Stench? Bush Pilot Bob Reeve’s ingenious innovations made him a legend. They also made him and his planes stink. “Reeve had worked out a way that he could pee past the stick and out a hole in the floor. The whole damned plane smelled of dried piss.” (A former passenger quoted in Alaska’s Skyboys by Katherine Johnson Ringsmuth)
Mushers fought Bush Pilots–more on Bob Reeve
But stench be damned, Reeve Airways needed Bob’s mechanical ingenuity.
Reeve made most of his money flying supplies to mines scattered throughout the rugged coastal mountains of Southern Alaska, and the mines offered only the most rudimentary landing strips—dangerous and hard on equipment.
To Reeve, the glaciers adjacent to nearly every one of the mines looked like potentially better landing strips, and snow remains on a glacier year around. He replaced the wheels on his plane with wooden skis.
Of course, to land on the glacier ice, unpredictable and split by deep crevasses, he had to be able to see it clearly, and he found that swooping down onto flat, featureless ice he had virtually no depth perception. He learned to fly over the ice surface before attempting to land, dropping tree branches and burlap bags dyed black to bring the ice into focus.
Come spring, Reeve ran into a bigger problem. The supplies he flew to the mines came from the harbor in Valdez. If the ice on the glaciers at the mines remained year around, the ice in Valdez did not. He could land on skis at the mine, but he couldn’t take off on skis from the Valdez airstrip.
He built a special pair of stainless-steel skis and moved from the airstrip to the mud flats that fronted Valdez at low tide. Unlike snow, mud sucked hard on the skis, but he could rock the plane violently back and forth and break the suction.
Working around his plane hip deep in mud impregnated with rotting seaweed and decaying salmon, Reeve stunk of more than just pee. And that stench made it into his plane too.