Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Super Cub: Pilot rescued after crash near McGrath, Alaska. NECK BROKEN: Rescuers have to cross Kuskokwim River.

By KYLE HOPKINS
Published: September 5th, 2011 08:17 PM
Last Modified: September 5th, 2011 08:18 PM

On one side of the Kuskokwim River, pilot James "Ken" Richardson, 66, hung upside down in the cockpit of his Super Cub, his neck broken. On the other side sat the small town of McGrath.

It was Sunday afternoon. Another life-or-death day in roadless rural Alaska, where plane crashes are a fact of life and village volunteers are often among the first to the scene. If Richardson was going to get help, McGrath was going to have to come to him.

And so it did.

"McGrath has just been great. Those people really come together," said Nancy Richardson, the pilot's wife.

Word quickly spread of the airplane crash. Richardson had lost power about a mile west of town and tried to land on the tundra, troopers said. His neighbors raced to fill their boats with gas -- fuel is more than $7 a gallon and boaters don't tempt thieves by leaving a full tank on board, one rescuer said -- and then scrambled on foot through wet black spruce, bogs and rolling hills to the crash site.

There they found Richardson conscious and able to tell his story.

"He remembers hitting the ground, bouncing and flipping," said Steve Kovach, captain of the McGrath-based Kuskokwim Valley Rescue Squad. "To us, that was a good sign, that he actually remembered what happened."

Richardson had been flying between the Alaska Range and McGrath on a sheep hunting trip the day of the accident, authorities and rescuers said. He was headed alone back to the upper Kuskokwim River town and preparing to land when the trouble began about 3:15 p.m.

"He said he throttled back ... and all the sudden he lost power and down he went," Nancy Richardson said.

A 40-year pilot with more than 22,000 flight hours, Richardson is a former guide and one-time game warden who now flies for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, his wife said.

He was returning to McGrath after dropping two hunting partners off at the Alaska Range, a trooper spokeswoman wrote in an email.

Kovach, the rescue captain, said he learned of the crash at about 3:35 p.m. Another member of the volunteer group is married to the airport manager, who knew a plane had gone down across the Kuskokwim.

Rescuers crossed the river and another pilot circling above helped direct them to the crash site. "Making low-level passes, guiding us in," Kovach said.

The Super Cub was overturned, Kovach said. Someone crawled inside the cockpit to stabilize Richardson's head.

"He had been down approximately 30 minutes before the first response arrived," Kovach said.

Volunteers carried the pilot in a basket-like stretcher, with three people walking on each side, back to the river -- a roughly 20-minute trip.

Volunteers slowly lowered the pilot down a 20-foot bank, Kovach said, and Richardson was ferried back to town on a mattress placed in one of the boats.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash. Investigator Larry Lewis plans to talk with the pilot on Wednesday.

"He's not talking too well but he thinks the throttle broke," Nancy said.

The accident is at least the second plane crash in the region within a month. On Aug. 13, pilot Ernest Chase and longtime Anvik schoolteacher Julie Walker were killed shortly after their charter flight left McGrath. The Cessna 207 crashed about 37 miles west of town.

Meantime, Labor Day weekend was a busy one for Alaska air safety investigators. A Piper PA-12 crashed at 4:10 p.m. Sunday in the North Pole area, causing minor injuries to the two people on board, according to the FAA.

On Monday afternoon a Cessna 170 went off the runway at Lake Hood and flipped over on the wet, spongy ground, said Clint Johnson, another investigator for the NTSB in Anchorage. The pilot reported brake failure, Johnson said. No one was hurt, he said.

Richardson, meanwhile, was in stable condition Monday at the intensive care unit of Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage, a nursing supervisor said.

Doctors had begun a day-long surgery at about 9 a.m., Nancy Richardson said in a phone interview.

"I don't think he can move his legs or anything at this point but he can feel them," she said. Richardson's doctor believes the pilot will walk again, she said.

"He's a tough old guy," Nancy Richardson said.

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