Hope bolsters pilot, families during glacier ordeal

When Don Erbey answered my call to his home telephone Wednesday night, I was surprised, and told him so.

“I’m alive,” he said.

And after watching this story unfold since Monday afternoon, it didn’t sound the least like a ridiculous summation of the obvious. It sounded like the very honest assessment of a man grateful for the opportunity to express the otherwise obvious.

He’s alive, and so are his four passengers and the National Guard airmen who risked their lives to rescue them after Erbey’s plane crashed on the Knik Glacier on Sunday. Despite the days and nights in the bleak, white wilderness waiting for rescue, they never lost hope.

It’s a harrowing tale, but one with such a happy ending it’s best suited for a Disney movie.

You can read the account on Page A1 — the downdraft that plunged them onto the glacier; the skillful emergency landing; the lack of emergency supplies; the new emergency locator transmitter (ELT) beacon that helped alert rescuers; the efforts by volunteers to relay messages between emergency workers and those stuck on the glacier; the rescue helicopter that flipped over on the glacier; the extra night on the glacier spent by two of the men and several of the rescuers; the return Wednesday of the last of those stranded.

What’s harder to describe in a news story is the hope, relief and stress in the voices and faces of the family members as they waited Tuesday night. Gracious, courageous, confident and cohesive, they answered questions of the press.

As I looked back through my notes of my first call to Beverly Erbey, Don’s mother, on Monday evening, then waiting for the rescue on Tuesday night, and waiting for the last two men to arrive at the hospital on Wednesday afternoon, they are filled with anecdotes that might not rise to the level of news, but paint a real human side to the story.

I lost track how many times someone told me I’d better be prepared to hear a lot of stories when “Donny” returned. One of his family members suggested I bring a fresh notepad.

“He’s a real talker.”

He’s such a talker that there are signs all over his shop reading something less-polite than “Shut up, Donny.” His wife, Cynthia, said Tuesday she might be tempted to say as much when she saw him again.

“It depends on if he kisses me first or tells me the story first,” Cynthia said.

He kissed her.

Another unflagging message from the Erbey family: Donny is a great pilot and as well suited as just about anyone to deal with an emergency. There was no lack of confidence, yet the strain of hours of worrying showed on their faces — from Don’s cherubic mother to his city councilman brother, but most of all on the face of Cynthia. Cynthia knew her husband was safe. She knew, just as did every other member of her family, but she admitted that until she could see him — could touch him — she could not relax.

Tuesday night, we were standing in Colville Logistics, which fronts the Palmer City Airport. The office above the hangar was crowded with family and friends of the Erbey and Lantz families, as well as members of the Alaska Air National Guard, staff at Colville, a few reporters and cameramen and two black cats.

Jeff Helmericks had opened his building for the group to get out of the chill and wind. No one was more grateful for it than the Mary Jan, Patrick and David Lantz of Galveston, who had already spent one night on the glacier and were fast to admit the unrelenting heat of Texas sounded very appealing to them.

Helmericks and Roland (Ron) Erbey, Don’s father, both pilots, started telling stories of their adventures, making light of things that went wrong. Ron Erby quipped that at $5 a gallon, someone needed to get back to that glacier to get the 80 gallons of fuel out of his downed plane. He didn’t know at that point if there’d be any other value in his six-seater Piper Cherokee. He still doesn’t.

It wasn’t all jokes. Ron admitted the stress had been hard on all of them. Even though it is a family of pilots — both Ron and Beverly Erbey flew as part of the Birchwood Civil Air Patrol — that had been through its scrapes and seen more than its share of crashes, the moments between knowing the ELT went off and that their son was safe were interminable.

“It’s been tough,” Ron said Tuesday. “It doesn’t affect you until it hits you in home plate.”

Beverly Erbey knows what it is like searching for a plane lost in icefields, and she knows sometimes they cannot be found.

On Wednesday, Patrick Lantz admitted to a reporter — and his stunned mom — that thought crossed his mind. Images flashed through his brain from the movie “Alive,” which depicts the real-life ordeal in 1972 of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes. They ate flesh from those who died so they could survive.

“Are we going to have to eat each other?” he said he asked himself. Those were in moments of what Patrick called “extreme fear.” But, he said, “Nobody was really freaking out.”

Coincidentally, the DVD “Alive” arrived in my mailbox Wednesday afternoon. I’d put it on my Netflix list weeks ago; the timing was eerie.

I could only wonder how much better that rugby team’s outcome would have been with new ELT technology, and be thankful, along with the Lantz and Erbey families, that Sunday’s crash had a much, much different ending.

Vicki Naegele has worked intermittently for the Frontiersman as an editor and columnist for 15 years. She lives near Palmer.