Talkeetna pilot celebrates 35 years of flying

TALKEETNA — While many people go their whole lives without ever catching a glimpse of Mount McKinley, Sheldon Air Service owner David Lee has landed a plane on the mountain more times than he can remember.

When Lee first came to Alaska from Minnesota as a 14-year-old, his brother was managing a hunting and fishing lodge 60 miles north of Talkeetna. It didn’t take long for Lee to “fall in love” with the state, he said, and by the time he was 18, the brothers were living in Talkeetna proper and working as licensed commercial pilots.

Lee’s career started with delivering helicopter parts throughout Alaska. After refining his skills flying five different aircrafts — four different kinds of helicopters and a Cessna 206 airplane — he started his own air service called “Leesaire” in 1984. At Leesaire, he transported an average 150,000 gallons of fuel a year to remote areas around the state.

Only two years later, in 1986, he began piloting scenic flights with Doug Geeting Aviation and later K2 Aviation.

It was like a whole new world had opened up for Lee. As a flightseeing tour guide, Lee met all kinds of people, from hunters and fishermen, to photographers and climbers, to longtime locals who just needed a ride to their cabin.

“It’s an awesome lifestyle,” Lee said. “We do just about everything.”

And he means everything. As a business owner — first of Talkeetna Air Taxi from 1989 to 1996, then of Hudson Air Service, now Sheldon Air — a pilot must also take care of day-to-day duties around the hangar.

“You’re the janitor, you’re the snowplower, you’re the pilot, you’re the correspondence person, you’re the dispatcher … there’s a lot of aspects to it,” Lee said.

Landing on and around Mount McKinley and other parts of the Alaska Range, though, seems like the fun part.

“The Mount McKinley area of the Alaska Range definitely never ceases to amaze me,” Lee said.

Flying throughout Denali National Park alone, Lee has logged more than 13,000 flight hours in his career.

But as jaw-dropping as the sights in that area are — as awestruck as he has been, standing on a glacier 1 mile wide and 3 vertical miles beneath the summit of Mount McKinley — Lee said the best part of his job is still the customers.

“The part I like best (about flying) is meeting all the people that come from all over the world to come and experience Alaska,” he said.

As a pilot, Lee has met avid climbers from all over the world, many of whom have made their mark on the world map in the Sheldon Air office. Several visitors have left small flags and even more have tacked monetary bills from their home country to the office corkboard.

Those who come just to look, not touch (or climb) a mountain bring something special to Sheldon Air, too.

“Because we’re in the tourist business, we deal with a lot of people that are happy,” Lee said. “It’s a real feel good business.”

But it’s not the same as it was 30 years ago. With communication and Internet capabilities getting better and more widespread, even in rural Alaska, Lee said, there’s a certain population that has nearly disappeared.

“There’s a lot of people that live off the grid, but the day of people living off the land and (the existence of) true mountain men … it’s very rare now,” he said.

Running sled dogs or riding horses out to a remote cabin, for example, just isn’t done anymore.

“I was really fortunate to be in the generation that I was in to be able to meet a lot of these old hunting guys and old trappers, and guys that were out there in the 1920s, ’30s, (and) ’40s,” Lee said.

Lee also had the unique opportunity of getting to know the famous Alaskan Bush pilot, Don Sheldon, through his wife (Sheldon’s daughter), Holly Sheldon Lee.

Though Sheldon passed away in 1975, his legacy lives on in his daughter — also a pilot — in various publications, and in his son-in-law, who always looks for a way to help an old friend or business partner.

When someone on his route needs groceries or extra fuel, if he’s not flying a tour group, Lee said, he’s happy to pick up what they need and drop it off for free.

Although Lee claims that flying, to him, is so easy that, “if they had bananas at both ends, monkeys could do it,” he said he recognizes the impact and value of his many years of experience behind the controls.

“As you get more experience, you get more comfortable with it, you hopefully get wiser and don’t get yourself into (trouble),” Lee said.

For more information about Sheldon Air Service, visit sheldonairservice.com or find them on tripadvisor.com.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.