John Bishop - the old timer secrets that kept him alive

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John Bishop came to Alaska with the Air Force as a teenager and spent his life flying here. He was an Alaska bush pilot in Super Cubs, Cessnas and float planes, trapped two winters in a wall tent in the Wrangell Mountains, and went on to fly for Northern Consolidated and Wien Air Alaska, from Convairs and F-27s to the Boeing 737, with over 20,000 hours of flying time.

This is a conversation about the bush flying lessons the old timers passed on to John, the little secrets he says kept him alive when he was a young pilot in Alaska. Pull up a chair in the hangar and hear the stories behind them.

John flew a Super Cub on floats out of Tangle Lakes, then counted the Nelchina caribou herd from the air: around 188,000 animals, swarming as far as you could see. Landing a ski plane at 25 below in the middle of the herd, he was pouring gas into the wing when he felt something and looked down to find a caribou licking his mukluk.

Before GPS, bush flying meant pilotage and tricks handed down from pilot to pilot: aim 20 miles to one side of a village so you know which way to turn, follow a drainage downstream if you're lost, and if you can see individual rocks from 200 feet, they're too big to land on. On his first trip to Barrow, with about 400 hours, one look over his shoulder kept him from flying out over the Arctic Ocean.

Flying the mail out of Bethel in a beat-up Cessna 185 bush plane, hundreds of pounds over gross, John timed his takeoffs to the ebb tide with the floats completely under water. An old timer named Eddie taught him how to get a float plane on the step, and a tiny pond on top of a hill taught him about STOL landings and takeoffs the hard way: a STOL takeoff with full flaps, kissing the tundra into ground effect.

Born in Syracuse, New York in 1939, John got his first airplane ride at eight in a Piper PA-12, a cousin of the Piper Cub, and was hooked. His family's story is that his uncle tuned the ignition on Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis the night before the flight to Paris. At 19, as an Air Force tower controller at Eielson, he was checking out military pilots in the aero club's Cessna 140 and Super Cub. He also tells the story of spinning a 1935 Stinson SR-5 with full flaps, and the one thing that got it out.

From the bush to the airlines: an engine fire on takeoff in a Convair 440 with a captain the flight attendants called "Sleeping Moses", an engine that blew apart climbing out of Seattle, and how Wien got the Boeing 737 certified for gravel runways in Alaska aviation, right down to the "ski" on the nose wheel.

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