[f-AA] ####Alaska Crash Article

[11...@comcast.net]

An interesting article on the pilot of the accident aircraft. 

 

 

Subject: For Pilot in Stevens Crash, Flying Ran in the Family

For Pilot in Stevens Crash, Flying Ran in the Family

For Pilot in Stevens Crash, Flying Ran in the Family
By MATTHEW L. WALDAugust 11, 2010

Whatever problem the plane carrying former Senator Ted Stevens encountered
before it crashed on Monday night, it was not pilot inexperience.

The pilot, Theron A. Smith, known as Terry, was a second-generation bush
aviator and a 28-year veteran of Alaska Airlines, where fellow workers voted him
a “Legend of Alaska” in 2001. He belonged to a flying family with a history of
pioneering and of tragedy.

His father began flying in Alaska in the early 1940s. His wife, Terri Ellis
Smith, a bush pilot herself, frequently co-piloted with him in their vintage
Grumman. She is related to a founder of Ellis Air Lines, one of the carriers
that merged to become Alaska Airlines.

And the Smith’s son-in-law, Maj. Aaron Malone, a pilot in the Alaska Air
National Guard, was killed on July 28 in the crash of a C-17 cargo plane at
Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Three other airmen were also killed in
the crash. Major Malone was married to the Smith’s daughter, Melanie.

Another child, Brian M. Smith, is a private pilot.
The plane that Terry Smith was flying on Monday, a single-engine DeHavilland
DHC-3T, owned by GCI, an Alaska telecommunications provider, was not nearly big
enough to need a cockpit voice recorder or a flight data recorder, so
investigators will have to work without the “black boxes” to piece together what
happened. And it was also flying in an area without radar coverage.

Typically in such crashes, the investigators begin by trying to map out the
four corners of the wreckage, to rule out in-flight break-up and look at the
wreckage to determine if the links between the pilot’s controls and parts like
the rudder, the elevators and the flight control surfaces, like ailerons, were
intact; they will also look to see if the engine was producing power at the time
of impact.

Another possible suspect is “controlled flight into terrain,” meaning that a
pilot, often trying to stay below clouds in an area of poor visibility, flies
into the ground. General aviation — that is, noncommercial, nonmilitary flights,
especially in propeller-driven single-engine planes at low altitude — are
notoriously prone to this hazard. The extent of Mr. Smith’s experience flying in
the area where the crash occurred was not immediately clear.

Mr. Smith was familiar, though, with many kinds of flying. In October, he and
his wife were flying a Piper Cub in New Zealand, where they liked to vacation,
when they were forced to land in a dry riverbed after something leaking from the
engine, probably oil, spread over the windshield so they could not see,
according to a news report in New Zealand. They were rescued while hiking to
safety. “That walk was worse than ditching the plane,” Mr. Smith was quoted as
saying.

In a travel article last year on Alaska’s Iditarod dog sled race, ForbesLife
magazine listed the Smiths as “a very good resource for finding capable pilots
and airplanes.”

Mr. Smith even spoke at a conference last year on seaplane safety run by the
Alaskan Aviation Safety Foundation.

Before he retired from Alaska Airlines in 2007, Mr. Smith was the chief pilot
in the airline’s Anchorage base. Kevin Finan, who was the vice president of
flight operations at the airlines when Mr. Smith was a captain there, said he
used to fly into Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutians, with him. The flight is
particularly challenging because the island is often obscured in bad weather.

Mr. Finan called Mr. Smith “one of the best pilots I’ve ever known.”
“There wasn’t anybody who was a better pilot than he was, particularly in
Alaska,” Mr. Finan said in a telephone interview. Mr. Finan said he did not know
anything about the particulars of the crash in Alaska on Monday, but as far as
the plane involved, “he would be plenty qualified to fly that, for sure.”

The Smiths flew a Grumman Albatross, a 60-foot-long plane capable of landing on
water. In December 2001, they took it on the inaugural flight of a route for
private planes from Nome, Alaska, to the Siberian village of Provideniya,
Russia. Six planes made the trip; the Albatross carried extra fuel so the others
could refuel on the Russian side.

In the 1980s, in the era of glasnost and perestroika, Mr. Smith was captain of
an Alaska Airlines jet that made two historic flights across the Bering Sea to
lay the groundwork for scheduled service between Alaska and the Russian Far
East in 1991, according to the airline. The plane, an early model Boeing 737,
with Terry Smith’s name painted on it, is now in the Alaska Aviation Heritage
Museum in Anchorage, said Bobbie Egan, a spokeswoman for the airline.

 

[Louis and Sabrina]

 A couple more good articles about it here:   www.alaskadispatch.com  …..Louis