Float Plane Pilots are Aging Out

Airplane pilots are aging out, with new pilots below replacement levels.  Management firm Oliver Wyman estimates a deficit of 8000 commercial pilots now, rising to 30,000 by 2025.

Our Piper PA 20, view from front porch

This is particularly true for the tiny subset of float plane pilots, who comprise just 3% of total pilot numbers (including my husband).  The 2021 FAA statistics counted 161,459 private pilots, so we can infer fewer than 5000 float plane pilots in the country.  Most of them are in Alaska, which has far more seaplane bases (140) than any other state in the country (Florida has only 44).  As these flyers retire, Alaska’s iconic form of transportation is diminishing. 

Many reasons contribute to the decline in numbers.

1)      1.  Because so few pilots are licensed to fly float planes, the pool of insured planes is smaller, resulting in high rates.  Two years ago, an air taxi pilot told us that his insurer announced a TRIPLING of his rates for floats, so he cancelled that summer service altogether.

2)      2.  Pilots with planes on floats in summer and skis in winter have to change out the undercarriage seasonally, an expense that wheeled planes lack.  For our small Piper PA-20, the cost is $600 to shift from floats to skis plus $50 each spring and fall to haul the plane in and out of the water.  The price is surely higher for bigger, heavier planes, even for air taxis that invested in the expensive equipment to handle these transitions themselves.

3)      3.  It is much more expensive to learn to fly now than 30, 40, 50 years ago, regardless of the undercarriage, but most people start with wheeled planes and then pay for 8 extra training hours to learn water take offs and landing skills.  My husband paid about $100/hr twenty years ago, starting with wheels and then added additional training for floats (and skis).  The total expense over the years he estimates at $10,000.  Currently, I see estimates of $20-25,000.  People who learned to fly as cadets or in the military enjoyed a substantial financial savings.

4)    4.    Many destinations for float planes are remote lodges, homes, and natural settings, so they may lack back haul cargo or passengers to cover the cost of the return.  As a result, float plane expenses for both the owner and the passengers can be higher than wheeled air taxis, which can have a steadier income flow from one rural or city airport to another.    For example, if I want to engage an air taxi at a time of year with few other passengers, I have to charter the whole plane, essentially paying round trip for my one way flight.  On such occasions, we pack the plane with supplies that we cannot fit in our little plane, like plywood or 100 lb propane tanks.   

5)     5.  Because the floats add more weight to a plane than wheels, a comparably sized wheeled plane can haul more cargo.  On the other hand, the floats of larger, commercial air taxis have (narrow) storage space for smelly stuff, like trash, garbage, and fresh animal skins.

Civil Air Patrol at Lake Hood, Anchorage

My husband and I live at a remote, fly-in only location.  Even here out in the boonies, we are aware of the following pilots who have hung up their wings:

In one small, rural community near us (population 2000), one air taxi owner/pilot got cancer and lost his medical approval to fly.  He sold his planes to private pilots.  Another was appalled to find that his hangar collapsed from heavy snow, pancaking both of his planes.  “Well, he observed, philosophically, “More time with my grandkids.” A third air taxi couple retired, and several years later, sold their dock and office to an out-of-state pilot who flies in the summers only and promptly doubled the rates given the dearth of competition.  Two accomplished pilot friends in their 80’s, one commercial and one private, may be wondering when their last flight will be, and to whom they can sell their immaculate float planes.

Further north, the FAA grounded a man who trained and examined a generation of float and ski plane pilots, reducing the paucity of people qualified to do so.   

In Anchorage, a flight teacher who used to do touch and go’s on our lake has retired.  Whoever bought her planes did not buy the business, too.  A phenomenally knowledgeable air taxi pilot in Anchorage retired to Louisiana, near relatives.  A veterinarian who used to fly to remote locations to care for racing and other dogs sold his plane to a friend of ours when he aged out.

Obviously as people age, they make different decisions about business or pleasure, based on health and expenses.  But I can’t help thinking that I am seeing, if not an end of an era, a dramatic reduction of float plane competent pilots.  This saddens me. 

Float planes can travel where wheeled planes cannot – to pristine lakes, glacier fed rivers, gorgeous log lodges and modest plywood cabins.  They connect technology with nature, air with water, noise with silence.  They travel where roads and bridges would be prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, leaving little trace on the landscape.  They require no runway. 

I salute all float plane pilots, past and future.  If you, as a reader, are not one, I encourage you to add to your bucket list a flight in a float plane to some lovely destination.  It will be memorable.   

Alaska Civil Air Patrol: Search and Rescue Training

 

The Civil Air Patrol is the civilian auxiliary of the US Air Force. Its missions, since formation in 1940, are emergency services, aerospace education, and cadet development.  Throughout the country, its squadrons are often the first people in the air to photograph damage from floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, and to assist in locating lost hikers, boats, and planes.  Among the states, the Alaska Wing of CAP (akwg.cap.gov) performs many search and rescue (S&R) operations.  These emergencies require both practice and coordination among pilots, ground crew members, and communicators.  Lectures and simulations are useful, but nothing is better than real experience.

 

That’s where I fit in.  Although I am not a CAP member myself, my husband is.  Several times per month, I receive a call to “put out the beacon.”  This means that one of CAP’s seasoned check pilots has decided to train another flyer to detect and home in on an emergency locator device that we keep at our remote home This gives the other pilot more than half an hour's flight over largely uninhabited land to find us.  

Summer or winter, I flip the switch and position the yellow box and antenna on a nearby tree stump, where its signal will not be obscured by our metal roof.   Pilots flying north from Anchorage eventually detect the distinctively annoying tone.  To determine the direction from which the signal is emanating, the pilot engages in one or more wing nulls, which is a circling maneuver in which the wings block the transmission from the source location, enabling the plane to skew closer and closer to its destination.   Most of the time, after flying directly overhead, the pilots give us a wing wag of thanks and then fly back to base.

 

Other times, we mix it up.  In the summer, I sometimes take the beacon with me in the kayak and head out to some spot on the lake, simulating a submerged plane or a floating pilot or emergency bag.   This winter, the check pilot asked us to incorporate ground to air signalling.  What a great idea!  We considered laying out a blue tarp (known as a signal of emergency) but because of winds, I decided to try a signalling mirror and a ground indicator made of logs.  Because the afternoon was sunny and beautiful enough that a few recreational flyers were in the vicinity, I chose not to use a symbol of true emergency, like an F, which means “need food” or two parallel lines, which indicate injury.  Rather, I formed on the frozen surface of the lake in front of our cabin, two large L’s out of logs, each one about 12 feet by 7 feet.  The CAP pilot, flying at an altitude of 500 feet discerned both the signal of “Lima Lima” which means that “All is well,” and my random flickers of the signalling mirror, before returning home from successful S&R mission training.  For higher planes, a bigger shape would be important.

 

This signalling practice was as useful to me as it was to CAP.  I had to think about the relative positions of the plane, sun and mirror to make effective use of a simple hand mirror.  I also saw how much the logs sank into soft snow, obscuring a lateral view. I recommend that anyone who spends time in remote locations practice familiarity with these symbols.

In future, I look forward to additional signalling practice with the CAP pilots, pleased that I can enhance their ability to detect and interpret audible and visible emergency indicators... before they are called out for a serious situation.  

     

 

Three Recommended Winter Tie Downs for Ski Planes

Black Diamond Ice Screws

For remote flying in Alaska - which includes rural airports, private strips, and landing on frozen lakes and rivers, prudent pilots create means for tying down a plane to protect it from sudden wind gusts with quick release for departure.  We use the three methods described below: for tie downs elsewhere, we stow ice screws and rope in the plane. For the tie down on the frozen lake at home, we shove boards through holes in the lake, and for easy and fast departures, we park the plane's skis on slick covered planks.

Ice screw

ICE SCREWS:
In our plane, we keep a 75 foot length of heavy duty nylon rope and three ice screws, which are really designed for ice climbing.  Made of aluminum with a steel tip to shed weight but remain strong, they weigh less than one pound each.  Ours are about 8 inches long.  We paid about $55 each.

https://blog.weighmyrack.com/black-diamond-ultralight-ice-screws/

Once he has taxied to a stop, Bryan picks three points (under the U brackets on the wings for tie downs and near the tail), hand turns the screws (easily) into the snow and ice and then lashes the plane to these anchor points with the rope.

He has done this at transient parking spots, for example, at Willow Airport (in Alaska) that lack permanent tie downs, as well as off-airport locations.

plane plugged in and tethered with ice screws

They are a cheap, light, small, and easy tool for winter safety.

NOTE:  These screws are not appropriate for mud or soil.

We received this excellent tip from long time flyers, George and Dorothea Murphy, who used ice screws over decades of Alaska bush flying.

SUBMERGED BOARDS:
A  second tie down is one we use all winter at home.  Here, Bryan uses our 8 inch diameter ice auger to cut two holes through several feet of ice on either side of  where we plan to park the plane.  Into each of the open holes, we drop a board through which a thick nylon rope has been looped and knotted.  We poke and prod the board until it pops horizontally beneath the ice.  When the ice hole freezes solid, the rope is locked in place until spring.  We thread the above surface lines through a pair of orange traffic cones set over the holes, so they are easy to find after snow storms.  We learned this useful technique from Larry Schachle.  In May, the lake ice breaks up and the boards float to the surface.  We retrieve them by kayak.

Windsock Value in an Era of GPS? Very, Sort of, Sometimes.

Our windsock in front of cabin and plane

A contemporary pilot, outfitted with GPS and other equipment, might understandably wonder why a simple, old fashioned airport windsock is still useful.  Who cares?   Bush pilots, among others. 

For one thing, even GPS systems rarely show ground speed at destination.  For another, ours conks out below about +10 degrees on winter flights in our cold Piper PA-20.

The first time this happened, my husband stuffed the tablet between his body and his quilted Carharrts to warm up, but it still did not turn on for 20 minutes, which happened to be the duration of the flight from the nearest airport to our home.  Fortunately, this was a familiar route.  But the mountainous terrain, rivers, glaciers, woods, and bogs result in very different wind, ice, snow, and temperature over very few miles, here.  It is not safe to presume a condition at another location.  The bright orange windsock next to a runway is, therefore, a welcome source of at least one piece of critical information.

Bought Site Unseen - Two Remote Alaska Cautionary Tales

People believe scams of all sorts - Nigerian princes wiring money, Russian women that really want  you, resumes describing extraordinary accomplishments.  So I guess I should not be surprised by the naivete of people who buy remote land, site unseen, in Alaska and then plan to move there. Even if the long distance purchase is a legitimate plot, not set in a mucky bog or on an eroding river bank, the challenges of this sort of life deserves more research... and introspection ... than some people give it.

Below are two, recent cautionary tales of people - one from New York and the other from California - whose dreams of living in the Alaska bush came to a rapid, rude awakening.

1. 

   We live in a forest - fuel and construction

   The first story made its way into Alaska newspapers. A film student in New York City (a Russian national) bought a plot in the Interior of Alaska, north of Fairbanks. Somehow, he met or made contact with a man who had a little cabin in the vicinity. The two agreed to meet on site and help build each other's structures, which was a relief to the New Yorker. He flew to Alaska and bought supplies that he figured he might need (never having been there), including a satellite phone, a rubber raft (?), his first gun, a tarp, and some food. He did not bring a tent.
   When the air taxi dropped him off, he did not schedule a return flight or a fly-by check, because he figured he could call for it. Alas, his satellite phone never worked and the neighbor never showed up. The alleged cabin was just four walls of a shed with no roof yet. The increasingly disillusioned traveler quickly realized that the location lacked any sizable timber for construction (or fuel), and his only protection from the millions of mosquitoes was a meager tarp for a roof over the other shack.

Almost 2 winters of wood - a bit more to go

With food dwindling and humiliation growing, he inflated his raft and started down river, hoping for rescue. Finally, he succeeded in flagging down a pilot who sent help, just in time, since his raft was deflating on a river rimmed with bear tracks. He left the state and put his property up for sale. I wonder what stories he told when he returned to the Big Apple.

2. The second story was told to me by the air taxi staff that flew a California dad and his 18 year old son out to remote property they had bought about an hour's flight north of Anchorage. The family had loaded a U-Haul trailer with all the supplies they could think of and drove up the Alcan Highway. I can imagine their excitement, can't you? At Lake Hood, they chartered two beavers (airplanes) to transport both their cargo and themselves. Shortly into his return flight, one pilot realized that he still had some of their gear on the plane. When he returned to where he had dropped them off, he encountered the son in a total emotional melt down. Apparently some small sliver of reality had sunk in. Was it the remoteness? All the work? A plot of land far different than expected? Whatever the cause, the two men jumped on the plane for a back haul to Anchorage, leaving everything behind. They subsequently sold the land, complete with whatever supplies bears had not punctured or hauled away.

View from a plane - no neighbors

I have elsewhere described the profound ignorance I confronted as I struggled to live here. Even though my husband had visited our property summer and winter before buying, we STILL did not really understand what we had because the undeveloped property was covered with dense thickets of alders and devil's club, along with decades of fallen trees that obscured the natural lay of the land. Bit by bit, we cleared patches for gardens, orchards, and structures, but we clearly made some mistakes of placement that have required double work to rectify later.

Need more pike for dinner, ice fishing

My recommendation for people who think they want to live remotely is to visit several parts of Alaska first. Do you like the treeless tundra up North? The green rain forests and islands of Southeast Alaska? Or other ecosystems in this huge state? Next, return and rent a home in the region you prefer.  If your goal is a "do it yourself remote life,"rent a dry cabin (no running water) down a rutted dirt or gravel road some distance from municipal conveniences.  Get your bearings. Do you have to haul water? How much fuel do you need to cook and stay warm and dry? Some people can't take the silence. How long is your growing season?  Learn before you make a financial, physical, and emotional commitment to a very different lifestyle in a  land far, far away.

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Winter Ski Plane Challenges in Remote Alaska

Winter flying introduces a number of duties and challenges not encountered in warm weather, but there are some advantages, too. Below are a few anecdotes from our ski plane flights, as we fly to and from our remote home in the Alaska Bush.

PRE-FLIGHT:
Warm Up:  Like any car in cold climates, we have to warm up the plane, since we do not store it in a hangar.  The day before a flight, Bryan unravels a long blue electrical cord  stored behind a cedar loveseat on our front porch, and threads it from an electric plug on the outer wall, down through the snow to the frozen lake where we have tethered the plane to two boards frozen beneath four feet of lake ice.  With the cord, he charges the plane's battery, since its performance degrades in cold temperatures.

The next day, an hour before the flight, we pre-heat the plane. When we first bought the aged plane (a 1954 Piper PA-20), the owner gave us an ancient Red Dragon heater that he had not used often.  To utilize it, we drag it down to the plane in a little black plastic sled, along with a 20 lb propane tank, a board (as a flat, hard surface for the heater), a battery charger, and a five foot long heating tube (that you shove up into the engine compartment).  Unfortunately, the tube  was so perforated with tiny holes that it took us 45 minutes to pre-heat the engine.  Not a fun wait at freezing temperatures!  Once we figured out the problem, we bought a new one for $200 that cut the time down to 15 minutes.  Well worth it.   Until... one day, when the low temperatures and the low voltage battery charger conspired to cause a near emergency.  The charger was underpowered for the job on a particularly cold day.  It had enough power to generate a hot flame but not enough to push the heat through to the plane's engine.  The tube caught fire!  We lacked a handy fire extinguisher but Bryan yanked it out of the cowling and tossed it on the snow, where the fabric sheath disintegrated into fluffy, gray ash. We learned several lessons that day.  One is to keep a fire extingisher with the dragon heater.  Another is to make sure that the bungee cords of the cowl cover are totally detached from every single hook for a rapid whisk away from the nose cone.  A  third is to utilize my snowmachine instead of the modest battery charger for future power (and the added convenience of grooming the landing strip after he departs).

Autumn: Moose Hunting and Float Plane Seasons End; Permanent Fund Dividend Arrives

Other parts of the country refer to this time of year as Autumn or Fall. In Alaska, we refer to its functionality as “the end of moose hunting season” or “the end of the float plane season” or, soon, Freeze Up, when bogs and shallow lakes freeze, followed by slow moving sloughs, creeks, and finally, rivers. It is also time for the Permanent Fund Dividend, or “PFD” checks which are distributed to every resident Alaskan in October (along with the predictable retail sales campaigns hoping to capture some of that windfall).  




End of moose hunting season:

Cow and calf swimming; don't shoot.

August is the rainiest month in South Central Alaska, followed by September, so it always rains on moose hunters (the season for residents runs from mid-Aug to mid-Sept, and for non-residents, about 10 days in early Sept). This year it has rained almost every day for three weeks. I feel like Mrs. Noah. Last year it rained for ten days straight. I pity those out-of-state hunters, clutching their $400 big game licenses (but that cost is just a drop in the bucket. Guided, trophy moose hunts are advertised for $10,000 – 16,000 per person). There they sit, dressed in their Cabellas outfits, surrounded by a mountain of gun cases, coolers, and butcher bags, waiting, waiting, waiting in the lobby of one Anchorage air taxi or another as their vacation time ticks down to a disappointing end. Every once in a while, sitting in our remote cabin, listening to the rain beat on the metal roof, we'll be surprised to hear a small plane, followed by two or three more in quick succession. Walking down to the dock in our rain slickers, we see a thin line of blue sky in the direction of Anchorage, and figure that the pilots decided to make a quick exit from crowded air space toward some remote spot where their arrival circumstances might be questionable.