Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
The Iditarod airforce
Show, ice, wind, dogs: flying backup for the word’s toughest sled dog race.
EVERY MARCH, IDITAROD MUSHERS making the final push towards the finish line in Nome, Alaska, encounter the barren ice of Norton Bay. They’ve conquered 1 300 kilometres of sleep deprivation and bitter cold, but the bay – frozen, flat, white, an 80-kilometre dash in search of the horizon line – is a brutal test. Humans and dogs become disoriented; every year, teams stall on the ice. Some, in real need of help, decide to scratch. When this happens, in not too long and if the wind is not too oppressive, they’ll hear a dull buzz, slowly growing louder. A Cessna will descend, set down on its retractable skis, and a pilot will get out and load them inside, dogs and all. They will be safe.
The Iditarod Air Force is a team of 30 or so local bush pilots who fly from checkpoint to checkpoint – or dip
down in between, should the call go out – supporting the sled teams like a flying pit crew. Their job starts two weeks before the race, hauling supplies into place. By the time spectators gather in Anchorage the first Saturday in March, the pilots are up in the air.
Bert Hanson, 66, used to fly commercial planes and run Iditarods, but now he’s a retired pilot who flies the race. He’s spent nearly 30 000 hours of his life in the air; 1 400 “just flying Iditarod”. He knows the practical reasons for landing on a lake rather than a clearing (“fairly smooth and fairly easy”), and why a river is worse than both (“there are so many hazards in the river that you can’t see, like if the ice has jammed up and created a ridge”).
Hanson is also the IAF’S director of operations. Sled teams can send equipment ahead to checkpoints before the start of the race, and getting it there is one IAF job. Pilots also fly straw. Every team, at every checkpoint, is entitled to one bale. At night, as the temperature drops, mushers rip it open, spread it around, drop their sleeping bag, and settle in – dogs splayed around them, everyone sharing the insulation.
Late in the race, when the dogs get sick, tired or hurt, flying them home is the IAF’S job, too.
The pilots own their own planes and carry their own emergency equipment: sleeping bag, camping gear, food. Some keep a camp stove for heating the engine if it’s too cold to start. Hanson says if they had to spend a night out on the trail, most of the pilots would have no trouble. But they’ve chosen the air, which makes them nearly invisible to the casual fan. The Iditarod is a 1 000-mile (1 600-kilometre)-long celebration of fortitude run by iconic tough guys with a pathological need to have their will tested. Hanson downplays the risk in what the IAF does, but supply runs, hairy landings, and rescues in the bush also require a person hewn from the toughest sort of stuff. There have been times when the IAF nearly lost a pilot, and Hanson describes one thus, with no great concern: “He got into whiteout conditions and he hit the top of a mountain is what he did.” Where the mushers are heroic, the pilots are dutiful.
Perhaps it has to do with this: the Iditarod commemorates the heroism of mushers and dogs who saved lives by delivering medical supplies to Nome in 1925. Circumstances were dire; for a musher, the landscape is an adversary. But the Iditarod Air Force is a testament to the power of flight. From above, the landscape is humbled: rivers and forests are just ribbons and speckles on the valleys, and the mountains and clouds settle like stiff beaten egg whites. Peering out of a Cessna’s cockpit is utter serenity.