Two Kinds of Flying: Winter Operations in Southeast Alaska

Removing the snow from last night.

“Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There's never a letup, it's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, and you gotta get it out, but the more you get out, the more keeps coming in”. Newman said it best in an episode of Seinfeld, it never stops, and not only the mail, but UPS, Fedex, and typical freight orders from town. During the wintertime in southeast the people don’t just up and leave until the cruise ships come back, they get order happy on amazon and keep the pilots at Taquan busy on through the new year. With more and more people taking advantage of amazon prime the loads double yearly and we fly more and more boxes out of Ketchikan to the smaller communities in southeast Alaska. With that increase in mail also comes the hard to work with weather of an Alaskan winter. After the summer solstice, the days begin to get smaller and smaller until the sun isn’t up until 8am and back down at 3pm. With the shortening of the day the amount of time we have to fly decreases, but the amount of flying needed to be done doesn’t change, people need to get home and important items need to make out to the communities. Having thirty to forty minutes between flights quickly becomes five to ten, just enough time to recycle some coffee, reload the plane and your thermos, and get fuel. The flying windows also get even smaller when the weather stops coordinating, if it isn’t early morning advection fog, its wind, rain squalls, snow squalls, or temperatures so low the saltwater freezes to the aircraft. At twelve degrees saltwater will begin to freeze and make aircraft controls harder to use and your floats an ice rink. If it snowed the night before you now have to de-ice and de-snow the aircraft, which and take upwards of an hour depending on the thickness of the snow, if it froze, and if you can hose it off with the deicing sprayer. Fortunately, we regularly plow and salt our dock at Taqaun but not all locations we fly to have those tools or necessarily the people to do the job. The airport dock is one such treacherous place that if you don’t take you time and get the plane slowed down enough you end up sliding down the dock holding onto a wing rope trying to find a spot your boots finally catch grip and you can tie up. To add to that ninety percent of the time the dock ropes are frozen and require some bending and kicking to get the plane secured. A few times I have gotten onto docks and began digging through a foot of snow trying to find a rope to tie the plane up. With this increase in excitement also come an increase in boredom, we can go weeks without flying to certain locations due to weather. One such location that we visit rarely in the winter is the small community of Hyder on the Canadian border southeast of Ketchikan. It is uniquely located within the Misty Fjords and its location further inland gives it much colder temperatures than Ketchikan, with almost a twenty degree difference its hard to find days warm enough to even land there. Many of the bays and inlets that the communities we service have a tendency to freeze during the winter and will only stay clear if the winds can blow the ice out of the bay or prevent the ice from freezing over the top of the water, this can often create ice fog that will blow off the top of the water in a very spectacular fashion. Fortunately, with ferry service to Prince of Wales island (POW), where most of the communities service reside, we can send a box van over that can deliver a lot of the mail. Even though most of the towns on POW are on the road system there are three that you cannot access via the road, Edna Bay, Port Protection, and Point Baker. Reliance on flights is one of the disadvantages of remote living and a few times this year we have had over a thousand pounds of dog kibble stacked in the freight room, of course the dogs in the remote town then get to eat salmon and much finer fare until the dog food comes in.