Good News for a Change

Happy Monday!

Ingredients:

• two men from Outside
• a Piper J-3
• Lake Clark, and
• Alaskan wilderness

They were overdue at their destination last Friday.  The plane was spotted a day later, with a note saying they decided to "hike to the nearest village". Too many of these stories end with, "and their bodies were found ..." - but not this one.

After 30 hours stranded on sodden tundra near Lake Clark, Patrick Williams and James Minton were ready to get out.

So they decided to walk from the site of their downed airplane to the nearest village, Nondalton, some 11 wild miles away.

Troopers found the men Sunday afternoon just a few miles from the village.

I love happy endings!

Any Landing You Can Walk Away From

is a good one.  From KTUU Channel 2 in Anchorage:

A Yute Air Cessna 207, seen here in an older photo, made a forced landing after an engine failure near Tuluksak Wednesday afternoon, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. (from www.ktuu.com)

Yute Air Flight Makes Forced Landing Near Tuluksak

By Chris KlintChannel 2 News

1:13 p.m. AKST, February 28, 2013

ANCHORAGE, Alaska— None of the five people on board an air taxi flight that made a forced landing near Tuluksak Wednesday afternoon were injured, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

NTSB investigator Chris Shaver says the Yute Air Cessna 207 was en route from Bethel to Tuluksak when its engine failed one to two miles short of Tuluksak’s airport, just before 4 p.m. Wednesday. Shaver says there weren’t any weather issues reported at the time.

~ snip ~

Dan Knesek, Yute Air’s operations manager, credited the plane’s pilot with averting a crash.
“(The) pilot did an excellent job getting it on the ground safely and all the passengers taken care of,” Knesek said.

Shaver says villagers from Tuluksak went to the crash site and picked up the plane’s occupants. According to Knesek, everybody on board initially refused medical treatment but they were subsequently given “a clean bill of health” at the local clinic.

Go here for the rest of the story.