Scary Passengers
by
Jay Kelley

© 2004   Jay Kelley
All rights reserved

In all my years of flying air taxi in Alaska, picking up passengers from diverse locations and transporting them to where ever they were going, I can recall only two flights where I carried a “scary” passenger. As a young air taxi pilot flying out of Cordova, I was often assigned flights to and from the Aleut village of Tatitlek. Alcoholism was a problem back then, not only among many of the villagers, but among many of the people of Cordova as well. At one point in time, decades ago, Cordova had the dubious distinction in the “Guiness Book Of Records,” of having the highest per-capita alcohol consumption of any town in the USA.

It was a pleasant autumn day in 1977. I was assigned to fly a Cessna 206 to Valdez to drop someone off and then to stop in Tatitlek on the return flight to pick up one passenger for Cordova. On a nice day the flight to Valdez from Cordova can be flown direct. This route goes through the Chugach Mountains along the northern edge of Prince William Sound over the heads of bays, through mountain passes, past hanging glaciers, craggy peaks and cirques with grazing mountain goats and then down into Valdez.

The flight was gorgeous and one of my favorites. The return flight with the stop at Tatitlek was also fun with more shoreline and over-water flying along the route. Tatitlek at that time had only a 900 foot long gravel runway. It was always exciting to contemplate landing there. Taking off from Tatitlek could also be interesting, especially with a moderate to heavy load.

In the months that I had been flying to Tatitlek, I had gotten to know most of the native villagers, and was on friendly terms with all of them. I buzzed the runway to announce my arrival, landed, taxied into the parking area and shut down the engine to wait for him. Soon he came speeding into the parking area on a three wheeler. I knew who he was, but I had never flown him before. He staggered over to the airplane carrying one small bag. I had carried drunks many times in airplanes and because I knew them, I was familiar with their behavior when they had been drinking. This man greeted me in a friendly way, and even though I didn’t know him very well, he seemed to be sufficiently friendly and harmless that I felt no reluctance about flying him on to Cordova.

We got into the plane, me in the left seat and him in the right seat co-pilot position. This 206 had dual controls, but I had slid his seat back a bit so that I wasn’t concerned about his possible accidental interference with the yoke or the rudder pedals. Without conversation we taxied for takeoff to the far west end of the runway for a straight-out departure to Cordova. There was no wind that day, so even with this minimum load, I was focused on the takeoff run, rotation speed and liftoff.

With full throttle we started our takeoff run. At about 50 mph with 20 degrees of flap, I eased back on the yoke for our transition into the air. Just as we rotated, this guy in the right seat suddenly grabbed the co-pilot's yoke with both hands! I instantaneously backhanded him hard on the left side of his face. He let go of the yoke like it was a piece of hot iron. I turned to him and said in a stern voice, “Don’t ever do that again.”

He sat there in his inebriated state of mind mulling the situation over. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to do anything violent in retaliation for the stinging blow I’d laid against his left cheek, but his demeanor was hard to read. We flew along in silence for about the first 15 minutes of the 25 minute flight. He finally looked at me with a serious, but friendly expression on his face and announced, “You my friend now,… I take you goat hunting.” We landed in Cordova with no further words...I never did get a chance to go goat hunting with him.

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It was a nasty day in Cordova and Prince William Sound. Sometimes mid-summer weather in Prince William Sound can be especially awful with high winds, low ceilings and minimum visibilities. My flight assignment for the day was to fly the Prince William Sound parts run. This required carrying an assortment of parts, mail and supplies to various commercial fishing vessels scattered around Prince William Sound. There was at least one parts flight each day during the height of the commercial salmon fishing season. Boats scattered around the sound would radio their requests into the office via long-range single sideband radios and the dispatchers receiving the calls would acquire the parts from the various vendors and suppliers in town and stockpile them in the office until the flight was dispatched.

There was often a hodgepodge of stuff to deliver that could include anything from envelopes and a boxes of groceries, to whole lower units for the outdrives of gillnet boats or whole nets to replace ones lost or ruined. The pilot would try to organize the load both for the geographic order in which deliveries would be made and for weight and balance. Often the two didn’t match up very well, so weight and balance took precedence. This sometimes entailed unloading and reloading stuff in order to get at the item destined for that boat or taking a longer route to deliver heavy items first.

I was about halfway through the 5 hour parts run and heading for the west end of the sound to deliver to several gillnetters, when the Chitina Air Service dispatcher came up on the airplane’s single side band radio with a request.
I responded, “Go ahead, this is Jay in eight six tango.”
She said, “Jay, where are you?”
“I’m just coming up on the east entrance to Esther passage enroute to Port Wells to deliver more stuff to a few gillnetters and one tender.”
She said, Will you have enough fuel to stop on your way back at Peak Island to pick up Gerald Follis (not his real name).
I radioed back, “It’ll be a little tight, but if the boats I’m delivering to are where they said they’d be, I will be able to do that.”
She replied, “Give me a shout when you are headed this way to let me know if you’re able to stop at Peak Island.”
I keyed the mike, “Roger Roger, will do, over and out.”

I proceeded west into Esther Passage with a huge turbulent tail wind and just a few minutes later arrived at Port Wells and began looking for the various boats who needed the items aboard the Cessna 185 that I was flying. Looking for a “gray bowpicker with a black cabin” somewhere in Port Wells is like looking for a “late model white car” in the parking lot of the stadium on superbowl Sunday. There are lots of them, but fortunately, the airplane and the boats were also equipped with marine VHF communication radios, so with the help of the radio, I was able to locate the necessary boats with reasonable efficiency, deliver the parts and start my return trip to Cordova.

The order in which my deliveries were made had me leaving the south tip of Esther Island for Cordova. Peak Island would be pretty much directly along the route. I radioed Chitina Air that I was heading for Peak Island to pick up Gerald Follis. She came back, “Thanks Jay. I’ll let them know and they’ll be waiting for you on the beach.”

The visibility was about two miles and the head wind was about 40 knots with driving rain. I dead reckoned my way to the bay on the west side of Peak island where Gerald and his family lived during much of the year. Gerald was an old timer in his mid-60s who had built his own purse seine boat and had lived and fished in the Prince William Sound area all his life. I made a straight-in approach to the head of the small bay in the lee of the low land that separated the head of that bay from the windward east side of the island.

The water in the bay was pretty flat with gusts, but no chop. The tide was low exposing cobblestone-like rocks but no gravelly spot to beach the plane, so I shut it down and let it coast slowly to shore where it came to rest gently on the rocks. Members of the family and extended family (about 15 people) were standing on the beach watching me. I got out, grabbed a line attached to the rear cleat on the left float and turned the airplane tail to the beach. I put my back beneath the root end of the horizontal stabilizer and boosted the plane about a foot onto the beach to prevent the now incoming tide and strong off-shore gusts from setting it adrift.

Gerald was standing stiffly about 30 feet up the slightly sloping beach. His hands hung rigidly at his sides with palms turned back. His face was extremely flushed and even from 30 feet away I could see that his pupils were dilated. He looked at me without recognition and with a somewhat confused expression on his face. His sister came over to me, cupped her hand to my ear and in a whisper said, “Gerald has the DTs. You need to get him into town. He’s been drinking after-shave lotion because he ran out of booze.” She went on to tell me that I would probably have to call the police when I arrived at the dock on Eyak Lake because he wouldn’t want to get out of the airplane.

A sardonic thought went through my mind, ‘Oh boy, this ought to be fun.’ As it turned out, his 55 year old girl friend was to ride in with us. For that I was grateful, but still apprehensive about the possibilities. With the headwind it was still about a 60 minute flight to Cordova, all over open water in a storm, and I had only an hour and a half of fuel remaining. Gina, his girl friend led him down to the plane and with an assist from me, they both settled into the two seats directly behind me with Gerald on the right side. I had briefly debated with myself about his sitting behind me, but figured that I could easily keep an eye on him, and it would be difficult for him to reach the controls. It was turbulent and they would be snugly seat-belted for the flight to town.

Light on fuel and with the water outside the bay much too rough for take off, I taxied down wind to the mouth of the bay and made my takeoff run back into the bay. There was a strong headwind flowing over the terrain at the head of the bay. We were quickly airborne. We cleared the beach and the people below by a six or seven hundred feet. We were soon eastbound heading over very rough water in the rainy windy gloom towards Cordova. I didn’t attempt to make conversation, but did glance frequently at the instruments on the co-pilots side of the instrument panel so that I could get peripheral looks at Gerald without being obvious about it.

About 20 minutes into the flight my anxiety had let up a little and I was glancing less frequently at the right side of the instrument panel. Gerald seemed to be remaining calm. Suddenly there was a strange lurching motion from the airplane as if the load had shifted slightly aft . There was a big commotion from behind me. I turned in alarm to see Gerald apparently grappling with some kind of imaginary beast that was trying to attack him from the baggage compartment. His arms were flailing, his feet stomping and it appeared as if he was trying to push his monster back into the baggage compartment. Without thinking about it , I said loudly, “Settle down, Gerald, there’s nothing there. Tighten your seat belt please, we’re almost to Cordova.” Gina took over at that point and proceeded to try and calm him down. He stopped his flailing, but continued to scrutinize the empty baggage compartment with obvious distress and paranoia. Twice more before we arrived in Cordova, he grappled with the baggage compartment beast, a hallucinatory product of his brain due to severe alcohol poisoning and delerium tremens (DTs). Twice more I admonished him to settle down and it seemed to calm him a little. At one point I looked at the spiral chord attached from my headset to the phone jack plugged into the panel and hoped he wouldn’t think it was a snake or something.

It was a big relief to finally arrive and land. I pulled into the dock. There were a couple of dock hands there to help tie up in the wind. Inspite of all our coaxing, Gerald refused to get out of the plane. We had to call the police to get him out. Gerald subsequently quit drinking, vanquished his monsters, married Gina and lived a productive happy life until he died about 20 years later in his mid-eighties.

© 2004  Jay Kelley
All rights reserved