Mushy Spring Ice and Bush Pilot Bob Reeve

Mushy spring ice doth not a runway make. Famous Alaska bush pilot Bob Reeve found that out at Burwash. Willis and the surveyors were there.

Link to another story “Stench and Reeve Airways”

The Army occasionally hired Reeve to ferry personnel from place to place along the route of the Highway, and about two weeks after Willis and the surveyors arrived at Burwash, Reeve flew in with a party of Engineers.

Burwash had an airfield. But it lay a mile from the post and Reeve didn’t feel like walking. Burwash also had frozen Kluane Lake, and Reeve found it much more convenient. He glided out of the sky aimed at two rows of felled trees laid out to mark a landing strip on the ice, touched down and rolled to a stop. All OK.

But then he turned the plane toward the shore. The “honeycombed and mushy late spring ice… started to yield beneath his wheels.” He quickly killed the engine just as the left wheel broke through. A second later the other wheel joined it and the belly of Reeve’s plane lay flat on the ice.

Over night the lake ice froze hard again and in the morning, the surveyors launched a rescue operation. Timbers under the engine would prevent further settling. But lifting the plane high enough to free the wheels required ingenuity.

They constructed tripods and hung chain blocks over the plane. Strong enough to hold the plane in the air, the chain blocks couldn’t lift it, so they lifted it with jacks placed under the plane. Lift then chain, then move the jacks and lift and chain… Finally the wheels emerged from the ice. Bob took off and the surveyors returned to surveying.

Years later Bob Reeve told his biographer about the incident.  He blamed the softened ice on the hundred or so construction workers walking and weighting it. Willis points out, “that in May 1942 construction had not yet started and the Army wasn’t within a hundred miles of Burwash Landing.”

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