My First Alaska Flying Job
by
Jay Kelley
© 2005 Jay Kelley
All rights reserved
I was a flight instructor at Boeing Field in Seattle in the late 60's into the mid-70s..
One day a guy with a German accent, the chief pilot from an outfit in Fairbanks, walked in the door of the flight school to interview
a young man (flight instructor) who had applied for a job in Alaska. The Alyeska Pipeline Consortium was beginning construction
on the Alaska pipeline. The chief pilot for Aurora Air Service had come down to Seattle to hire a pilot to be based in Coldfoot, a pipeline camp
in the Brooks Range. The young flight instructor didn't have enough flight time. The man with the German accent was dismayed...
digusted...annoyed and irritated. I piped up and stated, " I have 1800 hours." He turned to me and said, "You're hired!"
Three days later I arrived in Fairbanks in the dead of winter. And so it began.
It was 45 degrees below zero in Fairbanks
the evening of my arrival. The chief pilot put me up in his apartment for the first three nights. The first night he offered to
show me Fairbanks night life. We went out to dinner, did some bar hopping and arrived back at his apartment at about 2:00A.M.
The sky was clear and it was really cold. We stood out on his little veranda watching the northern lights, me for the first time,
when we were both startled by what sounded like a D-9 Cat dragging a bunch of sheet metal down some distant street. As the noise grew
louder we both realized we were hearing a large airplane in trouble. And then overhead appeared a DC-6 in a right turn back toward
the airport. Three of its four engines were shut down and smoking with the props feathered. The fourth engine was making that
god-awful noise and also smoking.
Then it quit too and the airplane descended onto Geist Road near the airport where it crash landed into the trees killing the pilot and the co-pilot.
The flight engineer was seriously injured. The plane had been inadvertently filled with Jet A instead of Avgas. There was enough gas in the fuel lines to
get it airborn.
The next morning we drove to Aurora Flight Service and met everyone...
the owner and his secretary, the pilots, office girl, ramp rats and the mechanics. I was then assigned to ride along with a seasoned
pilot in a Cessna 207 with cargo to Galbraith Lake, a pipeline camp on the North edge of the Brooks Range. The weather was nasty
with ice fog and not much visibility. We climbed initially to 6500 feet and proceeded northwest in the gloomy winter light with an
atmospheric obscuration that allowed only vertical visibilty. I thought to myself,
"How am I ever going to be able to do this kind of flying VFR with no forward visibility?"
The next day, I rode along with the
chief pilot in more crummy weather on a long ambitious flight from Fairbanks to a distant Eskimo village, Kobuk, in Northwestern Alaska.
We carried a load of 2x4 claim stakes which were to be dropped along the shoreline of a frozen lake near Kobuk. We arrived in Kobuk after about 2 and
a half hours of VFR flying in zero zero visibility at 8500 feet. (Things are different now) At Kobuk we were greeted by a very friendly Eskimo
man named Howard. There we took off the back doors of the 207 and unloaded enough of the claim stakes to make room for me in the back.
I was sort of tied in with a rope but with enough slack so that I could push
bundles of claim stakes out the doorless opening on the right side of the airplane as we flew low and slow over the shoreline.
There was
a serious and rapid fluctuation of pressure in the plane with the doors off. This pressure fluctuation was greatly amplified when going slow
with the flaps down. It felt like my ear drums were vibrating in and out and it was an unpleasant sensation to say the least.
But after three loads,
we had them all dumped. Into the wing tanks we emptied the 2 five gallon containers of avgas that we had hauled with us in the nose compartment
of the 207. We flew back to Fairbanks.
Shortly after that, I took a little training from the owner who also gave me the check ride and they turned me loose. I flew through the winter
and into the summer and fall before being layed off due to my being low man on the totem pole and to a reduction in business as winter approached.
I had many enjoyable and exciting adventures during those first 9 months of Alaska flying. I returned to Seattle for a few months and then moved
to Cordova for an 11 year stay.
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©right; 2005 by Jay Kelley
All rights reserved