"Down to Earth, Unfortunately"

The Cordova Airlines plane prior to its crash into Tustumena Lake.

DOWN TO EARTH, UNFORTUNATELY

April 2012

One day in 1966, a visitor came to the office of Harold H. Galliett Jr. and offered him something he didn’t want.

Galliett was a civil engineer at the time, working contractually on a water-and-sewer project for the City of Kenai, and his office was upstairs above the café at the Kenai Airport. His visitor was a friend named Bert Johnston, and the conversation, according to Galliett, went something like this:

“Harold, how would you like to take a ride in a plane?”

“Uh-oh. I suppose you’re going to suggest that we ride in that Grand Commander that I crashed in.”

“Well, yes.”

“Well, forget it. Not only ‘no,’ but ‘hell no.’”

Galliett said he wasn’t afraid to climb back into the Grand Commander, but doing so just seemed like a bad idea. “I just thought I’d had enough of that plane for a while,” he said.

The last time he’d seen the aircraft was during the previous September, and he had been standing on the leading edge of one of the wings as it sank rapidly into Tustumena Lake. As the plane vanished from sight, Galliett steeled himself against the icy water surrounding him and began to swim for his life….

*****

During that same September, only a short time after he’d survived the incident that had resulted in four fatalities, Galliett had a different visitor to his Kenai office: Anchorage businessman Joe Blackard, who began the conversation with, “Harold, I want to buy you a cup of coffee.” Since Blackard was a friend of Galliett’s, he agreed to join him in the café downstairs.

“He got a booth,” Galliett remembered, “and he said, ‘Harold, I want you to tell me the absolute truth.’ I said, ‘Okay. Depends on what you’re asking, but I’ll try.’ He was interested in the condition of the plane just before it sank—and very interested in how far from shore it was.” Turned out that Blackard and his partner, Anchorage helicopter pilot Bert Johnston, were keenly interested in buying the sunken wreckage and salvaging it, but they wanted to first make sure they’d be able to find it.

Galliett, who was also a licensed land surveyor, told Blackard that he was confident in his ability to determine the distance, which he estimated as almost exactly one mile. Besides the “eyeball test,” he said that he also knew—because he’d been wearing a Swiss-style waterproof Wittnauer watch—that his swim to shore had taken him approximately one hour. As an experienced swimmer, he estimated that he had been traveling through the frigid waters at a rate of one mile per hour.

Harold Galliett, a few years prior to the crash.

However, Blackard and Johnston chose not to heed Galliett’s measurements. Instead, after they had paid Cordova Airlines for the plane, they sent hired divers to search only 3,850 feet out from shore because a Cordova Airlines pilot named Gene Effler had flown the area back and forth in his Piper Cub and had estimated that to be the proper distance.

“They tried at 3,850 feet or thereabouts for three or four days, with no result,” Galliett said. “They were getting very worried. They had $9,000 (more than $61,000 in 2012 dollars) into this venture of theirs. It looked like they weren’t going to find anything. It’s a pretty deep lake, and they already knew it (the plane) was about 140 feet deep.”

Frustrated, Blackard and Johnston turned to Galliett’s recommendation. “They got a boat and a rope of measured length, and they got down to the spot where I said it was,” Galliett recalled. “And for three days they fooled around down there, dragging the bottom—and by golly they found the plane, right there, right where I said—pretty close anyway—damn close. And they got it out.”

The accident had occurred on Sept. 4, one mile out from Point Lake, which lies just north of Tustumena’s northern shoreline, approximately halfway between Moose Creek and Bear Creek. By the end of that month they had the plane ashore.

“They worked as fast as they could, but to recover the plane they had to get straps under it and raise it a foot or two (using flotation), drift toward shore with it, and then tighten the straps.” Divers had affixed the straps to the plane, and through this lifting-and-moving strategy, they incrementally raised the aircraft and brought it in to land.

Meanwhile, on the shore they had to make room to beach the plane and create a work area, for it was their intent to repair the aircraft on the spot and then attempt to fly it out. The 42-foot Grand Commander, with its high wings, narrow fuselage, twin engines and eight-passenger capacity, required considerable space for this operation, so they felled a large swath of forest to bring the plane ashore. From there, they hoped to move the wheeled craft through the woods to Point Lake and take off there once the coming winter had formed an icy runway.

“They built a shelter over it, a tent of some kind, and the plane was in excellent condition,” Galliett said. “The propellers were not bent, were not damaged at all. The mechanical was okay, except that the engines were full of water and some silt.” Only the bottom of the fuselage was “pretty chewed up” from its impact with the lake surface during the initial crash. Since doing aluminum work onsite would have been difficult, they trimmed off the sharp edges and covered the holes with treated fabric.

They spent weeks working on the project and hired Tustumena resident Joe Secora to stay onsite and guard the plane when they couldn’t be on hand.

When Point Lake was sufficiently frozen over, Blackard and Johnston climbed aboard, started the engines, and then went rolling across the icy lake until they could lift off. Airborne, they headed for Anchorage—but not without incident.

“They were on final approach at the Anchorage International Airport, and they were close to touching down when one of the engines quit,” Galliett said. “Scary, but nothing fatal at all. They landed with one engine, and they taxied off the line.”

More repairs ensued, including specialized work at the Aero Commander factory in Oklahoma City, and soon the craft was in “first-class condition” again.

*****

Despite Bert Johnston’s generous offer of a flight in the revamped airplane, however, Galliett turned down the opportunity. He said he toyed with the notion of going, but quickly rejected the idea. “I never did take a ride in that thing,” he said, “but I saw it a few times parked along Merrill Field.”

Galliett allowed the memory of his only flight on that plane to suffice for a lifetime, and today—at age 88 and living near Oroville, Calif.—his memory of that trip and its disastrous conclusion is still crystal clear.

*****

The speculation about the cause of the Cordova Airlines crash into Tustumena Lake centers on the fallibility of the human senses in certain conditions and on the need, therefore, to trust one’s instruments.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigation of the crash determined the probable cause to be that the pilot had “misjudged distance and altitude” under “adverse weather conditions.” Given the conditions, in other words, he should have trusted his eyes less and his dials more.

The pilot was 29-year-old Bob Barton—with brother, Bill, owner of Barton’s Flying Service out of Anchorage—who had 5,184 total hours of flying experience, including 403 hours in the type of plane, an Aero Grand Commander, that he was flying that day.

Barton had been a Cordova Airlines pilot for 7-8 years, flying previously out of Cordova, Gulkana and Yakutat. After the crash, he would leave behind a wife named Sharon and a six-year-old daughter named Sandra.

Barton’s first stop occurred sometime 7 and 7:30 a.m. in Homer, where he received two passengers: The first was 27-year-old North Kenai construction worker, Raymond M. Puckett, who had been living for the previous six years with Mr. and Mrs. Tony McGahan of Kenai and who had been a secretary to the Kenai Volunteer Fire Department.

The second passenger was 41-year-old Galliett, a key figure in the Anchorage Utility Company and under contract at that time with the City of Kenai. A qualified navigator himself, Galliett, who was returning to Kenai from Homer where he had been attending a meeting of the Homer City Council, sat in the left front passenger seat immediately behind the pilot.

Under heavy overcast and with temperature at about 50 degrees, Barton took off for his second stop, Seldovia, where he received his final passengers, an elderly couple named Mr. and Mrs. Antonio Cuerde of Port Graham. Poor visibility forced a one-hour delay, and then, before lifting off the runway at Seldovia at 9:16 a.m., the pilot opted to take an alternate route to his final destination, the airport at Soldotna.

The alternate route called for Barton to fly up Kachemak Bay, passing just south of Homer, and then to turn north up the Fox River drainage. Following the Fox upstream past its headwaters would lead the plane directly over a low rise and then down across the eastern end of Tustumena Lake and onward to Soldotna.

But the approach to the lake presented a problem: Because it was flat calm, the lake surface was like a giant gray looking-glass, and because the cloud ceiling sat only 300 feet above the lake, Barton dropped down perilously close to the water, where at best the horizon may have been little more than a thin line of trees several miles away.

“These lakes in Alaska, these glacial lakes, when it’s calm like that,” said Galliett, “are a giant trap for the unwary aviator because when you get down close to the water during that kind of weather, you can’t tell how high you are just by vision—the water’s so flat and mirror-like. So you really have to watch your altimeter. If you don’t, you’re in trouble. And I think that was a large part of the accident.”

In his official statement after being rescued, Galliett said the first contact between plane and lake surface “was not violent.” He compared it to “a rough seaplane landing” and added that it was “rather smooth for a crash.” Barton, he said, handled the plane well and kept it going straight.

“Then when it might have nosed over, the pilot, to prevent this, ground looped the aircraft 180 degrees to the left, and the right wing hit the water and kept the aircraft upright,” Galliett said. “For some seconds we couldn’t see out because of spray and water running off of the windows.” The plane did not bob up and down, the engines stopped, and there was no noise at all, he said.

After that, however, action was swift.

At approximately 9:40 a.m., the plane, with its wheeled landing gear that was not designed for water, began to sink.

“Almost immediately water started to come through the floor boards,” Galliett said. “I tried to open the left door first by using the normal handle. Then I reached over and tried to use the emergency release, but I guess the door was jammed closed.” He tried slamming into the door with his left shoulder but was unable to budge it. At the end of this day, the only injury that Galliett would sustain was a bruise on his left shoulder from trying to jar open that door.

Then Barton and Puckett managed pop open the hatch on the right side, and Puckett exited quickly, stepping on the prop help him climb onto the right wing. Galliett helped Mrs. Cuerde climb out, followed by Mr. Cuerde, and then Galliett shrugged off his jacket and climbed outside, too. Inside, with the cabin of the plane nearly half full of water, Barton grabbed seat cushions to serve as flotation devices and hurled them out the door, instructing the passengers to take them for safety.

Each of the Cuerdes took a cushion, as did Puckett. Galliett saw another cushion in the water and beginning to drift away from the aircraft. He dived off the wing and swam to retrieve it.

“About this time, the aircraft nosed up, and the plane sank from beneath the other three passengers and pilot,” Galliett said. The pilot, he said, appeared to have no cushion and could consequently barely keep his head above water. When they all began to swim for their lives, no sign of the airplane remained on the glassy surface, the shoreline lay almost exactly a mile in the distance, and it was not quite 9:45 a.m.

*****

Even in the summertime, the silt-laden waters of Tustumena Lake are notoriously cold. Fed by mountain streams and the Tustumena Glacier, the surface temperature is regularly in the 40s, greatly increasing the likelihood of hypothermia and greatly decreasing the likelihood of survival. Tustumena Lake has claimed many drowning victims over the years, but on this day it did not claim Harold Galliett.

Galliett alone was able to swim more than a mile to shore and survive.

In his statement to authorities shortly after being rescued, Galliett said that he placed his seat cushion beneath his left arm and began to swim the side stroke to conserve his energy. After he had swum only about 100 feet, he said, he heard Puckett yell. Galliett turned to look and saw the 27-year-old man sink out of sight.

Galliett’s leather dress shoes began to swell in the water and hindered the effective kicking of his feet. He tried to tread water and remove his shoes, but in the effort he struggled to remain afloat, so he left them on and continued swimming.

The next time he looked back for his fellow passengers, he noticed that the Cuerdes were still moving toward the shore but the pilot had vanished. Before he was halfway to shore, the Cuerdes, too, were gone.

All alone on a 26-mile-long glacial lake, he continued his measured breathing and steady stroke, watching the bubbles from his exhaled breaths trail behind him, counting the seconds it took them to move past, and calculating the speed at which he was moving. With his waterproof Wittnauer watch—a gift from his father—he occasionally checked his time, relying on years of swimming practice to gauge his progress.

When Galliett had attended the University of California in the 1940s, he had been financially strapped and forced to live in the basement of a boarding house occupied by numerous other young men, all of whom would crowd into the single upstairs bathroom each morning. “I couldn’t get in,” he said. “So that got kind of bothersome after a while. I said, ‘Well, hell with this. I’m going to go down to the gym.’”

At the UC gym each morning, he stood beneath the shower, with all the hot water and elbow room he desired, and washed himself and shaved. After a while, however, he discovered that the university had an Olympic-sized swimming pool right outside of the showers, and he decided to add a workout in the water to his time at the gym.

“I figured out how many laps I needed for a mile, and I decided to swim a mile every day,” Galliett said. “And that’s what I did. And I kept it up for several months.”

He had enjoyed swimming since his childhood, especially in the days that he and his family had lived on Oahu. “My mother used to pack us into our old Studebaker, and we’d roll on down to the beach, and I’d be there all day, swimming and trying to surf and whatnot,” he said.

The UC pool and the Hawaiian surf, however, were considerably different than the frigid Tustumena waters, which began to exact a toll on Galliett as he continued to move almost mechanically toward the shore. Despite his exertions, his legs were numb and he was growing steadily weaker.

About 45 minutes into his swim he heard the drone of an airplane, and shortly thereafter he saw a Cordova Airlines Widgeon fly over in a southeasterly direction.

“I tried to wave to attract their attention,” he said, “but every time I would put my arm up to wave I would start sinking, so I thought I better give that up and just try to keep swimming.”

Soon, he said, he noticed that the shoreline was only about 100 feet away, and as he drew closer he felt his feet begin to strike the bottom of the suddenly shallower water.

“I just swam right into the shore,” Galliett said. “I was very cold. I just flopped on the beach and (was) out of breath and almost unconscious. I tried to move and just couldn’t even do that for a while. In fact, I couldn’t even move the cushion.” The time was approximately 10:45 a.m.

He lay there for perhaps a quarter of an hour and then was able to stand and try to walk. He saw a point of land about 50 feet away to the west and began moving down the beach in that direction. From the point, he peered into a small bay and noticed the reflection of what appeared to be metal. On the theory that he was seeing the roof of a remote cabin, he set off with the hope of shelter.

“I was staggering,” he said. “To walk, I had to keep my feet far apart so I wouldn’t fall over sideways.” The cabin was nearly a mile further westward, and along the way Galliett foraged on lowbush cranberries. He also saw several spruce grouse and considered trying to bash one over the head with a stick; instead, unwilling to make the effort to hunt, he drove himself forward.

He arrived at the Pipe Creek Cabin just as he was “beginning to feel kind of alive again,” he said, and unwired the front door and walked in. Inside, he saw a woodstove in one corner, two cots with mattresses in another corner, and, above the stove, a small shelf containing an old-looking can of milk, a can of coffee grounds, and a bottle filled with long-handled kitchen matches.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I got it made now. I’m not even going to be cold tonight. I can put one mattress on top and sleep on one,’” Galliett said, “I didn’t start a fire in the stove. I decided to do it outside. I was going to pull a Robinson Crusoe or something like that—build a fire and have a lot of green wood to dump on it (to make a signal).”

For tinder he employed dry twigs and pages from an old American Rifleman magazine, and soon he had a roaring fire. Then, with the help of a saw from the cabin, he stacked armloads of green branches nearby. He stripped down to his underpants and lay his wet clothing and the contents of his wallet out to dry a safe distance from the fire.

Sometime after noon, he heard another aircraft.

“I was walking around in my shorts, so I grabbed my shirt, dashed down to the beach and started waving my shirt,” he said. “A Cordova (Airlines) C-46 flew over me then, and came back and passed over me about five or six times. I kept waving my shirt and practically jumping up and down, (but) the C-46 didn’t even tip his wings or anything, and he left.”

Shortly afterward, however, the Widgeon returned, landed out on the lake, and taxied in to the shore. The pilot hollered for Galliett to climb aboard, but Galliett said he needed to go back and collect his belongings, put out the fire and close up the cabin first. Behind him, the flames were reaching at least 15 feet toward the sky.

The pilot told him to grab his stuff but not worry about the rest. Someone else would take care of the details, he said.

Inside the amphibious aircraft a few minutes later, Galliett received some dry clothes, which he put on as they taxied out to the area he indicated as the crash site. There they found a rainbow-like sheen of gas and oil, but no bodies, no debris, no cushions.

*****

Galliett was back at work in a few days. His ordeal and rescue were reported in the local Cheechako News and in the Anchorage Times, and later that fall the Grand Commander was salvaged from the bottom of the lake. The bodies of neither the pilot nor the other passengers were ever found.

“I’ve told this story a few times,” said Galliett, now 88, via telephone from his home near Oroville. “It didn’t bother me at the time (because) I felt so lucky to have survived. Who am I to criticize the decisions of the Almighty? Anyway, I made it out. That’s all I can say, really.”

 

Harold Galliett, age 88, at his home in Oroville, California, in 2012.