The term “bush pilot” conjures up images of rugged individualists flying de Havilland Beaver floatplanes into Alaska’s most remote and difficult terrain. Such intrepid 20th-century aviators as Don Sheldon and Carl Ben Eielson were cut from that cloth—their ample skill at dead reckoning a compensation for the lack of charts. “There’s a mystique to the bush pilot,” says Brant Smith, who has been flying into the Alaskan bush (generally defined as a region with no road access) since 2012. Smith, though, applies the moniker more readily to his predecessors who ventured heroically into the relative unknown. “Now, it’s an overused term. I don’t call myself a bush pilot, just someone who loves the experience.”
Yet under practically anyone else’s definition, Smith has indeed worked as one in southeast Alaska, first flying cargo for a private firm and then shuttling tourists to a secluded lodge. “That was the most saturated flying I’ve done in my career,” he says of those three years of his life. “I experienced the nuances of weather, glaciers, orcas, bears. It was the most unique and precious experience.” Some of those flights were “the most challenging and dangerous” of his life as well but also the most instructive. “It’s those butt-puckering experiences that teach you to be a better pilot.”
The 49th state has roughly 8,734 registered aircraft and 8,000 active pilots. The latter figure, when compared with Alaska’s population, is six times higher than the national average. And those behind the yoke defy stereotype, coming in all shapes and sizes and from a variety of backgrounds.
In 1996, Jamie Patterson-Simes began flying the backcountry of Bethel (roughly the size of Virginia), providing access to 58 isolated villages. “All the strips were dirt or gravel,” she says. “The weather out there was insane. It was before modern avionics, so pilots, even the best ones, were being slaughtered.” Over the years, she has known 28 colleagues who never made it home.
After a year of rolling the dice herself, she relocated to Anchorage, flew tours around Denali for the next two summers, and then halted her professional-pilot career to raise a family. In 2014, Patterson-Simes launched a flight-training academy that quickly gained national acclaim and, for the past two summers, has returned to flying around southeast Alaska. She is now training to make sorties once again into the bush, this time to fight wildfires. The challenge posed 30 years ago compared to now is “night and day,” she says regarding such aviation, explaining that, previously, “the aircraft were hand flown, and we didn’t have GPS, so you learned the topography.” She recalls flying in winter temperatures reaching minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit and having to rely on steam gauges.
Like Smith, she does not have any desire to be called a bush pilot. “[There are] many pilots who are way more talented and experienced than I am,” she says. “Most of my experience has been instructing.” In her opinion, today’s next-gen suite of avionics, along with more-reliable aircraft offering greater power and performance, have made flying safer, but the same can’t be universally said of the aviators. “Not being able to fly without the navigation systems is a troubling trend,” she says. “I see that type of overreliance a lot.”
Then there’s artist Meg Smith, who previously flew her Taylorcraft and now flies a modified Piper PA-12—“it looks like a monster-truck bush plane”—to glaciers in the Chugach Mountains and near Denali. “My favorite thing to do with my plane is fly in on skis,” she says. “I am an avid backcountry big-mountain skier, so putting the two things together is next-level fun for me.” Smith has also flown to the base of a volcano to facilitate a caribou hunt and was dropped off by floatplane onto a mountain lake for kayaking. But mostly, her Piper fuels her creativity. “Flying out to explore these far-out places gave me such a feeling of awe, I was driven to re-create this feeling on canvas,” says Smith, who provides her work to galleries throughout the state. “Little did I know I was going to fall in love with the art of flying itself.”
