Nick Goes Adventuring

Nick with today's bunch of rabbits

Nick has more fun than you and I and a dozen of our friends put together.

Grumman Gosling on Lake Hood

Grumman G-44 Widgeon on Lake Hood

WW2 era Grumman G-44 Widgeon, otherwise know as the Gosling, baby brother to the Grumman Goose. The Gosling could carry five people, the Goose could carry ten. Only about 300 were made of each, not like the tens of thousands of fighter aircraft that were produced during the war.

But where's Lake Hood? Seems like I ought to know, we've got Hood River (river and town) and Mt. Hood an hour east of Portland, but no Lake Hood. Seattle maybe? Nope - Anchorage Alaska. It's a tiny little lake right in the middle of town and totally taken up with seaplanes.


Welcome to Lake Hood (LHD)
Federal Aviation Administration
They mention two IFR (Instrument Flight Rating) airports nearby, that would be Ted Stevens International, the commercial airport, and Elmendorf Air Force Base. Looking around I find there are also a whole bunch of smaller airstrips in Anchorage. Place might be the airport capital of the world.


Anchorage Airports

Lockheed P2 Neptune

Lockheed P2 Neptune on Iceberg Patrol near Adak, AK around 1966

Don't know how accurate the caption is. The International Ice Patrol has been operating in the North Atlantic Ocean ever since the Titanic sank, and the Navy operated Neptunes all over the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they were doing their own ice patrols while looking for enemy submarines.

P.S. April 2022. I just noticed that the propellers on this airplane are not turning. Normally photographs of this vintage show the propellers as a blur. It's only since the advent of digital cameras that we have been getting psychedelic images of props. Since it looks like they are not turning it means either: the engines have stopped and the airplane is gliding, on its way to its doom, or they used special high speed film and camera to stop the propeller, or the date is a lie. If the engine is turning at 1200 RPM, then the tip speed of this 15 foot diameter prop is around 1,000 fps. Typical exposure time for a 35 mm camera is 1/100th of a second which is 10 milliseconds. In ten milliseconds, the tip of the prop would have moved 10 feet, or about a quarter of a rotation and we would not be seeing the individual blades. Of course, this is a military aircraft and they would have had access to high speed film and cameras, so that's likely the explanation.

Lockheed Electra

Ice Pilots NWT Bonus Features - Lockheed L 188 Electra
Glacier Pilot Bob Reeve eventually started his own airline using Lockheed Electras. Poking around must have triggered Google because YouTube served up this entertaining little clip.

Teller, Alaska

Poster for the film Eskimo (1933)

I'm reading Glacier Pilot by Beth Day about pioneer airplane pilot Bob Reeve. In 1933 he flies a family out to Nome, Alaska. While there he picks up some work scouting for polar bears for an outfit making the movie Eskimo (page 37). The film crew is encamped in Teller, Alaska, about 50 miles northwest of Nome. It's not much of a place now, but during the booms years it boasted a population of 5,000.

Airship Norge

Teller was the terminus of the first cross polar flight in 1926 by the airship Norge. The Russians made the first cross polar flight by airplane in 1937.

Norge Airship voyage over the North Pole

Bob Reeve famous Alaskan Bush Pilot

Autographed copy Glacier Pilot

Iaman reports:

Just finished the book Glacier Pilot by Beth Day 1957.  Biography of  Bob Reeve famous Alaskan Bush Pilot.   I bought a biographical signed  copy for a $1 at a Unitarian church book sale.
Great stories; learned about reindeer hair affect on aviation oil relief valves,  flying on/off mud flats, beaches, river sandbars,  crevased glaciers, antiaircraft guarded military fields....  the US Aleutian military buildup prior to Pearl Harbor.
Bob had just a couple crashes and lived to be 78 by being a stickler for safety,  adherence to checklists,  performing maintenance and rebuilds much earlier than called for  by factory specs.

Déjà Vu, Alaska

Déjà Vu, Alaska - A Flying Short Film
I was honored to attend the world premiere of Déjà Vu, Alaska at the Thursday night hangar hangout at the Hillsboro Airport. A fine film by any standards, but most especially by ours.

Wien Alaska Airlines

Fairchild F27-A Propjet over The University of Alaska near Fairbanks

Wien Alaska Airlines operated in Alaska for 60 years, from 1924 to 1984. The Fairchild F-27 was a 1950's era twin-turboprop passenger aircraft. Posthip Scott sent me the above photo. Rooting around for more info I uncovered a cache of old photos on Alaska's Digital Archives. Some of them are pretty cool.

AIRCRAFT

First airplane operation in Nome - Seward peninsula area

Noel Wien in his Hisso Standard (likely a Standard-J powered by a Hispano-Suiza engine) in 1927 on first commercial flight to Nome

Wien first commercial flight

Noel Wien with a Ford Trimotor on skis

Ford Trimotor at Harding Lake

Howard Hughes stops in Fairbanks

F27A turboprop
Notice the long engine nacelles and the long legs on the main landing gear

CARGO

Baby Walrus being fed

Reindeer

Reindeer

Strange Cargo - A couple hundred pounds of jade and moose antlers

Wolf Carcass

Small plane fully loaded

Loading Wien tour bus abourd a C82 Flying Boxcar at Fairbanks

Old and new transport methods meet up

Dogs fly too

CONDITIONS

F-27A, Juneau Airport, Mountains, Glacier

Loading Wien Norseman Floatplane at Kotzebue Alaska
Yes, floatplanes can land on water, but do you want to do that when there are chunks of ice there as well?

Signs of Spring
Changing from skis to floats

Sigurd Wien by Cessna aircraft on sea ice at Nome
That's the ocean just past the dogs on the left hand side. 'Sea ice' means he landed on an ice berg.

LIFE

Christine Steve post mistress and agent
Stebbins Alaska

Eskimo lady pegging out large seal skins to dry at Point Hope

Wien Alaska Airlines Route Map

P.S. It took some time to download all the photos from the Alaskan archive (could they still be using dial up modems?) and I don't really have any place else on the net where I can display them, and then find them reliably. Nothing else has really panned out. Picasa is dead. Well, it's there, but it's a mausoleum. Nothing lives there. Flickr is for you own photos, not stuff you stole. Tumblr gives you a channel and lets you post pictures, but it's much the same as Blogger. Pinterest has lots of pictures, but no information about said pictures, like where they came from, or what's in the picture, or why it's there or really anything at all.

P.P.S. Most of the location names link to the same Google Map which has all the named locations plotted, but we don't have anything on the North Coast. That will have to wait for oil exploration.

How STOL can you go?

2016 STOL Highlights
If you want to get Far from the Madding Crowd, Alaska is the place to go. If you want to get around in Alaska, an airplane can come in mighty handy. Valdez, where this video was recorded, is about 100 miles east of Anchorage as the crow, or the Piper Cub flies, but 300 miles by car. And most of Alaska doesn't have any roads at all.

STOL (Short Take Off and Landing) is handy when there aren't any FAA approved airports handy. The STOL crowd holds a contest every year. Last year's winner got off the ground in 77 feet and managed to land in 27 feet, which is just five feet more than the length of the airplane.

Valdez, Alaska.
The airport is just visible to the right of the vertical line indicating the location of the town.
I suspect the big mountain on the horizon (to the left of Valdez) is Mt. Blackburn, about 100 miles away.

Via Posthip Scott.

P.S. Far from the Madding Crowd doesn't have anything to do with Alaska, it is set in rural England. I read it some time ago. It was kind of slow going at first, but I stuck with it and eventually I became totally engrossed. It must be a pretty great book as I still recall several scenes from the story.

Pic of the Day

Dreamlifter in Anchorage Alaska

What is a Dreamlifter doing in Alaska? As far as I know Boeing doesn't have a factory there. Seems it is just making a pit stop on its way back from Japan.

ALSIB

ALSIB - Alaska Siberia air road

Comrade Misfit tells us about a C-47 that was found in Siberia. During WW2 we flew thousands of airplanes to Russia to support their war effort on the Eastern Front. It's 6,000 miles from Great Falls Montana in the USA to Krasnoyarsk, Russia in Siberia, which is still 2,000 miles from Moscow. A C-47 (military version of the DC-3) cruises at 200 MPH, so flying time to Krasnoyarsk would have been 30 hours. Its range is 3600 miles, so it could have made the trip without too many stops. The Bell Airacobra was twice as fast, but its range is only 500 miles so it would have been having to stop every hour or so.  The USA and Canada put in a big effort to build airfields all along the flight path and a highway to support them. I imagine once you got over the Bering Strait facilities were a little farther apart.

Google Map of ALSIB

Shanghai to Chicago

A painting of a WW2 scene of B-24 Liberator bombers & PBY Catalinas at Amchitka AAF.

An airliner traveling from Shanghai to Chicago encountered a problem the other day and diverted to Cold Bay, Alaska. Cold Bay is a hamlet out in the Aleutian Islands. Why is there this giant, jet capable runway in this out of the way spot? WW2, of course. Looking for more information I came across Paul Freeman's Abandoned & Little-Know Airfields, which has a page devoted to the Alaska, which is where I found the picture. Several airfields listed on the Alaska page are in the Aleutian Islands, and most of those were built during the early part of WW2.

Reading about the airliner incident brought a couple of questions to mind. The first one was why was a giant airliner carrying only a hundred people? Every plane I've been on recently has been packed to the gills. And then I plot the trajectories on a map, and I wonder why are they diverted to Cold Bay. Cold Bay is way south of the Great Circle route from Shanghai to Chicago. I smell a conspiracy! The CIA is probably up no good, and this engine malfunction story is just part of the coverup.

Then I do a little more checking. Seems airlines sometimes need to stage a plane to be ready to pick up a full load of passengers, but there just aren't enough people where the aircraft is, who want to go where the airplane is going, but the plane has a schedule to keep so it goes anyway, which means that sometimes they are darn near empty. Wish I could find one of those flights when I need one.

Shanghai to Chicago

Looking at the Great Circle route again I notice that it goes over North Korea and we don't want to be flying over North Korea. They might not be able to hit the broadside of a barn with a bowling ball, but let's not tempt fate, eh? The route also goes over the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is part of Russia. These days I am pretty sure airlines are allowed to fly over Russia, but maybe they need permission, and you know, maybe we ought not go there either. Plug those allowances into the route and Cold Bay looks like a more likely solution.

Barrow, Alaska

My niece Liza is going north to Barrow AK.  Farthest point north in the USA.

"I want to see polar bears".

Four Corners of the USA

Coming into Barrow

Via Iaman.

Delivering a new Cub to Alaska

Crossing the Fraiser River in British Columbia. Via Scott.