On 2/12/2014 6:40 PM, DerbyDad03 wrote:
"(PeteCresswell)" wrote:
Per Oren:
A dear friend was stationed at Minot AFB...he will dang sure tell
you in no uncertain terms why he hated it.

Guy I used to work with was stationed North of the Arctic Circle -
somewhere in Greenland, IIRC.

They lived in these long Quonset huts placed side-by-side with
maybe 50 feet between them.

During storms, when winds were heaven-only-knows how strong and it
was seriously below zero everybody was supposed to stay in their
hut and not go outside under any circumstances.

But the macho thing to do was exit the hut on, say, the North end;
run for the adjacent hut while the wind blew you South, and make it
in to the lee of the other hut at it's South end where they could
enter the hut.

He said that every so often some guy would go out the North end...
and never be seen again.

At USCG LorSta Port Clarence AK our runway was about a 1/2 mile from
the main buildings. There was a paved road from the station to the
runway. Normally, when a bush pilot was coming to the station, they'd
radio ahead and we'd send a truck out to the runway to get them or
whatever they were delivering. There was a standard operating
procedure for incoming aircraft, with landing logs, proper
communication protocols, strobe lights on the runway, etc.

One afternoon, during a really bad storm - white out conditions,
comms down, wind buffeting the station, etc. - the front door flies
open and in walks one of the regular bush pilots and 3 Eskimos from
the village about 15 miles across Port Clarence Bay. We were
surprised to see them walk in unannounced and the duty officer was
****ed that he wasn't notified by the radio room about the incoming
aircraft. We were even more surprised to see their plane parked about
20 feet from the front door.

Turned out they were headed to the village from Nome but the
conditions were so bad that the pilot figured our runway was better
than the beach he had to land on in the village. He had tried
radioing in but couldn't get through. He saw a break in the storm,
dropped it onto the runway and taxi'ed up the road to the station.
"Aw heck, I didn't want to make you guys come out in this nasty
weather."

They stayed for lunch, played a little poker until the storm passed
and then headed on home. The duty officer "formally" (but with a
smile on his face) requested that he not park his plane in front of
the station next time.

I heard of an Alaskan bush pilot who hovered his light plane in a breeze
outside a control tower in Florida. When the man from the FAA showed up
to investigate, he told the controllers to forget about it because those
pilots were nuts. Bush pilots are like those kids you see doing
unbelievable stunts on skateboards. Those guys do things with aircraft
that the flying machines are not supposed to do. ^_^

TDD