Engine Failure

I ended my last post with this line….

“Anyway I wish him the best of luck.  We always say its better to be lucky than good.”

I guess that speaks volumes now because my dad was very lucky.  On April 1st, 2009 at approximately 1:30 PM Alaska time,  my dad was flying from Scammon Bay Alaska to Bethel Alaska when the engine on his Cessna Caravan II failed.  Being a single engine airplane he and the other pilot were without power and had to make an emergency landing.  When an engine goes out on an airplane like that you have very few options on where you are going to land.  Without power they fall out of the sky petty quickly.  They were able to bring the plane down on a frozen lake in the middle of the tundra roughly 90 miles from Bethel.  Luckliy neither of them were injured in the crash.  A national guard helicopter was dispatched from Bethel to rescue them but had to turn around due to bad weather.  The Alaska State Troopers have begun putting together a ground based search party out of Chevak Alaska which was the closest village to the crash site roughly 50 miles away.  There is a pretty bad blizzard working its way through the area so plans were made to drop supplies to help them weather out the storm holed up in the airplane.  I’ll post again when I know more.

dad-plane-crash

My dad has been a pilot since the late 70’s and is a very competent pilot.  This was his second day on the job with Hageland Aviation which has been in service since 1981.  I have flown many a flight with them during my tenure in rural Alaska.  They are a very safe company and I would fly with them any time.  The Cessna Caravan II uses a turboprop engine which usually is very reliable, so it will be interesting to see what caused it to fail.

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