Bush pilots have always been heroes in my eyes

“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Growing up in rural Alaska around small planes like the Super Cub, Cherokee 6 and 207, I idolized the Bush pilots who flew them.

I can still vividly remember the awe I felt when Lucky Egrass or Bob Magnuson would land on a small gravel strip or a sandbar and step out of their planes like aerial mavericks, broad shouldered and grinning legends. These people delivered essential services to my family while we lived in remote places around McGrath, but they also brought thrills and excitement to a young boy’s life and imagination.

When I was a little boy, I thought everything I owned came from Jimmy Demientieff, the charismatic pilot who flew most of our mail to the mine on Magnuson Air. My mother wrote a prize-winning Christmas story recounting how our family, living alone at the Colorado Creek mine in Interior Alaska, had not received mail for weeks. Ron Rosander swooped in on Christmas Eve, delivering a month’s worth of mail, presents and supplies, literally saving Christmas. My wife still tells a very similar story about Pen Air legend Billy Tolbert swooping in through the foggy pass to deliver mail in Perryville just before Christmas, saving the holiday for us and our children. My first dream, like so many boys growing up in Alaska, was to be a Bush pilot like them.

One of my heroes, Orin Seybert, made his life and his business flying remote rural areas of our great state. During my college years and just after, I was fortunate enough to work for his company, Pen Air, and got to know the airline business personally. Many summers were spent in King Salmon working the ramp, loading and fueling planes flying constantly in and out of Bristol Bay villages during the hectic, frantic commercial fishing season.

The whole Bristol Bay fishery relies on cargo and transportation from local airlines, a symbiotic relationship that has stood for more than 50 years. As I finished my teaching degree, I worked in Pen Air’s training department and was impressed by the deep level of attention to safety and quality. I developed a deep abiding respect for the training, experience and expertise of the pilots I worked with, an appreciation still with me almost 20 years later. That sense of safety went with me as I flew countless hours in small planes with Bush pilots as an administrator in the Lake and Peninsula School District. Awe still describes how I feel about people like Billy Tolbert, Georgie Tibbits and Lloyd Seybert, pilots so calm and competent they embody Hemingway’s quote that “courage is grace under pressure.”

Through my experience as a teacher and then administrator on the Alaska Peninsula and Bristol Bay area, I spent a lot of time flying with and getting to know Bush pilots, and my admiration for them only grew. Serving three or more schools at a time, all only accessible by air, much of my job entailed flying village to village with these amazing men and women. Flying Bristol Bay and the Peninsula is not easy. On one side is the volatile Bering Sea, winds whipping across cold waters from Siberia. On the south side, the Pacific Ocean, swirling weather patterns in from warmer climates to the south creating massive clashes with colder air fronts. Separating them is the Alaska Peninsula, a thin strip of rough, mountainous terrain providing peaks, valleys, gullies and funnels to channel and swirl high winds, fog and freezing rain.

Through all of this pilots navigate the mountains, weather and passes, village to village, with an amazing record of safety and success. Small villages, and the schools providing education in them, still rely heavily on the local airlines providing transportation and essential services to them. Needless to say, many of the youngsters in these villages, like little Adam growing up in the McGrath area, look at the men and women flying in and out of their towns as heroes and dream of being pilots just like them.

I think back on my years flying the Bristol Bay and Lake Iliamna region in Cherokees and 207s and realize I owe each of them a debt of thanks for keeping me safe on each village flight.

Some of my closest friends are pilots. Some of my boyhood and adult heroes are pilots. I married into a family of pilots. There is a grace and almost mystical majesty in what they do; flying small planes over vast, wild expanses of the Last Frontier like cowboys roaming the ranges of the Wild West before the encroachment of civilization and modernization pushed them out.

Essential transportation and supply service in our great state still relies heavily on air carriers and the people who work for them.

Despite great efforts toward safety in the industry, each year planes go down and lives are lost. My heart and thoughts are with the families of those lost in recent airplane accidents in our great state. Each time we have an air carrier tragedy, I reflect with a heavy heart on the challenge of flying our state and the amazing men and women who do it.

With unpredictable weather and vast territory, the track record and safety of flying Alaska is truly amazing. Bush pilots are real Alaska icons, true heroes of the Last Frontier.

Adam Mokelke is principal at Burchell High School.