Goodbye sled dogs, hello airplanes: Alaska
marks 100 years of aviation history
Harriet Baskas
NBC News contributor
The
Stearman C2B biplane was flown by several legendary Alaska bush
pilots, including Joe Crosson, the first pilot to land on Mount
McKinley, and Noel Wien, founder of the state's first airline.
One hundred years after the first powered flight
in Alaska, Anchorage Museum on Saturday opens a major exhibition
celebrating the rich and remarkable stamp aviation has had on the
Frontier State.
That history began as a spectacle. In 1913,
several Fairbanks merchants got together to ship a biplane from Seattle
to Alaska by steamboat. They then sold tickets so onlookers could watch
two barnstormers fly the plane 200 feet above the ground at a lazy 45
mph.
Ten years after that first powered flight in
Alaska, Anchorage officials declared a holiday so people could come out
and help clear land for the city’s first airstrip.
“In the early days, Alaska was a very
inaccessible, remote place, with very few roads and some dog sled trails
crisscrossing the territory,” aviation historian Ted Spencer told NBC
News. “With airplanes, though, mail could be delivered in hours rather
than weeks. Remote village and towns could be connected. Life changed
incredibly.”
The exhibit, Arctic Flight: A Century of Alaska
Aviation, showcases photographs and artifacts -- including leather and
fur-lined outfits worn by bush pilots and the tires and handmade skis
inventive pilots attached to bush planes to allow them to land on
glaciers and frozen lakes.
Even empty fuel cans, fabric, crates and other
flight-related items intentionally or unintentionally left behind had an
impact in remote places. “Those items were used to make furniture,
clothing and household objects that are still around,” said Julie
Decker, the museum's chief curator. “In Alaska, people are very
practical.”
Bush pilots became heroes in small towns and
villages, Decker said. “They were a connection to the outside world and
they could deliver things to places where things could never get
delivered before,” she said.
Pilots
were also real-life Alaskan characters that had to be skilled in the air
and on the ground. “They needed to be able to not only fly the planes,
but fix them. And they needed to be able to survive in the cold and in
the wilderness,” said Decker. “Imagine how tough and hearty they had to
be in the early days of flying when the planes had open cockpits and it
was 40 degrees below zero – on the ground.”
Other artifacts on exhibit include a Stearman
C2B biplane flown by several legendary bush pilots, ephemera and
memorabilia from a variety of former Alaska-based commercial airlines, a
1927 film clip from the first airplane to fly over the North Pole, and
bits of airplane crash wreckage, including pieces from the 1935 crash
that killed famed aviator Wiley Post and entertainer-humorist Will
Rogers near Barrow, Alaska.
And while improvements in technology have made
flying much safer than it was when that biplane first came to Alaska,
Decker says “weather trumps all” and that flying small or large planes
in Alaska can still present a formidable challenge.
“The state is just so huge, with all sorts of
water formations, vast and rugged landscapes and extreme, unpredictable
weather. Even with modern airplanes, GPS and radio communications, there
are still crashes and planes still occasionally disappear,” Spencer
said.