"Popsicle Plane"

Only the tail of the Super Cub could be seen when the rescuers returned

to try to salvage the plane from the ice of Beluga Lake.

POPSICLE PLANE

May 2010

The problem began with a December goat hunt and four friends in two airplanes.

One of the planes, a red-and-white Super Cub, was owned and piloted by Dr. Elaine Riegle, a Soldotna pediatrician. Sitting behind her in the two-passenger aircraft was Dr. Paul Isaak, a renowned bi-plane pilot and Soldotna general practitioner.

The other plane, a modified cream-and-gold Cessna 170B that had been previously owned by legendary Alaska bush pilot Don Sheldon, was being flown by its current owner, Jerry Near of Soldotna. In the seat to Near’s right sat his friend and fellow pilot, Gene Kempf.

Both planes were affixed with snow skis, and the plan was to make an aerial search for mountain goats in the hills around alpine lakes in the Kenai Mountains, and then, upon spotting some animals, to land on a lake and hike over to wherever the hunting was.

The four companions hoped that snow and cold weather would drive the goats to lower elevations, making them easier targets. With that thought in mind, they departed from the Soldotna airport on Dec. 4, 1971, and headed for the Fox River drainage near the head of Kachemak Bay.

They landed on two lakes there to take a look around. Noting that about 3-4 inches of snow covered the icy lake surface, they scanned for goats, saw none and so they moved on.

They flew south to Bradley Lake, which was about two decades from becoming a major source of hydroelectric power, and which was nestled in the largely treeless mountains just west of the southern tip of the Harding Icefield. It was there that they finally sighted some game.

“We flew in, and I spotted six or seven goats within about 50 yards of the lake,” Near said. He prepared to fly over the animals again and “wiggle the wings a little” to signal the other plane of their good fortune.

Just as he began to make the pass, however, the doctors in the other plane radioed in to notify him that they’d also seen the goats and were already preparing to land.

Near radioed back: “As they landed, I said, ‘How the ice?’ And Doc Isaak came back, ‘Good. All kinds of ice. Good and hard.’ And then I heard some kind of exclamation, and I looked out—and the aircraft has come to a stop and just broke through, fell right to the belly.

“And then the airplane sort of slowly filled with water and began to settle. They got out because the Cub door just folds down, and they had enough sense to roll along the wing but not climb on it. They got wet from about their waist down as they rolled toward the shore.

“And I’m in the air watching this, and I said to myself, ‘Now what am I going to do?’”

What he did first was look for a safer place to land, and he found such a place more than a mile away near a glacial outwash at the head of the lake. He landed on the thicker ice there and ran his plane up onto the beach.

Meanwhile, the half-soaked Riegle and Isaak were walking along the shore in the cold December air. When they finally reached Near and Kempf, the doctors gratefully boarded the four-passenger Cessna and shivered as they were flown home.

“We came back to town,” Near said, “and now we were puzzled: ‘What are we going to do?’”

They acknowledged that, for the time being, thin ice would prevent them from landing near the Super Cub, but they believed that they needed to take some action soon if they wanted to have any chance of rescuing the plane.

Shortly thereafter, Near and Kempf flew in Kempf’s plane back to Bradley Lake to assess the situation. Dr. Isaak followed in his own plane, and the men hauled along with them some “equipment” they believed might be helpful whatever the circumstances: some two-by-fours, some ropes, a semi-truck tire inner tube.

Doing some early shovel work.

Again, they landed at the upper end of the lake, and they carried their gear as they hiked along the shore toward the Super Cub, by this time supported solely by its wings, which were lying flat on the still-intact edges of the ice hole created when the plane broke through. The fuselage was almost entirely submerged and full of water.

Using the boards to stand on and more evenly distribute their body weight near the edges of the ice, the men attached one end of the rope to the inner tube and managed to loop the other end around the tail wheels. They hoped that the inner tube would act as a sort of buoy to keep the aircraft from dropping all the way to the bottom of the lake.

After they returned again to Soldotna, the weather took a turn for the worse. Although they were able to check periodically on the plane and occasionally stash more supplies, it was obvious to them that more snow was dumping on the lake, and that high winds from out on the Pacific Ocean were continuously buffeting the location.

While they awaited a string of nicer days, Near, Riegle, Isaak and their friend Herman Stenga were busy scheming. “There was a whole lot of head-scratching,” Near said. “And we had all kinds of suggestions. One was to get up there with bolt-cutters and cut the engine loose and just forget the rest. We kind of discussed this for weeks and weeks.”

When the proper nexus of time and opportunity finally arrived, it was Jan. 7, 1972, and the temperature was minus-20 degrees.

When the would-be rescuers arrived at the lake, they were astonished by what they saw: Only the tip of the plane’s tail was showing above the drifted snow. As they began brushing snow away from where the rest of the plane should be, they discovered that it was no longer on the surface.

Over the intervening five weeks, heavy snow and cracking ice had produced overflow, and sub-zero temperatures had produced more ice. The Super Cub was now entombed in a 42-inch crust, a sort of icy netherworld between the air above and the water below.

Despite the dire logistics involved, they hoped to find a way to stir up the water around the entombed plane, melt the ice, and free the aircraft.

Isaak had flown to the lake with Riegle and Stenga in his Cessna 180. A Civil Air Patrol pilot had also flown out in to the lake in a De Havilland Beaver to help haul in supplies. They landed as daylight was fading, according to Riegle, who kept handwritten notes throughout the rescue attempt, and when Isaak and the C.A.P. pilot departed, Stenga and Riegle were left alone to set up camp and begin their operation.

In the near-dark on the ice adjacent to the accident site, they erected a small, tan-colored nylon tent. At dinnertime, they used a blowtorch to cook their food.  During the night, the temperature continued to drop, and overflow seeped up through the floor of the tent and into their sleeping bags.

At daylight the following morning, visibility had dwindled to one-eighth of a mile. The temperature was minus-25 degrees, and the wind was beginning to howl. Riegle said she learned later from a report by one of their visitors that area winds by the end of the day were gusting up to 100 miles per hour.

Knowing that their wet sleeping bags and gear posed a danger to their lives, they hiked across the ice for about a mile to a Forest Service cabin, which they established the next day as their primary shelter.

When they headed back through the blowing snow toward the plane, they struggled to find the tent. When they did locate it, they covered it with Visqueen and banked the windward side with snow. They slept one more night in its wet confines, munched on C-rations, and suffered minor frostbite.

On Sunday, Jan. 9, they moved into the cabin, which featured two wooden bunks. To dry out their sleeping bags, they chopped alders into lengths and started a fire in a small woodstove.

Meanwhile, Isaak flew back in to lend a hand, and then Near arrived in his Cessna 170B.

The four of them set to work on the actual recovery of the Super Cub. From the beginning, however, it was clear that little was going to be easy. On this first day of work, they discovered that the fuel line on their small generator had been broken, and then, as they were chopping ice to widen a hole they had recently bored, one of them accidentally let the ice auger slip and it fell through the hole and dropped 60 feet to the bottom of the lake.

Isaak flew the generator back to Soldotna, and on Monday the C.A.P. Beaver arrived with Riegle’s 10-horse Ski-Doo, which she had also purchased from Stenga. The snowmachine provided them with more rapid transit between work site and cabin shelter.

The temperature, according to Riegle’s thermometer, had dipped to minus-30 degrees, but the winds had eased to only 30 miles per hour. Out on the ice, the trio worked in snowsuits and bunny boots or heavy Sorels. They wore woolen caps and heavy mittens and facemasks to stave off more frostbite. Despite these precautions, Riegle, now 67 and a pediatric anesthesiologist in St. Louis, said that for several years after this experience, parts of her face, fingers and toes continued to “react negatively” to cold.

On Tuesday, Jan. 11, they set up a large canvas tent out on the ice to use for equipment maintenance. Inside the tent they placed a Herman-Nelson kerosene-powered heater capable of producing 120,000 BTU’s and providing them with a warm workplace.

Before beginning this rescue attempt, they had taken the dimensions of other Super Cubs back in Soldotna so that they could be fairly certain of the location of each wing tip and the propeller entombed in the ice. In front of the nose of the plane, they chiseled a large hole through the ice, placed a 2x12 plank adjacent to the open water, and then attached two three-horse Johnson outboard motors to the plank as if it were a boat transom.

One of the 3-horse Johnson outboards at work.

As the motors ran, hour after hour, the action of the moving water began to melt the ice nearby, creating a small underwater ice cavern just in front of the prop. They placed a third three-horse Johnson just off the tip of the right wing.

According to Riegle, they broke so many shear pins on the small outboards that they soon began repairing the problem with nails.

By Wednesday, the ice at the front of the plane had melted sufficiently to allow them to drop a cable into the open water and encircle the crankshaft between prop and engine. Then, in order to support the weight of the engine as the ice continued to melt, they began erecting a steel A-frame that would act like the boom on the back of a tow truck.

The A-frame consisted of two long legs—each made up of three six-foot sections of steel pipe held together with couplings—connected at the top, like an inverted “V.” At the top joint was a steel plate with a hole in it from which they hung a pulley to use in a block-and-tackle system. The “foot” end of each leg was bolted to a gusseted steel plate that allowed the entire A-frame to articulate forward and backward, controlled by a series of ropes acting as guy wires.

With a replacement auger, they bored holes in the ice through which to drop the end of each rope, connected to a deadman plate that effectively anchored the rope end into the ice. They employed a come-along to tighten all the ropes and position the A-frame’s apex directly over the prop. With the cable connected from apex to crankshaft, the plane was then secure.

The plane begins to emerge from the ice.



Most of the A-frame work was accomplished on Thursday when the air temperature rose somewhat and the winds decreased. The outboard action near the wing tip had cleared the ice from the surface of the wing itself, and, as the workers moved the outboard to the tail of the aircraft, they were pleased at the progress they had made.

Unfortunately, the weather stopped cooperating on Friday afternoon. Before the temperature plummeted to minus-50 degrees, however, Stenga examined the open water developing around the tail and decided that he should secure a cable to the tail wheel. To do so, he stripped to the waist and reached into the water with the cable in his bare hands.

As the winds continued to intensify on Saturday, Near flew back to Soldotna for more gear and fuel. After he departed, however, Stenga and Riegle ran out of fuel entirely and began to have problems with the starter on their generator. When Isaak dropped by to check on the project and deliver more gasoline, they decided to escape the worsening weather and go home for the rest of the weekend.

They pulled up the outboards and placed them inside the work tent, then climbed aboard Isaak’s Cessna just ahead of a storm. Riegle said that on Sunday the winds at Kodiak were clocked at 110 miles per hour, and 90 miles per hour at Homer. It would be Monday before they could return.

The weather was so bad over the weekend of Jan. 15-16 that returning to the aircraft was out of the question. Riegle and Stenga sat at home in Soldotna over the weekend and contemplated their next move.

Prior to returning on Monday, Jan. 17, to continue the job, they decided to upgrade their equipment. They borrowed two larger outboards—18 horsepower—hoping that the stronger prop action would allow them to melt ice and expose the plane much more quickly.

When they arrived in Isaak’s Cessna, however, they were dismayed to see that they had more work ahead of them than they had expected. “Six inches of overflow had covered everything and had erased all our work from the previous week,” Riegle said. “We spent the entire day moving the tents and campsite.”

Also flying in Monday was Near, who had helped extensively during the first week. Although Near did not stay this time, he did drop off Bob Robinson, whose wife, Jeanne, worked as a nurse in Isaak and Riegle’s clinic. Robinson planned to help complete the rescue.

On Tuesday, with the weather improving (no wind, minus-20 degrees and sunny), they re-set the three-horse Johnsons near the prop and tail and then placed one 18-horse motor at each wingtip. As the outboards chugged along, the rescuers used shovels to clear the snow that had drifted over their work area. For the first time since they had begun this mission, Riegle said, “Everything worked great.”

On Wednesday, their good fortune continued. Although the skies remained clear, the temperature warmed to zero degrees and the day remained windless.

Around the plane, as the ice thinned, they used a steel chipping tool to break it apart. Standing on boards to more evenly distribute their weight, they chipped away, scooping the ice from the water whenever possible. Then, much to their surprise, at about 3 p.m. the left wing of the Super Cub suddenly bobbed to the surface of the water.

It took them a few moments to figure out why the left side had risen first, especially since they had melted ice around the right wing during the first week.

While a three-horse motor had run off the right wing tip, the action of the moving water had melted the ice inside the wing; however, the water inside the left wing was still frozen, and since ice floats, the left wing rose first.

In an effort to more effectively remove the ice from the left wing, Stenga attempted to cut the fabric of the wing itself. In this attempt, he fell into the water but was able to jump to the edge of the ice as he fell, thus avoiding sliding under the wing.

The C.A.P. plane, piloted by Zillman Willis, had arrived just as the left wing had surfaced, and Willis soon returned to Soldotna to tell friends of the rescue team that more help would be needed the next day.

Riegle stayed up all that night to keep the motors running, while the men returned to the cabin to rest. By Thursday morning, which was again windless at zero degrees, a large T-shaped swath of open water revealed the entire airplane.

After Near flew in at about 9:30 a.m., the workers connected the block-and-tackle system to the plane’s sky hook to slowly raise it as the water drained from the fuselage and the wings. By adjusting the angle of the A-frame, they were able to pull the plane forward onto wooden planks placed like ramps under the skis at the edge of the ice.

The plane emerges from its icy tomb.

Next, they extracted all of the gear from the aircraft to lighten the load and then placed a blanket over the engine. Because the engine was the heaviest part of the airplane, the entire craft had canted nose-down, raising the tail above the ice and keeping the engine largely underwater all seven weeks.

Then, through “brute force,” according to Riegle, they began at noon to lift the plane entirely free of the lake. The plane was stable and on the ice by 4:30 p.m. and enveloped in a 50-foot square of Visqueen by 5 p.m.

As a Herman-Nelson kerosene heater blasted away beneath the enclosure, Stenga and Near worked until 2 a.m. to clean up and repair the engine. According to Near, they dried out the plane’s interior, pulled off and dried the magnetos, changed the spark plugs, and drained and replaced the oil and all other fluids. They also replaced the Cub’s bent propeller with a new straight one that they had flown in from town. The temperature under the Visqueen was a tropical 120 degrees.

Visqueen provided a warm workplace to repair the plane.

On Friday, Jan. 21, the weather remained constant: zero degrees, windless and clear. Stenga and Near continued working on the plane. Where Stenga had cut the wing fabric, Near said, they pressed the cardboard from a beer box and duct-taped it into place. Isaak arrived in the afternoon to help. Willis also returned in the C.A.P.’s De Havilland Beaver.

Then, in the early afternoon, Stenga climbed into the cockpit seat and signaled Near that he was ready for him to attempt to prop-start the plane. After several attempts, Near succeeded in engaging the engine. “It sounded awful,” said Riegle.

They allowed the plane to run for a while before Stenga took it out for a test flight, circling the lake at low altitude in a plane with no working gauges or radio. He landed again and told the others that he thought it was safe to fly home. He left Bradley Lake between 4 and 4:30, and arrived at the Soldotna airport at 5:15 p.m.

Back on the lake, the others loaded as much gear as possible into the Beaver and the two Cessnas and headed home. They had to make several more trips out to the lake later in the month to remove the rest of their gear and garbage.

Riegle, who still has nearly a half-hour of Super-8 movie footage she shot during her time on Bradley Lake, said that the two-week effort nearly 40 years ago was “an important event” in her life.

“I remember it like it had just happened,” she said. “I have done many other things in my life, but this one is major. It really shows you the value of true friends. None of us could have done this alone. It took real teamwork to think through the problems and solve the problems.”

Riegle, who has worked 22 volunteer pediatric missions in Africa, China, Central America, Eastern Europe, and most recently in Haiti, understands the value of such teamwork.

“When I was a kid growing up, I wanted three things,” she said. “Become a medical doctor, fly an airplane, and live in Alaska.” She achieved all three of those wishes, and received a chilly adventure in the bargain.