Alaska's First Bush Pilots, 1923-30. Jim Rearden
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Wien is on the right wearing laced leather knee boots and breeches common to pilots of the time. Eddie Hudson, miner, in center.
Rodebaugh asked Northrup to hire two pilots and a mechanic to accompany the planes to Flairbanks.
The two pilots Northrup sent were Noel Wien and Art Sampson.1 The mechanic was Bill Yunker, who was also a pilot, and with whom Noel had once briefly barnstormed.
The steamer Northwestern docked at Seward, Alaska, in early June, 1924, with 25-year-old Noel, now with more than 500 hours as a pilot, and a crated Standard aboard. Yunker, who had already been to Fairbanks with the other Standard, was there to meet him and the plane.
AT ANCHORAGE
The crated plane rode an Alaska Railroad flatcar to Anchorage, then a railroad town of 2,000, where Noel and Yunker assembled it and had “ANCHORAGE” in huge letters painted on its fuselage.
That June, in Anchorage, Noel flew more than 170 passengers on sixty-five flights with the Standard from a 2,000–foot runway volunteers had prepared just south of the town. He charged ten dollars for a fifteen-minute ride, and took in $1,700—a tidy sum in 1924.
Today, the runway he used is the Park Strip that parallels Ninth Street in down-town Anchorage.
The Standard, with Noel piloting, was the first airplane ever to fly passengers from Anchorage. On July 4th he flew loops, spins, and stalls for a large and appreciative Anchorage crowd.
Yunker installed a streamlined auxiliary fuel tank on the underside of the upper wing. It was built to his specifications by local resident Oscar S. Gill. This gave the plane sixty-five gallons of gasoline, with a range of about 400 miles, enough, Noel hoped, to allow him to safely reach Fairbanks.
While in Anchorage, Noel met Carl Ben Eielson, who was on his way out of Alaska. Within a few years Eielson was to make a name for himself as a pilot in Alaska and elsewhere. In time, he and Noel became friends.
“You’ll like it up here, and you’ll do well,” Eielson predicted.
FLIGHT TO FAIRBANKS
On July 6, 1924, at 2:30 a.m., Wien, with Bill Yunker in the front cockpit, lifted the Standard from the Anchorage runway and flew to Fairbanks. It was the first flight ever between the two cities, and one of the dozens of first-flight records in the Territory made by Noel Wien during his early years of Alaska flying.
Noel was not one to seek fame. He wrote the following brief account describing the historic flight in the August, 1956, Wien Alaska Arctic Liner monthly publication, which was aimed mostly at company employees.
June, 1925. Noel Wien landed on the first airport built in interior Alaska by Frank Leach, owner of Circle Hot Springs. “I went up on the nose and the prop stuck straight down into the ground, but did not break. We used the horses to pull the plane to harder ground, and take off was made without trouble. Frank Leach with a prying pole on left left, helped by Joe Mehern on right
Recounting the Early Days of Wien Airlines
By Noel Wien
The change has been great both in aviation and the city of Fairbanks since that memorable day, July 6, 1924, when, in a water-cooled Hisso-powered Standard J-1 open-cockpit biplane, Bill Yunker and I landed here after flying non-stop from Anchorage.
We flew up at night, thus taking advantage of the smoother air. The smoke was very thick for the last eighty miles and kept us guessing all the time. It was even difficult to follow the railroad tracks from Nenana on in.
[AUTHOR] The flight wasn’t as simple as Noel made it sound in the above recounting. Following the railroad was easy, as long as it was visible; pilots still follow railroads as a navigation aid, and Noel had often followed them in the states. However, on this flight there were no airports for a safe forced landing. Much of the land was rough and steep, impossible to consider for a landing. The Alaska Railroad map he used showed towns and stations, but the “towns” often consisted of a few small scattered buildings. Stations were commonly one small building. The railroad had been completed the previous year, and there was little development along it; Noel flew over mostly unsettled wilderness.
After passing Mount McKinley (Alaskans call it Denali), North America’s tallest peak, he left the foothills of the Alaska Range with relief when he reached relatively flat, green country. It wasn’t farming country with pastures and cultivated fields he was accustomed to; instead, it was miles and miles of uninhabited tussocky tundra, interspersed with patches of spruce and birch trees. There were no obvious places to land safely.
Ahead of his airplane, the railroad tracks disappeared in forest fire smoke that extended to 10,000 feet. To keep the tracks in sight, he had to fly at 200 feet. Visibility grew worse, and smoke burned his eyes. He was soon forced to fly at 100 feet. He kept his eyes on the railroad, afraid to look elsewhere, fearing he might lose the tracks at a turn.
Noel Wien, on right, bound for the Kantishna area with mining engineer Ingram (left) and his secretary, Billie Hart, in September, 1924. Bad weather forced Wien to land on a 300-foot long bar on Bearpaw Creek twenty miles short of their destination. His passengers had to walk the rest of the way.
Three hours and forty minutes from Anchorage, Yunker pointed down to the University of Alaska’s experimental farm. Four miles farther, Fairbanks itself was covered solid with smoke, and Noel was startled by the sight of the two 200-foot-high midtown Northern Commercial Company’s smoke stacks. He quickly banked away from them. Shortly, he saw and landed on the race track at the edge of town. Race tracks (for cars) were commonly used by barnstormers in the states, and experienced barnstormer Noel had found a home.
That race track eventually became Weeks Field, for many years Fairbanks’ only airport. The town grew around it and it was clearly too small and inadequate for the use it was getting, as well as being in an awkward location, when it was finally closed in October, 1951.
PLUCKY AIRMEN BRING “ANCHORAGE” TO INTERIOR WITHOUT STOP; FAST TIME MADE OVER UNKNOWN COURSE, read the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner headline for the day, with the following somewhat misleading report:
Arriving over Fairbanks at 7:16 o’clock this morning, the airplane ANCHORAGE, ship No. 2 of the Alaska Aerial Transportation Company, successfully completed the first non-stop flight between Anchorage and Fairbanks. The flight was made in the fast time of 3 hours and 45 minutes, and was accomplished without incident. Pilot Noel Wien was at the stick, with Mechanician William B. Yunker2 as passenger.
Wien and Yunker, after making a pretty landing on Weeks Field, stated that, although they followed the general course of the Alaska Railroad, at no time was the roadbed visible to them. They were able to discern the Carlson roadhouse at Cantwell, where a landing field was said to be ready for them, but they were unable to distinguish the field.
Mount McKinley, rising to majestic height, was not visible until they were within a short distance of it. The lofty dome presented an inspiring pictured veiled in the low early morning mists surrounding it.
Noel Wien (left), in 1925, with one of the Hisso-Standard biplanes which he flew commercially from Fairbanks in 1924, 1925, and 1926. His passenger here was gold miner Carl C. Dunlap who Noel flew from Fairbanks to Beaver on May 3, 1925.
Seventy-five years later, on July 6, 1999, with special permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, another biplane, a World War II Stearman with two open cockpits, took off from the identical location