pass took a sharp dogleg.
During my observation flights as an apprentice, each of my mentors had cautioned me that thick clouds often bottlenecked in the dogleg portion of this pass during precipitation. Several years earlier, a Beaver had crashed into trees there after the pilot, flying alone with cargo, lost visibility in bad weather. Remarkably, he suffered few injuries, and after extracting himself from the wreckage he swung the mail sacks over his shoulder and hiked out.
When moisture was evident in the air I routinely hugged the outside slope before entering the dogleg to check conditions there and gain maneuvering room for turning around, if necessary. Sometimes I had indeed found the dogleg to be blocked by thick fog. But more often it contained just a mist or isolated scud I could squeeze around.
My gradually maturing weather savvy now activated an alarm somewhere inside my brain: Recent rain. Lingering scud. Watch out for dogleg.
An alarm cannot prevent danger, however, only warn of it. I chose not to listen. The morning weather delay had backed up the schedule. In addition to the five people on board my Beaver who were impatient to reach Craig on the west side of the island, a family of three inbound passengers waited there hoping to sail on the ferry Malaspina, due to leave Ketchikan for Seattle in just over an hour. It was winter again, and its short days meant less time to probe the weather, to squeeze in the business. Swinging wide at the dogleg would cost an extra thirty seconds.
So, like a racecar driver cutting corners on turns, I barreled headlong into the dogleg—and met a wall of fog.
The curtain stretched from slope to slope and apparently from surface to ceiling. It offered no holes, not even a light spot. Yet, I was too low to turn, and the stratus immediately above prevented a climb. No water lay below for a hasty landing, only the forest and a narrow, winding road. Now the racecar had become a locomotive committed to rails; I could only continue on.
Terror gripped me in my helplessness. I throttled back, lowered the flaps, and shoved the nose toward the treetops, hoping for some space there beneath the fog, although none was evident. If the fog indeed lay on the trees, I would have to decide instantly whether to crash-land wherever I could, or plunge into the cloud to grope blindly through the rest of the pass to Klawock Lake on the other side.
People like to think that confronted by imminent, unavoidable, violent death or injury, they will face it with teeth clenched and head held high. Stoicism can be elusive. I gripped the wheel like a vise and began chanting, “Oh god, oh god!...”
Suddenly, at about fifty feet above the forest, I discovered a narrow, clear space between the trees and the fog, a corridor that had been undetectable from an angle above. Klawock Lake appeared a mile ahead at the end of the dogleg. It was the glimpse of the lobby when the sluggish doors of a crowded, claustrophobic elevator finally creaked open.
Over the lake in open air again, I climbed back to my original altitude, my mouth like paste. How loud had been my pathetic plea? Had my passengers heard? At the seaplane dock at Craig, they stepped out of the cabin with no sign of strain on their faces. A couple of them smiled at me. Obviously, they hadn’t realized how close they had come to obliteration. Apparently they had regarded our sudden descent in the dogleg as a routine maneuver, though perhaps a bit roughly handled. The pilot, they presumed, knew the corridor was there.
After takeoff with the three inbound passengers, I turned south to try an alternate pass from Trocadero Bay to Twelve-Mile Arm. It was wide open. As the Beaver rumbled along toward Ketchikan, I sat grim-faced, numbed, angry at myself for having been so reckless. I had surrendered caution to pressure and had nearly killed myself and five innocent people in the process. The thought of death in the fog resurrected images of a recent grim experience.
Months earlier a thirty-six-year-old pilot for another air service in Ketchikan and four of his six Forest Service passengers had died when their Beaver crashed in fog on climb out from the Thorne Bay logging camp on the east side of Prince of Wales. Approaching the camp shortly after the accident on a charter of my own, I noticed a flotilla of boats racing down the bay. “I wonder what’s going on,” I said to the loggers on board. At the seaplane dock we learned about the crash; the boats were hurrying to the scene to help. We watched solemnly as a rescue helicopter arrived and dangled a stretcher over the wooded knoll where the crash occurred, the rapid whomp-whomp-whomp of its rotor blades puncturing the air.
The less injured of the two survivors had already been taken to the camp infirmary. After he received initial aid, an official asked me to fly him to town for hospitalization. Still in shock, with caked blood embedded in his beard and tangled hair, and blood-soaked bandages on his face, the twenty-nine-year-old man stared blankly at his feet on the flight to Ketchikan. In short, halting sentences, he told me that the floats had grazed the treetops before a wing struck a tree. One moment he was looking out the window at the fog and the next he was lying in the brush outside the wreckage, he said. I radioed the company, and an ambulance with its red light flashing was parked on the upper dock when we landed.
I returned immediately to Thorne Bay to resume my charter. As I entered the bay I flew over the crash site and spotted the crumpled wreck by the knoll, about 100 yards from the beach. One wing had separated and lay nearby. Loggers had already cut a swath through the woods to the site.
Like motorists driving more cautiously after passing the accordion-like remains of a head-on collision, the rest of us had tiptoed about the skies for the next few days as if a crash were contagious. And for weeks afterward, the tragedy had cast a pall of gloom over the Ketchikan flying community.
How close I had come this afternoon to replenishing that gloom. A hand tapped me on the shoulder. “Pilot, are we going to get there in time?” one of the passengers yelled. “The ferry’s due to leave in a half-hour.”
“I’ll do my best.”
I could only speculate whether pressure had compelled my fallen peer at Thorne Bay to dilute his own caution, despite his far greater experience. He would not have heard overt pressure. No air service owner was going to take a pilot aside, put a hand on his shoulder, and say, “Joe, this is a really important charter. You’ve got to get there come hell or high water.” But like palpable prejudice in small Bible Belt towns, tacit pressure to complete flights pervaded every air service in the bush.
[begin SIDEBAR]
In a 1980 special study on air-taxi accidents in Alaska, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that pressure played a major role. Between 1974 and 1978, the data period for the study, the rate of fatal air-taxi accidents in Alaska per 100,000 hours flown was double (2.57 versus 1.11) and the nonfatal rate almost five times (15.2 versus 3.29) that of the rest of the country. “In Alaska, the study said, “it is not uncommon for pilots to fly in extremely bad weather—stories abound about pilots who have been involved in numerous accidents and have survived. These pilots have become near-legends and are spoken of almost reverently by some young pilots, especially those who have arrived only recently in Alaska. Taking chances is considered a part of flying in the Alaska by many Alaskans—not just the pilots, but also the passengers. Passengers affected by the ‘bush syndrome’ demand to fly even in hazardous weather conditions, and if one pilot or operator will not fly, the passengers will go to another operator. . . . The ‘bush syndrome’ goes beyond the realm of poor judgment compounded by pressures and into the area of unreasonable risk-taking.”
The NTSB found that pilot error was more often an accident factor or cause in Alaska than in other states: 86 percent compared with 72 percent. The report also noted that “The Southeast, in which the flying involves significant float operations, also has a substantial portion of the state’s accidents.”
Another agency taking note of Alaska’s air taxi accident record was the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which reported in 1999 that professional pilots in the state faced an eleven percent chance of dying over a thirty-year career, versus 2.5 percent for professional pilots in other states.
[end SIDEBAR]
Fortunate was the pilot who turned around because of impenetrable fog or gale-force winds. He got a free pass. The weather was indisputably unworkable, and he had no choice. Everyone understood. Air service owners had little use for a pilot who never turned around; that sort would inevitably kill himself and his passengers and destroy an expensive airplane. A single crash could bankrupt an air service with lawsuits, bad publicity, and a spike in insurance premiums that were already exorbitant.
On the other hand a pilot who turned around in marginal conditions, when he did have a choice, faced a gauntlet of subtle recriminations that could only jack up the pressure next time. The first would come from his passengers after he announced, “Sorry, folks, the weather’s no good, we’ll have to go back to town.” Some passengers accepted a turn-around magnanimously, but many grumbled and pursed their lips in disappointment and disgust. Occasionally one even started crying. There was no isolating cockpit door in a floatplane to block a pilot’s view of such reactions, or to block his ears from the cajoling: “Aw, hell, this ain’t nothing. I’ve flown with ol’ Joe in stuff a lot worse than this! Let’s keep going.”
Next his alter ego began nagging: The weather wasn’t really that bad. You should have tried harder. Maybe you could have gotten through by skimming the treetops in the valley or taking the shoreline all the way around. The company hired you to fly airplanes to wherever the customers want to go, not to burn up a lot of fuel for nothing. Being resourceful is part of the job. The famous pioneer bush pilots would have found a way.
Back in town, the pilot saw the disgruntlement in the dispatcher’s face as she studied the schedule behind her desk. “Well,” she told the passengers you led into the office for rebooking, “we’re really busy today. We won’t be able to try again with you until four o’clock.” Perhaps a couple of the passengers said forget it, we can’t wait that long, we’ll try another outfit down the street.
The linemen also made faces. They had hauled 300 pounds of catalogs, mail sacks, food cartons, and other cargo from the freight room to the seaplane dock for your flight. Now they have to take it all back.
The company owner tried to act nonchalant. “Found the pass closed, huh? Well, maybe it’ll be better this afternoon.” But nonchalance didn’t compensate for the lost revenue on the flight or pay for overhead like fuel and engine wear and tear. You knew that the owner, walking away hands in pockets, was filing the turnaround in his mind alongside previous turnarounds and the records of other pilots.
On particularly hectic days owners, trying to keep the company afloat, and dispatchers, trying to keep the schedule flowing, could not always restrain their frustration when a pilot announced that he wasn’t able to get through: “Well, we’ll have to get somebody who can,” one might snap, or, “Well, Joe got through!” No matter that Joe might have enjoyed the good timing to arrive when the route was between rainfog showers. Or maybe the weather was the same as when you tried and he emerged on the other side with trembling hands and cotton mouth. What counted is that he got through. You didn’t. People remembered.
In late summer 1978, after one of his pilots came back from a turnaround because of fog, an air service owner in Ketchikan took over command of the Grumman Goose. “I’ll make the damn trip myself,” he was overheard muttering. Later that day, a passing fishing boat came upon airplane debris and a body floating on the surface of Sumner Strait near the Goose’s destination at Labouchere Bay. The skipper radioed another nearby boat, which had to use its radar to locate the scene in the fog. Searchers eventually collected three more bodies, but deep water at the site prevented recovery of the other eight victims or the wreckage. (The twin-engine amphibian contained one passenger more than the legal limit.)
[begin SIDEBAR VIII]
At least five other air service owners in Ketchikan had fatal seaplane crashes between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s. One might assume that these owners spent too much time in the office and grew rusty at bush flying, but in fact all were proficient. A pilot typically logs thousands of hours over many years before becoming an owner, and he then continues day-to-day flying alongside his hired hands. But financial pressure to complete flights often compels owners to take extra risks, for an aborted mission affects them directly.
[end SIDEBAR VIII]
Peers rarely criticized a fellow pilot for a turnaround or refusal to carry an overload, especially if the pilot were still relatively new. But a pilot’s performance determined his reputation and his credibility. A weather report from a gutsy pilot who turned around would persuade others bound in that direction to hold back for a couple of hours, while an identical report from a hesitant pilot after an abort would be tactfully dismissed. In the latter case, someone might say, “conditions change fast around here, so we’ll send out Joe right away to check for an improvement.”
Joe takes off. Forty minutes later the radio crackles in the operations room, where the rest of the flight crew has gathered, drinking coffee, waiting. “It’s pretty spooky in the scud and drizzle,” he reports, “but it’s workable down around three hundred. It’s a couple of miles in most spots. I’m making it.” Everyone scrambles.
Soon, you reach the vicinity from which Joe issued his assessment. You judge the ceiling to be 200 feet and the visibility closer to one mile. Conditions might have deteriorated a bit, or maybe Joe simply has a different perception, the way one person will describe a paint job as maroon and another will say red. In any event, you don’t want to push on in such low weather. But Joe’s making it.
Unless a federal inspector was in town poking around, operators and pilots ignored most official rules governing weather, loads, and other flight considerations. Instead, the criterion was what could be done safely. And common sense. A pilot could cruise along just as well beneath a 400-foot ceiling as the 500-foot limit. If the airplane could get off the water with a 200-pound overload, good enough. And as long as the babbling, drooling drunk could stagger to the airplane, he was welcome aboard despite the regulation banning transportation of obviously inebriated passengers. Because if you refused to carry him, he’d take his money elsewhere.
Although a paycheck was not contingent on completed flights, a pilot with a history of turnarounds experienced job insecurity. If pay was by salary, he might return after a vacation to find his services were no longer needed—and that the pilot roster included a brand-new name. If pay was by the flight hour, he might spend more and more time sipping coffee in the operations office while the dispatcher assigned flights to comrades with less seniority but fewer turnarounds.
Realizing all this, pilots pushed themselves and their airplanes, flying a line with pressure on one side and disaster on the other. Whether they survived depended on the width of that line.
I dutifully carried the overloads and the drunks, and I managed to slog through fog and drizzle as successfully as most pilots. In snow, however, I was a thrown horseman who had not yet climbed all the way back into the saddle. Still haunted by the traumatizing ordeal in snow down Cleveland Peninsula and across Behm Canal the previous winter, I continued to step back whenever the beast reared. Most of the winter was mild, with only scattered days of cold, icy, snowy weather.
Then came March. Like a retreating lion turning to roar before disappearing into the brush, winter now unleashed snow squalls that swept through the region almost daily in thick, dark cells spewing gusty southwest winds. They seemed to stalk my routes relentlessly. Everyone had to detour, knock on multiple doors, and land along the way to wait. While other pilots eventually struggled through on most of their flights, though, I limped back to town on many of mine, shuffling into the operations room with taut lips and oily skin. One afternoon late in the month, company part-owner Terry Wills called me into his office and closed the door. Wills was one of the most popular pilots in town for his flying expertise and amiable personality. He fidgeted a moment after we sat. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he said, frowning, “but I’m going to have to let you go.” The office, a windowless, converted storeroom, suddenly felt overly warm. Wills said I was “too scared,” and that both pilots and passengers had commented on my trepidation.
Shocked, dismayed, I admitted snow was a nemesis but pointed out that I had otherwise held my own. “It’s almost April,” I pleaded. “The snow season is about over. You’re going to need all the pilots you can find for the summer ahead. Let me stay on till fall, and then I’ll leave before the snow starts up again.”
Wills consented to the compromise, perhaps in empathy over aviation-related stress. When he owned a previous, now-defunct air service in Ketchikan, he had had to deal with the crash of two of his airplanes. In one accident, the pilot stalled a Beaver after takeoff from the Deweyville logging camp on Prince of Wales Island, killing himself and all six passengers. Ever afterwards, he lived with daily apprehension about another tragedy. Now, chronic financial worries plagued him. Soon, suffering from hypertension, he would get out of commercial aviation altogether.
Before dark I took a quick walk on a path in the woods, deeply chagrined. Fired! Although Wills hadn’t stated so, the reprieve seemed conditional on future performance. I was on a quasi probation. Unless I redeemed myself over the next few weeks, I might not even make it to fall. Now the pressure was suffocating. The lion was finally inside the brush, but predators just as deadly prowled on. I’d have to slay each one.
In the first week of April, an Alaska Airlines 727 slid off the end of the runway at Ketchikan International Airport and caught fire after a botched approach in snow. Rescuers had to use crowbars to free the trapped cockpit crew, but only one passenger died. The accident reminded me that even the big boys, with their fancy instrumentation and intensive training and helping hands in the cockpit, were not immune to the consequences of pushing too hard. It reminded me that I was no half-god Hercules trying to perform an onerous Twelve Labors.
Still, the pressure....
In mid-spring I was assigned to fly two fishermen up to Sitka, the old Russian capital of Alaska on the outside coast of Baranof Island. A lucrative, two-day herring fishery would begin in that area at eight o’clock the next morning, and the men had to catch a 4 a.m. sailing of a seiner. Fog had grounded Alaska Airlines’ flights throughout Southeast, and the ferry to Sitka was not scheduled to leave Ketchikan until a day after the fishery ended. A floatplane charter was their last hope.
Rainfog plagued our flight right from takeoff, forcing me to grope my way around islets and up channels and shorelines. Sitka was reporting fair conditions, so I had hoped that the weather would improve by the time we got to the Chatham Strait area. Perhaps we’d even be able to climb high there and take a direct route to Sitka over the mountains on Baranof. But as we approached the Cape Decision lighthouse on the southern end of Kuiu Island, I saw that Chatham Strait beyond looked gray and dingy. The water, rain fog, and ceiling were all the same color. Now we would have to cross more than twenty miles of open water at low altitude out of sight of land and follow the shoreline to Sitka around Cape Ommaney, on the southern end of Baranof.
The long open-water stretch across the strait between Cape Decision and Cape Ommaney was uncomfortable even in good weather; the swells were usually too deep for a safe emergency landing, and the water was too cold to survive in for more than a few minutes. Miss Cape Ommaney in low visibility by navigating too far south and the next landfall would be the continent of Asia. Cape Decision seemed aptly named.
Normally, I would have decided to turn around under these conditions. Not now. Not on probation.
The fisherman in the right front seat must have sensed my tension. He leaned toward me. “Sure appreciate your flying us out,” he yelled. “The next two days have got to pay the bills till we go after salmon this summer.”
“Well,” I yelled back, “the strait’s a little marginal, but I’ll take a look.” Off the right side, the white lighthouse at Cape Decision slipped by in the rain, swells exploding against its rocky base. Moments later, the 185 crossed the eastern edge of the strait. With no land in sight ahead and the horizon blending into the rain and water, visibility seemed much lower. I descended to about 200 feet. Every few seconds I twisted my head for a glimpse of the receding Kuiu Island shoreline, trying to hold on to it as long as possible. With each glance the reefs and trees looked more ghostly. Suddenly, they were gone.
So far I had been navigating by familiarity or aeronautical chart. Now the compass became my primarily focus. The chart showed a magnetic course to Cape Ommaney of about 270 degrees, and I made a mental note that a 180-degree turn to 90 degrees would take us back to Kuiu Island, if necessary. Scribbling in my notebook, I computed that we would need about ten minutes to cover the remaining distance at our airspeed, which meant we should be able to see the Baranof Island shoreline a minute or two before that, depending on the visibility on the other side.
In between glances at the compass and clock, I watched the strait out my side window. Despite a light wind, the deep, undulating swells surrounding us foamed at the crests like frothing monsters snapping at the floats. Even the gigantic China Clipper of the 1930s would have broken apart trying to land here. Suddenly, the engine roughened.
Adrenaline prickled my skin, and I started a tentative turn back toward Kuiu. At the same time, a quick sweep of the instrument panel showed the manifold pressure, fuel pressure, oil pressure, oil temperature, cylinder-head temperature, and tachometer gauges to be giving normal readings. I stopped the bank, no longer sure I had actually heard roughness. The engine now sounded okay. Or did it? Somehow, its steady droning seemed—different. The fishermen were looking out the windows at the swells, showing no indication of having noticed a change. I decided I had probably simply experienced “automatic roughness,” a strange aviation phenomenon that occurs only over places where a safe emergency landing is impossible and goes mysteriously away as soon as a landing again becomes an option.
On and on we cruised across the strait. In the misty rain, with no land reference, the visibility might have been two miles or just a quarter of that. Nothing but the open North Pacific Ocean on the other side of Baranof; maybe it was unwise to head directly for Cape Ommaney. I turned to about 280 degrees. Better to hit the island too far north and have to fly south a bit to round Cape Ommaney than miss the whole thing.
Before actually expecting to see land, I began squinting into the murk ahead, cheating, hoping, longing. A turn back to Kuiu Island was gradually gaining in appeal over proving my value to the company, but I kept going. Baranof couldn’t be much farther ahead. I studied the chart again and again to estimate our position and reassure myself that I hadn’t somehow misinterpreted the proper direction.
The fishermen had struck me as seasoned and savvy, and when the full allotted ten minutes expired and land still had not appeared, I looked at the man beside me, half expecting him to point and say, “Right over there, son.”
“ ‘Bout time for ol’ Cape Ommaney to show up, huh?” he said instead. He joined me in peering out the windshield, and from the corner of my eye I noticed his companion lean over to look between the backs of our seats out the front.
Well, maybe a strong headwind, masked by the swells, was impeding our groundspeed. Could we have unknowingly entered Port Herbert or some other inlet on Baranof, with the shorelines on either side invisible in the rainfog and the head of the inlet about to appear? The continuing rolling, foaming swells below provided the answer: the water would have subsided inside an inlet.
I could feel dampness on my brow and under my arms. And damn, the engine was sounding rough again. I pushed the wheel forward and descended to 100 feet. Sometimes a slightly lower altitude yields better visibility. Not this time; the rainfog remained just as dense and gray and empty.
We could not possibly have already flown by Cape Ommaney in the fog too far to the south. After all, I had added a margin of 10 degrees. The lubber line in the compass still bisected the 28 that stood for 280 degrees. For extra insurance, I pressed the right rudder pedal and skidded the nose to 285 degrees, then 290. Could my arithmetic have been faulty? I scribbled on the chart again, and again came up with a ten-minute crossing.
“We lost, partner?” The rear-seat fisherman said, his words sounding more like an accusation than a question.
“No!” I barked in defiance of my thumping heart. Where were we? I could not have been this off on the time. The swells so close below looked larger than ever. The chart showed that if we had indeed missed Cape Ommaney, a 90-degree turn to the right would take us to the west coast of Baranof; if we were still over Chatham Strait, that turn would eventually intercept Kuiu Island. Either way, that tactic would lead to land.
I banked until the compass read north-northeast. “We’d better turn back,” I told the fishermen while leveling the wings. They sat in silence.
At this point I would have traded a year’s pay for an automatic direction finder on the instrument panel, which could have picked up the old Coast Guard beacon back at Cape Decision or one of several stations in the Sitka area. But like most bush planes, this one had no navigational radios at all. Because electronic navigational aids were so uncommon in the bush, navigational radios were dead weight in the eyes of air taxi companies; add another pound of payload instead.
After a west-northwest course the last few minutes, the switch to north-northeast, with the associated change in the appearance of the swell pattern, created some spatial disorientation. Suddenly, I was unsure of what direction we were following. The compass read about 15 degrees, but according to my senses we might have been flying in circles.
The needles on the two fuel gauges wavered just above the one-quarter marks, enough for another at least 150 miles before the engine sputtered and died. The chart clearly showed that regardless of our current position, 150 miles at 15 degrees would put us well into the archipelago, maybe even into the mainland. Where we ended up there was less important now than seeing land, any land. Nobody has moved southeastern Alaska, I reminded myself. It’s still there. Hold 15 degrees and you’ll find it.
Unless the compass was way off. When had the compass last been checked? When, in the busy, belt-tightening world of bush flying, had anyone bothered to check the compasses of any of our aircraft? Since we normally depended on our eyes for navigation, an inaccurate compass might go unnoticed or unreported for weeks.
“Where the hell are we?” said the man in back. “We want to go to Sitka, not Japan.”
“We should see land soon,” I answered. Although I ached to believe that comment myself, the unknown reliability of the compass planted a question mark on my 15-degree strategy. We could simply be paralleling the outside coast of Baranof. Or the inside coast.
I tuned the radio to 121.5 megahertz, the international mayday frequency. Maybe the Sitka Flight Service Station could hear us wherever we were, and despite our extremely low altitude use the transmission to give us a direction-finder steer.
“Fellows, I’m a little unsure of our position. I’m going to call for help.”
I picked up the microphone. “Sitka, this is Cessna three-four-seven-seven Quebec. Over.” I repeated the transmission.
A broken voice crackled unintelligibly in my headphones, but I caught the word “Quebec.” Someone was trying to answer me. I called a third time just as I noticed a darkish line on the horizon. Ground fog? My pulse quickened.
“Land!” cried one of my passengers. I stopped breathing for a moment.
The darkish line appeared to be far away, but seconds later the windshield filled with coves, crags, trees, reefs, and breaking swells. I turned to follow the shoreline and tried to correlate the features with the chart. The visibility and low altitude thwarted me, but not the fishermen.
“There’s Branch Bay!” one of them said. “I’ve holed up in there more than once.”
Branch Bay put us on the outside coast of Baranof some twelve miles northwest of Cape Ommaney. Being back in contact with land, knowing where we were—no prisoner ever breathed a deeper sigh of relief at a commuted sentence.
The rain diminished and the visibility improved as we flew up the coast, and so did the aural health of the engine. By the time we passed Crawfish Inlet we had climbed to almost 1,000 feet. The radio suddenly boomed in my ears: “Cessna three-four-seven-seven Quebec, Sitka Radio, how do you read?”
“Sitka, seven-seven Quebec, loud and clear, go ahead.”
“I’ve been trying to call you for twenty minutes,” said the voice in a rapid New England twang. “Do you require assistance?”
“Negative. We had a problem for a while, but it’s been resolved.” After landing in Sitka Channel, I deposited the fishermen at a downtown dock.
“Interesting ride, captain,” one of them said as they shouldered their dufflebags.
I found a soda machine in a nearby building and chug-a-lugged a cola. Then I rented a room in a downtown lodge for the night.
Before landing back in Ketchikan under a high overcast the next day, I checked the compass against the runway heading at the Ketchikan Airport and found it to be off by about 18 degrees north. No wonder I had missed Cape Ommaney to the south. I complained so bitterly to the company management that in a week all our compasses had been checked and adjusted.
Spring slid into summer and week after week of long hours, stuffed cargo carts, stumbling drunks, heavy takeoffs, back-to-back flights, weather delays, and too little sleep. “I’m hearing only good things about you,” Terry Wills said at one point. My improved standing might have merited reconsideration of my agreement to leave by winter, but the stress and fatigue of rebuilding my reputation extinguished any desire to stay on. Enough of this. Why wait for snow squalls to come blustering back, like rowdy drunks stumbling into the streets after the bars closed? In the fall I quit.
Teaching was an honorable, stimulating profession, especially at the college level, with regular hours and no marginal-weather situations. Summers off. I promptly signed up for a teacher-certification program through the University of Alaska’s Juneau branch and passed all courses. The following spring, the final requirement was six weeks of in-class student-teaching. Had I done my stint in upper high school, I might have had a third career in the classroom. But an eighth-grade English teacher thought my background in journalism would be helpful to her pupils in putting together a yearbook, so I chose that grade instead.
It had been a long time since I was in junior high, and I had forgotten than an eighth-grade classroom was a more appropriate training ground for a police cadet than a student teacher. It was also a good milieu for scream therapy. Occasionally I’d lose patience and yell, “SHUT UP!” so loud as to silence voices not only in our classroom but in adjoining ones, as well. The regular teacher smiled sympathetically from her desk as the little devils and I skirmished daily in the blackboard jungle. The playing field seemed to be structured fairly—one side outnumbered, the other outranked. Indeed, in the end the teacher apparently judged the contest to be a draw; her written evaluations helped send the kids to the next level and cleared me over this final hurdle to certification.
But my young adversaries won a symbolic victory: when I received my teaching certificate from the state, I put in a file with other documents, never to be used.