Pioneer Bush Pilot

398 Pages·1991·7.805 MB·English

by  Martin Caidin

- BANTAM AIR & SPACE SERIES -
SP
Pioneer Bush Pilot:
The Story of Noel Wien
Ira Harkey
" A gripping story of the early
days of aviation... and a fine tribute
to a truly great pilot."
-Gen. Jimmy Doolittle
- BANTAM AIR & SPACE SERIES -
"TO—
The William Phillips original painting of
Noel Wien flying his Ford Tri-Motor
brings into being the fascinating piloting
done by this aviation pioneer.
William Phillips's aviation paintings have
become even more highly regarded now that he
has had a one-man exhibition at the
GWS Gallery in Carmel, California.
The detail of the above painting is
used for the cover of this book
by courtesy of The Greenwich Workshop.
BUSH PILOT
==o^=
THE STORY OF NOEL WIEN
Ira Harkey
rm
ffllCOH
BANTAM BOOKS
NEW YORK ­ TORONTO ­ LONDON ­ SYDNEY ­ AUCKLAND
This edition contains die complete text
of die original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED."
PIONEER BUSH PILOT
A Bantam Falcon Book / published by arrangement with
University of Washington Press
PRINTING HISTORY
First published by University of Washington Press 1974
Batman edition / April 1991
FALCON and the portrayal of a boxed "f are trademarks of
Bantam Books, a division of Bantam DouMeday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1974 by Ira B. Harkey. Jr. and the Noel Wien Trust.
Cover art copyright © 1991 by Hiram Richardson.
Library of Congress Number: 74-13213.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage ami retrieved system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
ISBN 0­553­28919­5
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group. Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the wards "Bantam
Books" and the portrayal of a rooster,i s Registered in US. Patent and Trademark
Office and in other countries. MarcaR egistrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue,
New York. New York 10IB3.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
OPM 098765432 I
Dedicated with love to my mother, Flora Broad Lewis,
and to my father, Ira B. Harkey, rest them
With gratitude to Kay Kennedy, Alaskan; Professor
Charles J. Kern, University of Alaska; and
Professor Paul Barton, Indiana University
Preface
Noel Wien, a self­effacing Minnesota farm boy who arrived
in Fairbanks in 1924, was for two summer flying seasons die
only aviator in Alaska Territory. As a working pilot he had
been preceded in Alaska only by Roy Jones, Carl Ben Eielson,
and Art Sampson. Jones flew a seaplane for a while down on
the foggy coast of Ketchikan and then gave up. Eielson had
gone to Fairbanks as a schoolteacher in 1922, in 1923 had
done exhibition, joyhop, and some commercial flying within
a fifty­mile radius of Fairbanks, and in 1924 made eight mail
flights between Fairbanks and McGrath, 280 miles west.
None of these men was a bush pilot, Jones because the
southeastern Alaska coast to which he confined himself is not
the bush, Eielson because his short­term exhibition and mail
flying was not in the "general practice" tradition of bush
flying. Jones had returned to the States by 1924. Eielson and
Wien crossed paths in Anchorage where Wien, who had just
arrived in June as a twenty­five­year­old ex­barnstormer and
stunt flyer, was assembling a Hisso Standard in which he
began his Alaska career. Eielson, his mail contract canceled
because of three crashes, was on his way Outside, where he
would remain for two years. He returned to work for George
Hubert Wilkins, the Polar explorer, serving as his pilot in
1928 on the milestone flight from Barrow to Spitsbergen.
Eielson did not enter bush flying until 1929. By that time
Wien had pioneered the bush routes they all were later to fly
and had already had a mountain officially named for him.
Robert Marshall, a forester, drew a reconnaissance map of
the northern Koyukuk region that he had explored, and la­
vi
PREFACE vii
Hisso Standard
beled a 6;000­foot prominence in the Brooks Range for Noel
Wien, "die first aviator to land in the Koyukuk and to fly
over this peak."
Hie third working pilot, Art Sampson, was in Fairbanks in
die summer of 1924 waiting for Wien to arrive and take over
his job so that he could return Outside. Sampson could see no
fhture for aviation in a land so sparsely setded, so huge, and
so inhospitable to flying. Sampson, with litde flying experi­
ence, had taken a job with Jimmy Rodebaugh's firm as the
only aviator in that infant enterprise. But after he had arrived
in die Interior, he made immediate plans to get out. Interior
Alaska does that to some people, not just flyers, and the
instant turnaround is not uncommon even today.
Wien's list of firsts, which seem so important in the
documentation of aviation heroes, is almost endless. As he
was the first bush pilot, almost every flight he made was an
inaugural. He was the first to fly the 350 miles from Anchor­
age up the muskeg and through the Alaska Range alongside
Mount McKinley's 20,300­foot eminence to Fairbanks in the
"Golden Heart" of Alaska. He was the first to fly over and
land beyond die Arctic Circle; to fly commercially between
Fairbanks and Nome; to pilot a first passenger flight from
Seattle to Fairbanks; to fly the Arctic coast commercially; to
land at such places as Deering, Taylor, Teller, Wainwright,
Point Hope, Kotzebue, Circle Hot Springs, Eagle, and Fort
Yukon; to glimpse the Arctic Slope from the air over the
viii PIONEER BUSH PILOT
Brooks Range. Perhaps of more consequence than all of
these, Wien was the fust man to attempt scheduled flying
through an Alaskan winter, and to be successful a( it.
Wien captured world attention by making die first flight
across the Bering Strait, during the first round­trip flight ever
made from North America to Asia in 1929, and by winning
the race to deliver to the Outside world the first photographs
of the Wiley Post­Will Rogers fatal crash near Barrow in
1935. His pilotage excellence on that flight gained the ap­
plause of flying men everywhere and it remains a classic in
aviation history, although far more public acclaim was given
to the glamour hops that brought criminals to justice, ill and
maimed persons to medical care (and vice versa), and one
hundred thousand dollars' worth of fox pelts from an ice
bound ship off Siberia.
Wien's skill was recognized by Captain Wilkins, who hired
him as a pilot. In 1928 Wien preferred to remain in Alaska
rather than accept Richard Byrd's offer, through Bernt Balchen,
of a job as pilot with his Antarctic expedition. During the
1940s and 1950s, important personages and officials visiting
Alaska often asked that their planes be piloted by the famous
Noel Wien.
Although other men—notably Eielson and businessman
Jimmy Rodebaugh and W. T. Thompson—had envisioned
and worked toward this same goal, Wien, as the first bush
pilot, was the working flyer who pulled Alaska from the
stone age to the age of wings, from transport by dog sled and
boat to airplane. His flight from Fairbanks to Nome in 1925,
for example, reduced mail delivery time between Seattle and
Nome from as much as six weeks to about eight days. Over
an area of some three hundred thousand square miles—about
half of Alaska—Wien flew miners, adventurers, trappers,
romantics, drunks, scientists, light ladies, poets, fugitives,
clergymen, stowaways, madmen, prisoners, and corpses, tti
all of whom but the last the most valuable commodity in the
rich endless distances of Alaska was time.
In a day when men practice golf strokes on the moon, it
may be difficult to find perspective that properly locates the
importance and perils of early Alaska flying and the intrepid­
ity of the men who did it. Astronauts are the final parts added
PREFACE ix
to a scientific, engineering, and technical structure of thou­
sands of men who conceive, draw plans for, and build space
vehicles and their systems. In simplest terms, die groundlings
run the show while the astronauts take a ride. In Alaska in the
1920s Wien was utterly alone in a giant, undeveloped land.
He conceived, planned, and executed his historic flights,
depending solely upon his own courage and skills. There was
no one to point over a mountain and say with certainty, "It's
that way." The triumph of man alone is sublime, and that is
the reason why the name Lindbergh is still posted several
rungs higher than Armstrong. Wien, too, was a man alone.
While the flamboyant characters among the flyers who
followed Wien into the bush gained the publicity, Wien
gained the admiration and gratitude of even the show­offs
who used his wisdom and the lore he gathered to make their
jobs easier. In a day when the typical aviator was—or pre­
tended to be—a sort of cowboy of the air, a hell­for­struts
daredevil happy to be referred to in print as "a flying fool," *
Wien was a cautious, methodical practitioner who carefidly
planned every flight. In this he was years ahead of his time.
He studied the weather, using his own judgment based upon
his own observations, because there were no machines or
specialists to hand him a print­out. He anticipated the winds;
measured, packed, and repacked his load; and checked and
rechecked his distances. He never flew the short, direct route
if along the way there were no spots to give him an even
chance in the emergency landings he knew were inevitable.
"Noel won't fly a straight line" was a common complaint of
those who did not understand.
He babied his airplanes. He changed oil every five hours.
He once quit the only flying job available in Alaska because a
fellow worker insisted upon a convenient but dangerous me­
chanical adjustment. He babied himself. He did not smoke.
He drank only water and milk. He was decades ahead of the
Canadian Air Force in physical fitness. He exercised daily
and, beginning in the 1920s, he jogged every day to maintain
the stamina that he needed more than once to stay alive when
lost in the quagmire muskeg and the frozen tundra.
Some of the late­coming cowboys of the air ridiculed
Wien's caution, and employers and prospective customers
x PIONEER BUSH PILOT
often grumbled with impatience because their pilot would not
take off into a cloudless sky. On such days, while his com­
petitors were flying, Wien remained on the ground because
he knew the weather at his destination likely was foul, or
because the blue local sky was due to change and return
would be impossible. Only on urgent occasions, such as
when one of his scoffing competitors was overdue in bad
weather that only Wien had known was coming, would he
take off into marginal conditions.
Wien's character is at odds with the stereotyped image of
the 1920s cloud buster. Certain of his deeds have been told
and retold in newspapers, magazines, and in books ostensibly
about other pilots. Yet the man remains an enigma. "One
wonders how so mild and quiet a person could have taken
part in all of the pioneer flights which he did," wrote Thomas
M. Griffiths, head of the University of Denver Department of
Geography in 1971.* Griffiths met Wien during a 1941 trip to
the Kuskokwim and Yukon. Bob Reeve of Anchorage, the
colorful old mud flats flyer who built Reeve Aleutian Air­
ways, says, "I have never heard Noel Wien raise his voice to
any man, and I've seen him take guff that would make the
Pope cuss his mother."t
Stoicism allowed Wien to endure reverses that would have
crushed other men. There were financial losses, unfair com­
petition, forgiven debtors. Noel, his wife, and his daughter
all experienced illnesses that threatened time after time to
drain the struggling family of its resources; he himself has
lost aa eye and been crippled by polio. But there are persons
who have been close to the Wiens for decades who will for
the first time learn of these crises when they read these pages.
A competitor once arranged for dangerous overloading of a
plane Wien was scheduled to fly, and flew ahead to the sriiall
field that was Wien's destination in order to watch the hoped­
for crack­up. He bragged around Fairbanks about his ingenu­
ity. "We're good friends," Wien says today. "I see him
every now and then and tell him hello and we talk a bit." In
mature societies what this man did is defined as attempted
­Letter to author, 1971.
tlnterview with author in Anchorage, 1969.