FLIGHT

THOSE WHITEOUTS can be scary to fly in when everything is frozen.  Snow
everywhere.  Kobuk Lake is expansive and must be flown over when returning
from Upper Kobuk.  It's not a lengthy flight and it's beautiful when clear. 
It is against visual flight rules to fly when visibility is less than six miles or after 9 p.m.  Our pilots broke those codes.  There are many small airlines in the Kotzebue region, above the Arctic Circle, on the Chukchi Sea.  With a whiteout, the snow blows up from the earth and small crystalline snow falls from the sky and they combine, swallowing up the aircraft.  Two miles visibility is actually enough visibility if we can see the mountains to the north.  We changed our flight pattern, midflight, to go through a different pass when the weather was bad on our way to Kiana.  We saw the storm and went another way.  We land on the opposite end of the airstrip in Kotzebue when we flew after 9 p.m. and we scurried off the airfield, out a back gate, while the pilot waited a few minutes before flying back home.  He was wishing that he wouldn't get stuck in Kotzebue that night.

Rosa, in her late 40s, survived a small aircraft crash into the Kotzebue
Sound sixteen years ago in a very cold September.  She remembers the cold.  She was found floating.  One young daughter, 4 months old, survived.  One did
not.  Her husband's remains washed up on a beach a year later...his skull was
buried in a full casket with fancy new clothes purchased.  Her surviving
daughter had her head shaved with tubes poking out of it.  Her sister didn't
survive because she was too heavy and didn't float.  The pilot's body washed
up near the Baptist Church the following spring.  One engine quit and after
they were falling at a steep angle, almost straight down, the pilot managed
to level it off and tried to land on the point.  They didn't make it.  The
plane broke through the thick ice and Rosa was found on the ice.  It is a
common saying, among the older women, that if a newborn baby cries
constantly, that they are the soul of a person who died in an aircrash who
has come back to life.  They are reliving the memory of the crash when they
cry incessantly.

*Hotel 26* is the coded signal via CB radio that a small aircraft is approaching for landing.  We gather up our winter gear, pull on snow pants, bundle up warm and head out to a snow machine to get to the air strip.  Even the larger 737 flights are cancelled if the winds are at 40 knots.  That is a storm and this is spring in Northwestern Alaska.

copyright by
Patricia Aqiimuk Paul, JD
July 17, 1999

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