It’s 6:00am and 47 degrees below zero, time to get ready for work. After hitting the coffee really hard and getting dressed for the elements you head outside to start your snow machine. As you walk out the door you realize how cold it is as the -47 degree air enters your lungs.
After a nice ride to the airport you start your preflight:
· Digging the aircraft out of last night’s snow drifts.
· Sweeping the snow off of the plane.
· Running back to the hanger to warm my hands, it’s so cold that after 15 minutes your hands start to hurt even with the best gloves on.
· Firing up the “Herman Nelson” heater to heat the engine and then the avionics. If you are interested in finding out what a “Herman Nelson” is you can view at http://www.herman-nelson.com/
· Fuel the aircraft – At these temps you have a high risk of static electricity so extra perceptions must be taken, put out your smoke J
· Now you’re ready to start the engine and allow for a full warm up without high RPM’s as you can crack the cylinders at this temp.
· Now that the warm up is complete you can put the engine blanket ( http://www.kennoncovers.com/enginecovers.htm ) on the aircraft to keep the heat in and also plug the aircrafts external oil heater in.
Now you are ready to get your manifest and determine if you are flying passengers or freight. If you are flying freight you will need to head back into the cold to remove your seats from your aircraft.
Ready to go but the temp and weather are not on your side, the temp has only climbed to -45 degrees and you are restricted from flying at anything under -40 due to the company SOP. The ATIS is calling the Visibility at ¼ mile and Ice Fog, looks like it’s time to hurry up and wait.
10:00 am – The temp is @ -39 and the ATIS is calling the weather at 500FT and ½ mile visibility, you are good to go. Now you get your passengers loaded, give a quick preflight briefing (Buckle up and Shut up) and call ground for a special VFR. Once you have your clearance you proceed down to the taxiway to the line of aircraft waiting to get out. Looks like this is going to take a while, you have 3 inbound IFR planes that take priority.
Finally you get your clearance and you are off, it’s only 15 minutes to your first stop and it appears it’s going to be a great day for flying in Western Alaska. Time to call the village agent to get updated weather for your first stop. You turn on the marine band VHF in your aircraft and you hear a lot of village chat (Most village households have a VHF radio in the house for communicating with other people in the village) so you wait your turn, Once you get in contact with the agent you ask about the weather and you are informed that it’s not good. Hmmm, what does “Not Good” mean for landing? You ask if he can see the airport from your location and he replies, NO. Time to go and look for yourself. Well he is correct, you are looking at ice fog that appears to go to ground level around the village. Your only option is to turn back or create your own instrument approach with your onboard GPS, risky business for even the more experienced bush pilot.
After deciding on the second option you get lined up on final and start your decent, 500ft – 400ft – 300ft and still no sign of the airport, you decide to give it another 100ft and then out of nowhere you spot the little gravel strip, what a relief.
After offloading the passengers and loading 1200lbs of freight yourself you repeat this process over and over again until your day is finally done. Your days ends with 7.5 hours of flight time after spending 13 hours on duty.
Now it’s time for a few beers with friends, a snow machine ride and off to bed so you can repeat this process again the next day.
Flying in the bush is very hard work with a lot of risk but the reward far exceeded. You will see scenery that people only dream of, work with great people from a very close community and provide a very essential service to remote Alaska.
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