#10: Just another Alaskan plane crash

When Hageland Aviation flight 1453 crashed in 2013, I received an email from a reporter with a national magazine who wanted my advice on how to research it. He later dropped the idea after he was told it didn’t have national interest. I’ve been thinking about my emails with him lately as I continue to discover that his editor is not the only one so quick to classify an Alaska aviation story as strictly regional.

Some national coverage of flight 1453

2013 was a tough year for commercial aviation in Alaska. I was writing for Alaska Dispatch, an online news site that later bought the Anchorage Daily News (and then went bankrupt — long story). When flight 1453 went down, I was already covering the preliminary investigations from the Alaska Central Express double fatality crash on March 8, the Alaska State Troopers triple fatality crash on March 30 and the Rediske Air crash that killed ten people on July 7. (There was also a Pacific Wings crash with one fatality and two serious injuries and Promech Air crash with three serious injuries.)

There were 26 Part 135-involved accidents in AK in 2013 including three with Hageland. When the reporter reached out to me on flight 1453 he said that he wasn’t familiar with St Marys, where the accident occurred, but Hageland, which operated as part of the Era Alaska air group, was well known among adventure/outdoor readers due to the Discovery Channel show Flying Wild Alaska. That was part of the hook, I think, that drew him to the story. I shared some general information but not much — honestly, where could I begin on the history of plane crashes in southwest Alaska for someone who didn’t know about the region? About a year later, after Hageland had another multiple fatality crash and became the subject of a DOT fitness review, FAA audit, and urgent safety recommendations from the NTSB (any one of which are very serious), I realized I never saw anything from the reporter and emailed to see how his article turned out. He told me that he “couldn’t find an angle” to write about Hageland and “there just wasn’t enough there to really do anything with”. His detailed pitch never made it past his editor.

By the time flight 1453 went down, Hageland had crashed ten times since Era Alaska was formed in 2008 — there were 27 more accidents if you looked back to Hageland’s beginnings in 1990. It was, without a doubt, the company with the worst safety record in modern Alaska history. (Ryan Air Service, in the 1980s, is a close second due to the high number of fatalities from its accidents.) The FAA Audit of Hageland included reference to other incidents and events and the St Marys accident investigation would show that the company had a pattern of defying safety regulations and FAA oversight. (One FAA manager told investigators that Era Alaska budgeted for expected enforcement fines because it was perceived as cheaper to pay then implement safety changes.)

Other ways the reporter could have tackled the story included the history of accidents in the YK-Delta region, issues with the state’s appalling lack of navigation infrastructure which the FAA was intimately aware of but could never cough up the money to upgrade, and (AND AND AND) the fact that the FAA couldn’t expand its oversight of the company because Hageland couldn’t keep enough aircraft in the air to meet the minimum for more inspectors. (Every time they got close, according to an interview, they crashed and so they failed to sustain the minimum fleet requirement.) (I guess it didn’t occur to whoever in the FAA bureaucracy made this decision that maybe all those crashes warranted more oversight even though they were a couple of planes short.)

For the reporter and his editor, the tragedy of St Marys and everything that came before it was not enough to grab national interest. As it happens, for Hageland there were two more fatality accidents coming, with six more deaths, before the air group’s $90 million bankruptcy would finally ground Hageland permanently. (By that point, in 2020, Hageland was still Hageland but the air group name was changed to Ravn Alaska.) For that part of the story lots of folks paid attention but not for long; it was only $90 million after all.

Unlike the reporter who gave up, Hageland was just one of the Alaskan companies I burned to investigate and write about. But while the Anchorage Daily News survived its purchase by Dispatch, its relationship with freelancers like me did not. Eventually I was relegated to only submitting op-eds, which are important but not paid for and thus, I felt, unreasonable for an investigative career.

Turning to industry publications outside Alaska, I did end up writing about Yute and Taquan, but I didn’t get to write about Security Aviation and medevac industry failures or Soloy Helicopters and operational control concerns or Promech Air and lack of proper oversight or Guardian Flight and all of its issues everywhere or the legacies (both for industry and the FAA) of debacles at Cape Smythe Air, L.A.B. Flying Service, Evergreen Helicopters and Ryan Air flight 103. I didn’t get to write nearly enough about the state’s lack of IFR infrastructure and critical weather reporting and the zombie-like manner in which the bush pilot myth has continued to permeate how Alaska aviation is viewed. And finally, no one was interested in an article about how there were 26 accidents involving Part 135s in 2013 and 21 in 2023 and really, shouldn’t we be a lot better than this a decade later?

I haven’t even seen anyone in Alaska write about that.

What I have been told, more than once and most recently today, is that these subjects are all just too small, too narrow, too regional. As articles, as essays, even as a book on Hageland, Era and Ravn, there is not enough to take a chance on me.

At the moment I’m trying really hard not to think about how Sebastian Junger (who is a great writer) made us all care about a single longline fishing crew out of Massachusetts but Hageland Aviation and the Era Alaska/Ravn Alaska saga with its complicated, lucrative, important, and devastating history, can not do the same.

Okay, I think about it all the time.

Writing about flight 1453 and Hageland Aviation is about accidents, but it’s also about the staffing of the FAA and NTSB in Alaska and how those agencies (esp the folks outside AK) have viewed aviation in Alaska. It’s about money, a ridiculous amount of money, and how it has been misused in pursuit of air safety Alaska, while also denied to Alaska’s physical air safety system and notably, via bypass mail, how it is spent with some companies reaping a ton of dollars. (This would be about the Ravn bankruptcy.) It’s about the power of certain politicians and, I believe, connections to those politicians. (This would be the chapter on Ted Stevens.)

And, at the end of the day, it’s about what doesn’t work in the AK aviation industry and how everyone knows what doesn’t work, but they are stuck with letting it not work. Part of the reason why is because for far too long no one expected aviation to be safe in Alaska; the bush pilot myth convinced everyone it never would be and so they told themselves that was it and just tallied the crashes and shrugged their shoulders and ignored all evidence otherwise. (I know there were folks who didn’t believe this but too many folks did.) (I include some of the folks who wrote safety studies on Alaska in the latter group.)

Including the crew of the Andrea Gail, seventeen Gloucester, MA fishermen have been lost since the boat sank on October 29, 1991. In that same period there have been 358 fatalities in Part 135-involved crashes in Alaska, or basically two 737s. All of them have a story but altogether they have an enormous story and by itself, Hageland and its air group partners give the clearest and most encompassing entry into that story. What I have always wanted, and briefly enjoyed, in my aviation reporting, is the security of an editor and publication, the promise of the work being read, accepted, and paid for as I go about researching and writing it. I had that for my articles for a time, but the lawsuit (which is slowly moving along) has damaged my faith in industry publications. So I sit here with what I want to write, and a pile of research, and the latest rejection on a book proposal (following a series of rejections of my Cosmic Ray Expedition proposal), and it’s finally come to this.

Sometimes, you just have to hope that after it’s all written, you’ll be able to sell it.

Pitches have not gotten me there on the Alaska-centric articles and proposals have not gotten me there on the books. My first book was entirely written before I got an agent or deal — in fact my agent (who has retired) sold it without a proper proposal. I do like some parts of the proposal process (the chapter summaries for sure) as they help to organize the material. But after hiring an independent editor (who helped) and going through a workshop (fun and also helpful) and hearing so many people say my proposal are top notch and excellent and then not getting any kind of interest from the agent world, I’ve got to just quit trying or I’m going to lose my mind.

But unlike the reporter who gave up on the flight 1453 story, I think I’m just going to write it all anyway. The articles can still go here, in a shorter but still strong fashion, and the books, well, they just get written. And even though it’s so much easier to get access to certain records (or certain people) with the golden “I have a book deal” words behind you, well, sometimes that’s just not in the cards.

2024 has kicked my ass enough. I’m done with letting this year beat me up. I’m just gonna write.

Here is a dog picture to make you smile. This is Indy and Tesla, as a puppy, taken nine years ago. Tesla completely changed color as he got older - he’s now almost entirely black!