Miracles

A prudent pilot leaves their plane tethered to the ground when fog rules the skies.  However, a co-worker whom I'll call Joe (by coincidence his real name) failed to return from a moose hunt the previous evening.  We had to do something, anything, so Lyman (actually his real name, too) offered to start an aerial search.

The call reverberated through our office.  Any volunteers to add a pair of eyes?  So there I was sitting in the back seat of a red Citabria headed towards a snow encased birch forest west of Talkeetna, Alaska.  Never mind that visibility in the area could be compared with peering through random keyholes while Lyman squeezed the plane between the frozen tree tops and a dense fog bank, a layer of air barely wide enough to accommodate the plane, it’s red-painted wings the only color in our line of sight.  Down below we knew searchers reinforced our efforts, but the thick mantle of snow on the trees obscured any sign of them -- and of course, Joe.  Undeterred, we persisted.

We knew it would take a miracle to spot Joe, but the point of the entire exercise, we were doing something and you can never spot a miracle in advance. 

Now, daylight, if you want to call it that, ends early in November at that latitude.  That also coincided with our similarly dwindling fuel supply.  Reluctantly, we turned towards Anchorage in the early afternoon.  That's also about when a voice in Lyman's headset gave us the news.  Searchers had found Joe, or was it vice versa?  Either way, he had simply lost his race with nightfall to get back to his car the previous evening.  Other than a frigid night and feeling embarrassed, he had a story for his grandchildren. 

That's also about the time we crossed the Petersville Road.  Now remember, we constituted the filling between a white layer of fog and a white layer of snow-covered tree tops.  What we did not know was a power line had been added to that filling -- strung along that road, just above the tree tops.  That frost encased line bore a striking resemblance to everything above and below it.  Talk about cammo!

That was the moment the lights went out in some homestead along the Petersville Road.  However, all I felt was a slight hesitation in our forward momentum.  That's all.  No sparks, no flying wires, no Hollywood-style pyrotechnics, just a momentary hesitation.  Lyman turned to me and muttered, "we just screwed up." 

With that he banked left towards Talkeetna to make a stealth approach.  We landed far out at the end of the runway, hoping our landing gear was intact and to escape notice.  Lyman leaped out of the cockpit and dashed around the plane to make a hasty inspection of the plane's exterior. Satisfied that the apparently thin wire hadn't inflicted any obvious damage we roared off into the gathering twilight aiming south towards home.  Joe was safe, we were safe, and we’d let someone else puzzle over the mystery of the severed power line.

Today, well beyond 40-years later I wonder why we survived.  I've read multiple accounts of aircraft encounters with power lines.  The wires always won.  Always.  Except this time.  Like I said, you can never spot a miracle in advance.

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Lacking any digitized photos from the days of this event back in the 1970s, this seems like the time to augment a post with some of Karen's images that include, surprise, fog.  

Wise "aviators" remaining grounded waiting for fog to lift.

A commercial fishing boat sails into fog in SE Alaska.

Fog bank over Frederick Sound, Alaska.