By Alex DeMarban
Lee Ryan says he owes his education to supportive nonprofits.
The number of Native pilots has come in waves since the first batch took advantage of the GI Bill after serving in World War II.
For some, it runs in the family. Fathers who learned to fly and founded airlines during that era passed along the skills and maybe even the business to their children.
Arctic Transportation Services and PenAir, both of Anchorage, as well as Vanderpool Flying Service out of Aniak, are all examples of family-owned Native companies.
But a recent surge of Native pilots has less to do with bloodlines and more to do with scholarships and training.
In the last decade, money to pay for flight training has come largely from regional Native nonprofits, such as the Association of Village Council Presidents, and fishing consortiums that receive a portion of profits from Bering Sea fishing to create jobs in villages, such as Coastal Villages Region Fund, pilots say.
Also important are training efforts that have sprung up in rural areas, such as the Yuut Yaqungviat flight school in Bethel. The classes that began in 2004 stemmed from an earlier aviation program at the tribal college created by AVCP, said John Amik, acting co-director of the flight school.
Since 1999, the efforts have produced 16 commercial pilots. All but one have been Native.
Three more Native students are close to earning their commercial wings, and the flight school has begun training others who finish their schooling elsewhere.
The school encourages prospective students to go after scholarships so they can attend the flight school, he said.
On a smaller scale, Covenent Church pastor Grant Funk has taught high school aviation in recent years in the Yup'ik village of Hooper Bay.
He's offered a ground-school course – one of few such high school classes in the state – and even airplane-building after a Dallas-based company donated parts for a two-seater Thorp T-211.
Now, Funk is developing an aviation program for the 11 schools in the Lower Yukon School District, in hopes that more students can leave high school with their ground credentials – the toughest part of learning to fly.
The effort in Hooper Bay has produced two pilots, including Franklin Joe, who's flying commercially for Hageland Aviation Services, and three flight mechanics, he says.
Learning piloting helps keep young people focused on a career, because the responsibility is great.
"In an aviation career, if you mix drug and alcohol with it, you're going to lose," he says.
An Inupiat Past for ATS
Lee Ryan, the 28-year-old chief pilot for Arctic Transportation Services, represents the third generation of a family of Native pilots and mechanics who own or work at Anchorage-based ATS. Nonprofit groups helped him pay for schooling.
"I owe everything I got to Kawerak (the Nome-based regional nonprofit), Anchorage Air Cargo Association, Bering Straits Native Corp., the Norton Sound Economic Development Quota (a village fishing consortium)," he says. "Everybody's been real helpful when it comes to getting an education."
Arctic Transportation Services has Inupiat roots. It was founded around 1957 in the Northwest Alaska village of Unalakleet, in part because Wilfred Ryan Sr., whose father delivered the mail to nearby Inupiat villages, figured there had to be a better way to move the mail than by dog sled, said Lee.
Wilfred Ryan Jr., 55, learned to fly as a high school student. A guard on the basketball team at the Covenent Church boarding school in Unalakleet, pilots would let him sit in the cockpit and fly the team to away games.
Donny Olson, also a teen pilot and now a state senator, played on the team and also flew in a second small plane.
"The old pilots would sit there and watch us fly, then we'd jump out and play basketball," says Ryan, who led his team to three state championships beginning in the late 1960s.
Ryan was just 23 and had been flying commercially for only about five years when he took over the company after his father unexpectedly died of cancer in 1976. Called Unalakleet Air Taxi then, the company had just three planes.
Thanks to winning key contracts to help the former Wien Air Alaska, the company grew. Now it's got 65 employees and 16 airplanes serving 70 communities across Western Alaska. Of 18 pilots, five are Alaska Native, says Ryan.
Sound Fundamentals
Natives make excellent pilots because they intimately know the land and weather they're flying in, says Bob Vanderpool, of Vanderpool Air. Vanderpool is a second-generation flier in his family-owned company.
"The local boys and girls that grew up in the woods in rural Alaska, they know the environment, they know the country, so I think that's a big plus, especially around Bethel," says Vanderpool, who is part Athabascan. "They travel by snowmachine between all the villages all their lives, when they're kids they're boating, so they know all the brush piles and where to go."
Home-grown pilots, as opposed to ones that are imported from the Lower 48, are also more likely to stay in Alaska, reducing the turnover that's often been a struggle for airlines.
Local residents appreciate the Native pilots, said Wilfred Ryan Jr.
"They have a lot of commonality with the people they serve, they speak the same language," he says. "There's no misinterpretation with wants and need."
It's good for the communities too, because Native pilots tend to live full-time in their communities, instead of staying in rural Alaska for two weeks at a time while actually living outside the region, says Lee Ryan.
ATS has been instrumental in helping train new pilots, Lee Ryan says. The company hosted rural residents at their flight-simulator workshops in Anchorage, flew the Thorpe T-211 out to Hooper Bay for free, and written letters to scholarships groups promising to hire students who earn their wings, he says.
"We try to help Native people wherever we can," he says.
Alex DeMarban can be reached at 907-348-2444 or 800-770-9830, ext. 444, or .