Mountain flying men

Father, son duo knew the mountains well

Ever since he was a toddler, Ryan Hoerner was around airplanes.

While his father, Dave Hoerner, was flying planes and teaching aviation in Kalispell, Ryan was always underfoot, always learning and waiting for his day at the controls.

At age 16 he soloed his first airplane. At 19 he had his commercial pilot license.

He died Sept. 4 doing what he loved: flying.

Ryan's two-seat Piper Super Cub crashed in Southwest Alaska after it apparently had mechanical problems.

The plane was found nose-down in the tundra, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Ryan and his business partner were killed.

The Hoerners were in Alaska closing a purchase on a hunting and fishing lodge that had been Ryan's dream. Dave Hoerner was to fly with his son that day, but chose instead to go fishing. Just before Ryan, 31, took off, he gave his dad a big hug and told him not to worry.

"I was always the worrying father," Dave Hoerner said in an interview Wednesday at Red Eagle Aviation, his Kalispell business. "But I knew what kind of pilot he was. I was more worried about the plane malfunctioning than I was about Ryan.

"He'd been around aviation all his life. He flew a plane like he was wearing it."

Ryan Hoerner was one of eight Flathead Valley people killed in plane accidents in the last seven weeks.

Jim Long, Ken Good and Davita Bryant died after a single-engine plane crashed Sept. 20 on the east side of Mount Liebig, just south of Great Northern Mountain.

On Aug. 29, Steve Schuldheiss of Lakeside and Ray Zinke of Kalispell died when their single-engine airplane crashed into a home on the west side of Kalispell. On Aug. 17, a plane crashed near the summit of Big Baldy Mountain, killing both Flathead Valley occupants, pilot Larry Baier and co-pilot Scott Kiral.

TUCKED AWAY in remote forests of Northwest Montana are several grass landing strips that offer access for airplanes and pilots working and playing in the wilderness.

Schafer airstrip, for instance, is a popular spot to land for float trips on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Schafer was the destination for the Forest Service crew that crashed Sept. 20.

In good weather, flying to Schafer is a fairly routine, 20-minute trip from Kalispell City Airport over two mountain ranges. It can be a bit longer if you're forced by weather to detour around the Swan Mountains and fly up the Middle Fork drainage.

This is where you can run into problems, says Hoerner, who has flown the trip countless times and has logged 24,000 hours flying the mountains of Montana and Alaska.

Hoerner flew portions of this route up the Middle Fork on Wednesday morning while doing aerial surveys for radio-collared grizzly bears. With Hoerner was bear biologist Tim Manley.

Hoerner knows each drainage like the back of his hand, and he also knows how tricky it can be navigating the mountains of Northwest Montana.

"On a good day anybody can fly in the mountains," he said. "On a bad day, not many people can."

Wednesday was a bluebird day, with hardly any wind and a few clouds.

With Manley listening for radio signals from the collared bears, Hoerner made his way from Kalispell over Big Mountain, then turned east toward Glacier National Park. Near McGinnis Creek in the North Fork of the Flathead we picked up the "beep-beep-beep" of the radio signal on our headphones.

The bear was somewhere below us in the dense underbrush and could not be seen. We continued on toward Desert Mountain, where we located another radio-collared grizzly. Hoerner put the plane on its right wing and flew a steep, spiraling circle within the small drainage where the bear was located. This time, too, the forest was too thick to see the grizzly.

From Desert Mountain we headed south toward Essex. On our right was Mount Liebig, the site of the fatal plane crash. Hoerner described how the pilot had likely tried to cross the ridge between Liebig and Great Northern Mountain, but did not have enough altitude.

Two people, Jodee Hogg and Matthew Ramige, survived the crash and walked out to U.S. 2.

We flew close to Bear Creek, where Manley wanted to check a culvert trap that had been set along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. The trap was empty, and after circling twice above Essex to gain altitude, we headed west toward Ferndale to search for another bear.

Before we could get to Ferndale, we had to cross two mountain ranges and Hungry Horse Reservoir. Hoerner radioed the Flathead National Forest dispatch to request a "flight follow."

This is a courtesy that the forest extends to pilots with FM radios, and pilots radio in their locations every 15 minutes until they are safely out of the mountains. "Better safe than sorry," Hoerner said as we climb up and out of the Middle Fork drainage.

We flew only a few hundred feet above the ridge that divides the South Fork and the Middle Fork. It's easy to see how a sudden downdraft could force a plane down. In bad downdrafts, Hoerner said, a plane can lose a couple thousand feet of elevation in a minute. "You have to pick your spots where you cross ridges," he said. "You have to know where the bad weather is going to be.

"Knowing the country is everything. If you look down and see a creek, you need to know what creek it is."

Near Ferndale, we picked up the radio signal from the bear. The grizzly is found near the radio tower on Swan Hill, an area dotted with large, luxury homes just outside Bigfork. Again, the bear is not seen, only heard by its radio collar signal. With the bear wandering among densely populated rural homes, it could be only a matter of time until it comes too close to humans before it hibernates.

"There's still time for her to get in trouble," Hoerner says.

MINUTES LATER we touch down at Kalispell city airport. For Hoerner and Manley, this was just another day on the job.

Hoerner remembers back to Sept. 20, the day of the fatal crash on Mount Liebig. He had flown to Schafer earlier that day, before a storm blew in later that afternoon and he grounded his company's other flights.

"It was poor weather, but flyable," Hoerner said of his morning flight that carried two hunters.

On days like that, Hoerner always makes sure he has an exit in mind and can always see the next ridge ahead of him before venturing on.

"It's a tough call, having to turn back, especially when you have paying customers with you," he said.

He has flow into Schafer when the only visibility is "sideways or straight down," he said. Wind is the worst, he said. "At least when it's raining, there's usually no wind."

There are places on this flight up the river where you have to know where to turn when visibility is poor. For instance, when flying up the Middle Fork corridor, a pilot must make a left turn at Logan Creek and continue up the Middle Fork. Then, you have to bear right at Granite Creek, a large drainage that pours off the Continental Divide.

Make a wrong turn here, and you end up flying up Granite Creek into a box canyon, Hoerner said.

On the yoke of his plane is a global positioning system unit that scatters electronic bread crumbs behind him, so in case he has to turn around, he simply retraces his path. Some planes don't have those.

In the wake of the Mount Liebig crash, Hoerner, as a veteran mountain pilot, was interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board.

When Hoerner was asked which of his pilots could have flown the route to Schafer the day of the fatal crash, he had one answer.

"My son," he said.