Update,
About 11 a.m. on June 4, an emergency call placed via satellite phone reached authorities in southwest Alaska. The caller was on a gravel bank on the Chitistone River in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Preserve, where a flight of four Super Cubs had landed to practice backcountry off-airport operations. The instructor leading the course had been hit by a turning propeller. He died almost instantaneously. Damage to the airplane was classified as “minor.”
The victim was the 62-year-old owner and chief flight instructor of a well-regarded bush-flying school. He was an Air Force veteran who’d flown F-16s and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel, then gone on to fly for Northwest Airlines before moving to Alaska nearly 20 years ago. By the time of the accident, he’d accumulated 40 years of teaching experience and was deeply respected in the community. Friends described an exceptionally aware and conscientious pilot who never stopped thinking about how to defeat the innumerable risks of bush flying. It’s possible, however, that he hadn’t accorded sufficient respect to the most dangerous animal on the planet: the mosquito. (By communicating disease, these pestilential parasites have caused far more human deaths than attacks by all vertebrate species combined.)
After landing on the Peavine Bar, the training group was swarmed by hordes of the biting insects. To keep them under control, they decided to start the engines on all four airplanes, using their propwash to blow away the infestation. Unfortunately, rather than leaving one pilot inside each airplane to hold the brakes, they merely chocked the wheels. While loading his Super Cub from its right side, the instructor saw that the airplane to its left had jumped its chocks and begun to roll forward. Dashing up to try to stop it, he apparently misjudged the arc of his own propeller and ran into it from behind.