Growing up close to the water is a way of life for most “southeast-erners.” Let the crowd at Sitka’s Fourth of July parade catch sight of the U.S. Coast Guard contingent marching down Main Street, and enthusiastic cheers erupt. Most everyone knows someone whose life has been spared when the Coast Guard intervened.
“And nobody,” adds Burgess Bauder, “who does anything around the water up here will bad-mouth the Coast Guard. There’s a whole bunch of testosterone associated with what those guys do. And they do a great job. They risk their lives to save the lives of people who have often made some really dumb decisions. Those guys are genuinely, certifiably heroic.”
Flying a helicopter virtually anywhere in southeast Alaska brings with it the deadly, and almost continuous, threat of navigational error. A pilot usually advances with the body of his aircraft pointing into the prevailing wind. Cocked to one side at an angle occasionally as severe as forty degrees, the helicopter will nevertheless advance along at a steady pace in the intended direction. This is called “crabbing.” The critical dilemma the pilot faces is that when the aircraft is so engaged,
the radar points off to the side, leaving those inside the helicopter essentially blind in bad weather.
No matter where pilots fly in southeast Alaska, they are always fighting head winds of some kind. At such times, new pilots often feel frustrated; it seems that they can never make the plane fly fast enough or straight enough. It is something that seasoned pilots eventually come to accept.
Helicopter pilots typically fly within sight of shore at about a three-hundred-foot level. That’s the magic altitude. The majority of the maneuvers they perform, including the hover-downs to the water, are generally predicated off the three-hundred-foot mark.
Above all, a pilot cannot permit him- or herself to become distracted. Screw up in bad weather, allow something to draw your attention to a problem you may be having with one of your engines, as the chopper pilot did in 1985 over on Kodiak Island, and you could end up exploding into a ball of flames, killing everyone aboard on some lonely, barren hillside, just as he did.
In Alaska, virtually no one, except search and rescue pilots, flies after dark. During the fierce winter storms that routinely pound southeast Alaska and dump upward of two hundred inches of rain, and tens of feet of snow a year in some places, entire weeks may pass without a single civilian aircraft flying into or out of some of the remote villages that dot this vast land.
In cases of emergency, it is the search and rescue helicopter squads in Sitka who are called upon to respond. Flying blindly through mountain passes at night is not at all unusual. At such times, it’s like trying to navigate through the mountains while trapped inside the prisonlike confines of an aircraft with no windows, no radar, and only one’s ability to use a map, a stopwatch, and instruments to see one through.
Even with the advent of the high-tech global positioning system (GPS), a pilot’s worst fear remains that of running into a mountainside. Only in recent years has the GPS been used in conjuction with the radar picture, allowing pilots to fly with minimal dependence upon visual input as long as they maintain adequate clearance and stay the course. Whether it is a mission to Skagway, Lynn Canal, Haines, Juneau, Hoonah, Gustavas, Yakutat, Chatham Strait, Angoon, Kake, Meyers
Chuck, Pelican, Port Alexander, Point Baker, Rowan Bay, Security Bay, Petersburg, Wrangell, or Ketchikan, the trick is to remain on the beaten path as long as you can. The real adventure begins when you are forced to veer off and venture out into the wilderness alone.
In bad weather, the winding, cliff-lined route through North Inian Pass that leads into the unlighted dirt runway outside the ancient Tlingit village of Hoonah is exacting enough to turn a young pilot’s hair prematurely gray. “When you commit to go in there,” says one longtime pilot, “you’ve just got to have that place etched in your mind.”
In freezing weather, when ice begins forming outside, the little red ice-detector warning light will begin to pulse. Then the deicing heater will switch on. Soon, the ice will begin breaking apart and sliding across the windshield in irregular islands, offering up a disorienting visual display.
Other times, pilots will face the thick, frosty layers of fog rolling in off the massive glaciers near Petersburg and Wrangell, or up in Glacier Bay or Lituya Bay. Though the sophisticated radar capabilities of the H-60 are far superior to those of the old H-3, those fine white crystals can render even that system useless in just minutes.
Calls to aid a stroke or heart-attack victim, or perhaps someone who has sustained a serious injury in an automobile or snowmobile accident, or while fishing or logging, are all understandable. But other missions often leave pilots questioning the judgment of those who summoned them. At such times, a Coast Guard pilot will invariably find himself saying, “This better be for real.”
As storm warnings were being broadcast over the radio, alerting all mariners, one pilot who was forced to fly through horrific weather to pick up a man injured in a bar fight in one of the villages found himself thinking, Why did this drunken jerk get us into this position? Why do we have to go out on a night like this and risk all our tails just to save this guy’s sorry ass?
On a clear, moonlit night, a pilot wearing five-thousand-dollar night-vision goggles (NVGs) can see almost as well as one flying through broad daylight. On dark nights, when no moon is showing, he can still spot the flame of someone lighting a cigarette match as far as ten miles away. Once, having searched long and hard for an overturned boat on
a wet and miserable night in a remote bay over on Kodiak Island, Capt. Jimmy Ng spotted something. It turned out to be the tiny sparklerlike flicker of a Bic lighter that wouldn’t ignite. Though one youngster died from hypothermia after being trapped beneath the boat, two severely hypothermic men, one of whom was the boy’s father (both men had tried repeatedly to swim under the boat and save the boy), still managed to convey their position, saving both of their lives.
About once a month, a seasoned pilot will fly into a situation where his awe of, and his affection for, Alaska is overwhelmed by some discomforting factors that begin to gnaw at his psyche. Flying along at better than one hundred miles per hour in high winds and torrential rains in “zero-zero” weather (with no ceiling and no visibility), crabbing sideways as he goes, all the while fighting against the dead-man’s state of total vertigo, is enough to make a pilot want to crawl up into the fetal position and pull a blanket over his head.
Seasoned pilots flying out of Sitka know only too well what it’s like to travel along in total darkness through a blinding snowstorm up the ninety-mile-long fjord of Lynn Canal to Haines or Skagway to make a pickup or delivery with nothing but fluorescent green ridges on a tiny radar screen pointing the way. Caught in the whiteout conditions of a blizzard, the view from the pilot’s seat is obliterated. The result is sensory deprivation. Then the trip becomes a carnival ride, with the lives of everyone on board resting on the pilot’s experience, savvy, and ability to adapt. At such times, copilots, rescue swimmers, and flight mechanics alike get to experience one another’s threshholds for fear, their own included. Everything that they are, and everything that they have learned, or failed to learn, through the years will dictate how they respond.
Shortly after one well-known Sitka pilot first arrived in Alaska, he came very close to running into some real estate under those exact conditions. He was flying down Lynn Canal at the time, returning home to Sitka in the dark after plucking several injured, but grateful, survivors off the glacial crash site of their downed bush plane, and was about halfway through a ninety-degree course correction when his navigator, who was seated behind him, suddenly inquired, “Hey, is there a reason we’re flying at only sixteen feet?”