Have a Safe trip
New simulator a tool for redeeming Alaska's air safety record
In a small room in downtown Juneau's Centennial Hall, pilot Howard Shepherd flew over Misty Fjords.
"Costs a lot less than $6 a gallon for av-gas," he said.
Shepherd, a retired electrician who is building his own Supercub, was trying out Juneau's new flight simulator. Surrounded by blue skies on three 27-inch screens, with a passel of Cessna 172 gadgets below him, he deftly flew through the only computer-like part of his view, a line of fluorescent green rings that marked his route. On display in downtown Juneau Tuesday, the simulator is heading to the Civil Air Patrol building at the Juneau Airport, where anybody can play on it free.
It's kind of like the old F-16 Strike Eagle video game, only a lot slower and you can't fly under bridges.
The simulation is for safety's sake. Flying is one of Alaska's most dangerous jobs. From 1990 to 2002, Alaska pilots were dying on the job five times more often than the national average. And from 1990 to 2007, 35 percent of all U.S. air crashes were in Alaska.
Why? Analyses of Alaska accidents showed a good portion of them were what's known as "controlled flight into terrain," or flying the plane into the Earth because the pilot couldn't tell it was there. Those are likely to be fatal. Takeoff and landing crashes also were common.
Southeast is a dangerous place to fly, said Mary O'Connor of the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety in Anchorage, who was watching Shepherd and others try the simulator. The weather is why; many pilots trained down south don't have experience in it. And there is a lot of traffic, particularly air tours.
"We have been geared toward Alaska, because the occupational hazards have been so high," O'Connor said.
The state's safety record has improved, due to simulator trainings, weather cams, better technology, more training and voluntary self-reporting by air carriers. Recently Alaska went 28 months without a fatality, said Marina Jarvis of the aviation-safety nonprofit Medallion Foundation, "which was unheard of in Alaska," she said.
Despite improvement, the dangers remain.
Hence this new Alaska-specific simulator, installed in 13 cities around the state by the Medallion Foundation in partnership with the Federal Aviation Administration. It melds elevation data with satellite pictures to create something that's pretty close to actually flying it.
The program started with Microsoft's $50 flight simulator, "plus millions of dollars' worth of imagery," said Spencer Yearns, program manager for the simulator software at the Medallion Foundation. Though a lot of that imagery was free, courtesy of the federal government. It's the same data Google Maps uses.
The idea is to help people learn routes, Yearns said.
It's also about weather. Perhaps unrealistically, Shepherd was flying near Ketchikan surrounded by blue skies. But the program also simulates more typical Southeast weather by adding a layer of graphics, such as a barrage of droplets on the screen-windshield or a programmable cloud ceiling. Whiteouts and winter wonderlands - the weather that makes pilots crash.
If they make the wrong decisions. The point is not only to fly better, but to know when to turn back, said O'Connor.
"To me, it's exciting, because I want to see the accident rate down, particularly in Southeast. I lost a lot of mentors through the years," said Alaska's deputy commissioner of aviation, Christine Klein.
"My sister was in a crash in Misty Fjords in '83," said Klein, who is from Southeast. "So I'm really looking forward to getting this in Ketchikan."
• Contact reporter Kate Golden at 523-2276 or kate.golden@juneauempire.com.