On the day Sam Wright, Hans Munich and Tanya Hutchins disappeared in the Fairweather Range, Haines pilot Drake Olson was doing much-needed maintenance on one of the three airplanes in his hangar.
The plane, his fastest one, was in pieces on July 20 when he got a call from Munich and Hutchins, who own Coastal Air Service in Yakutat. They were on their way back from Seattle when their flight from Juneau got canceled.
They called Olson who said he couldn’t help them – but then thought of Wright, his neighbor.
“I arranged it,” Olson said, sighing heavily.
“Everybody was busy. It’s the heat of the summer, all the air carriers are busy,” Olson said. So I called Sam and he said ‘no’ because he had to go to a wedding. And then he called back and he said ‘you know, I should go,’ and I said ‘Yeah, I think you should go.’ That was stupid of me.”
It was settled. Wright flew his distinctive 1948 Beechcraft Bonanza to Juneau, and picked up Munich and Hutchins. It’s not a backcountry plane.
“That was his, you know, his commuter,” Olson said. It’s fast and sleek.”
He landed in Juneau and picked the Yakutat couple up.
“I got a picture from Tanya [Hutchins] from the backseat of Sam’s Bonanza as they were departing Juneau,” Olson said.
A few hours later he got a call from Yakutat – long after the trio should have landed, as the flight generally takes less than an hour.
“It was the guy who was actually waiting for Hans and Tanya in Yakutat and .. actually saw the signal stop in the Fairweathers,” Olson said. “He called me and said – like – there’s no airplane here and it’s weird, but the signal stopped in the Fairweathers.”
Olson scrambled to get up into the air, but he was working on a part of it that takes a lot of precision adjustment – think of the serpentine belt in your car – so, it took a few hours to get his plane back together.
“I put it together hurriedly. Thoroughly, but hurriedly,” he said. “I think I left around 7 [p.m.] and I was out until after 10. I was so tired and fatigued that I was like ‘I’m a bloody hazard out here. I’ve got to go home.”
The disappearance of two deeply experienced Southeast Alaska pilots, and Hutchins, touched off a weeks-long search for any trace of the missing plane.
And it left Olson searching for answers. He described Wright and Munich as mentors and some of the few backcountry pilots he relied on for knowledge and friendship in Southeast Alaska.
“These are the closest people that I have there and in my little corner of the world,” he said. “It’s just like, in my current world, that was my inner circle. Like, poof. Gone. Just gone.”
The search
The initial call about an overdue plane came into the Coast Guard just before 6 p.m. on July 20.
Coast Guard spokesperson Shannon Kearney said the agency put out a marine broadcast and sent out the cutter Reef Shark that night. They launched a helicopter from Sitka, and a C130 from Kodiak. The Alaska State Troopers and Alaska Rescue Coordination Center got involved, as did the Civil Air Patrol.
The flight tracking stopped at about 10,000 feet in a specific location near Mount Crillon at the southern end of the Fairweather Mountain Range. So official and unofficial searchers combed the area.
But, just under three days later, the Coast Guard called off the official search. That left people like Olson, Haines pilot Mike Mackowiak, Clayton Jones, and others from Alaska Seaplanes and Temsco helicopters to continue the search on their own.
When pressed, Olson can’t remember everyone but he remembers seeing a lot of people out looking, including: a pilot from Gustavus, another who flies for Alaska Seaplanes but was using his own personal plane, another in a Super Cub from Juneau.
Others went up and photographed the area in high resolution so the photos could be examined for what tired eyes may have missed.
And as the days dragged on and people returned to their busy summer lives and schedules, Olson said they would still pitch in where they could.
Like Randy Kiesel from Ward Air who would send pictures when he flew by the region.
“Cause there was weather and we were always wondering when we could go out there and not get skunked by clouds,” Olson said.
The trio were well-respected, so that explains some of the private effort, but Olson and others also said there’s something of a code in the tight-knit aviation community.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s somebody I don’t even like at all. It’s like, you go. There’s human life involved, something bad has happened, we’ve got to find them. End of story. I would want that for myself,” he said.
Especially early on when there was no sighting of the plane and some, like Olson, wondered if the data showing the plane had stopped suddenly at 10,000 feet was incorrect. Perhaps the plane had landed somewhere else and Wright, Munich and Hutchins survived or needed help.
“Even though the [tracking] data showed that they hit the mountain, there was no evidence,” Olson said. “So, you go, is the data wrong? What’s going on here?”
Confusion and speculation
But while the private search unfolded, publicly there was a lot of speculation about what had happened to the plane – fueled in part by how journalists reported on the situation.
Both Olson and Mike Wright, Sam Wright’s son, said they were frustrated by the way the news reporting impacted people connected to the missing and the private search.
Multiple media outlets, including the Chilkat Valley News, reported on the ongoing search and the point at which the Coast Guard called off its search for the plane.
But Wright and Drake pointed to a specific story in the Anchorage Daily News, published on July 25, that they say gave the impression that the wreckage had been found.
It relied on interviews with a Coast Guard communications person, the Alaska head of the National Transportation Safety Board, and a report from the Civil Air Patrol which found an “area of disturbance.”
The story initially indicated that the Coast Guard called off its search for the plane based solely on the presumption that the crash site had been found.
“They got the whole community of Juneau and Haines in an elevated state with their misinformation and lack of follow-through,” Wright said.
The story was later quietly corrected to say that the discovery of a potential crash site was “one of the factors,” that prompted the suspension. But there was no indication in the story that a correction had happened until a week later.
In response to questions about community criticism of valuing speed over accuracy, Anchorage Daily News Editor David Hulen wrote in an email that the paper takes accuracy seriously and takes care to quickly fix errors when they learn about them.
“In this case, we initially reported that the apparent discovery of the crash site prompted the suspension of the search. The next day, the Coast Guard reached out and said it was one of multiple factors. We updated the piece to reflect that. What we failed to do was add a note or correction to the article saying it had been updated and that the earlier information had been corrected,” he said.
Both Wright and Olson said the piece caused a lot of confusion among people following the search or who knew any of the three people aboard who were missing.
“The impact that it has is that people, when people have lost anything – a person or a possession – there’s a lot of hope and when hope starts to get fulfilled falsely then it creates a second wave of tragedy when they find out that it was an untruth,” Wright said.
Wright and Olson said they had to tell people over and over again that the plane had not been found and that people were still out there, flying in the Fairweathers, searching for it.
“They’ve got to relive this moment multiple times,” Wright said.
Olson said private searchers lost an entire day trying to verify what was being labeled as the probable crash site, something which ultimately proved to be inaccurate.
A comprehensive account of what happened isn’t expected from the National Transportation Safety Board for some time. But, the agency released a preliminary report in mid-August.
It shows Wright’s plane leaving Juneau around 1:45 p.m. and heading northwest for about 70 miles before turning southwest and heading into the park for another 30 miles. Just after 2:20 p.m., the signal abruptly stops on the side of East Crillon mountain. The plane was flying more than 160 miles per hour.
The report details that a private search of the accident site revealed portions of the plane wreckage on the eastern side of East Crillon Mountain at just over 6,000 feet, some 4,500 feet below where the plane is believed to have crashed into the mountain.
That private searcher was Drake Olson.
Finding the plane
On the morning of Aug. 5, when Olson found the wreckage of the missing plane, he woke up early – around 4:30 a.m. He made himself a coffee and headed to his hangar at the Haines airport to prep one of his Cessnas.
“The idea was the morning light, with no clouds, it was a different angle of light,” he said. “Maybe I’d pick up a reflection in that different light.”
He was up in the air at about 6:30 a.m. and out near Mount Crillon to search within an hour. He looked for a while, but – it just didn’t feel right.
“I was so fatigued,” he said. “I didn’t have my … you have to have this gunslinger attitude – your flight swagger – when you fly anywhere around here,” he said. “I felt like a child. I was out there like ‘wow. This is gnarly.’”
So, he descended and landed on a nearby beach. He walked in the warm sand, ate some food and took a nap.
“I looked my airplane over cause I hadn’t flown it in awhile. I did a few little tweaks because it was running a little hot. And, god, we were much better after that,” he said. “We were totally relaxed and in sync. We were like peas and carrots. We were right with the world.”
He climbed inside, took off and started climbing. Zig-zagging back and forth, first over Mount La Perouse, a 10,700ish foot peak nearby.
“The whole thing changed,” he said. “After that rest I was like – f*** – lots of people, professionals and everybody, amateurs have looked and looked and looked and really? This is how it ends? Like, not a shred, really? Because, this is it for me, I think. I’m about over this.”
With that attitude – and the idea that he may never return to searching again – he really started to catalog his surroundings.
“My eyes have never painted this area as thoroughly,” he said. “I’m seeing more of this area than I have ever seen. I’m back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.”
He practiced a few approaches in spots he thought he could land on La Perouse and Mount Crillon – learning the lay of the land, then just low power floating.
“I just kept working my way up, up, up, up, until I was at that kind of crash altitude,” he said.
The place where Wright’s plane stopped broadcasting a signal is right around 10,000 feet. It’s a place he had returned to over and over again. A place people had flown dozens of times looking but never seeing.
And in that angled morning light, Olson saw a flash.
“That reflection, right down below but you’re really right up against the mountain and looking down it,” he said.
Initially it was hard to keep track of it. He could only see a flash for a second at a time as he was flying in circles, then it would be gone.
“It was like a mystery every time. Every time I circled, I wasn’t sure I was going to see it again” he said.
He started descending in his circle. A long slow series of spirals, keeping an eye out for that flash every time. And finally, he got close enough to see the crumpled, polished aluminum.
He pushed a button, marking the GPS coordinates, flew back up and headed toward Gustavus. He got cell phone reception over the Brady Glacier and called flight service and told them to call Eric Main, a helicopter pilot at Temsco.
He also called Mike Wright, Sam’s son. The signal was bad – but Olson said he managed to get across that he’d found the wreckage.
Eric Main, the Juneau-based manager at Temsco Helicopters, got into the air that afternoon in an Airbus350 to verify it.
The helicopter has a distinct advantage in this situation because the spot of the accident site is very essentially on the side of a mountain and something of a bowl. Olson has to maintain some kind of airspeed, so he can only get so low.
Main in his helicopter can hover. He said he could have landed, but to do that they’d have had to have prior permission from the National Park Service.
So he hovered within 10 to 20 feet looking at pieces of debris and taking pictures.
“We started finding pieces that were obviously aircraft aluminum of that color,” he said. “We found some a bit later that had markings that more or less identified that it was that aircraft.”
Olson said when he found the wreckage, he fell apart emotionally.
“There it was. It happened. Everything else was just speculation,” he said.
In that moment, Olson said he was finally able to let go of Wright, Munich and Hutchins. Or, at least, the idea that they might still be alive and need help.
“We don’t let go until we know,” he said. “That’s why, you know, that’s why there’s all these – like families are always – if they’ve lost somebody they just go through crazy attempts to get verification. You want to know because otherwise they might be alive.”
In that crumpled piece of aluminum, Olson saw the finality of what had happened.
“Like, all this data was correct. This is bad. This is done,” he said. “It’s a bad scene, but they’re not anywhere else. There’s closure for sure for everybody. But, it’s – there’s also a huge void. My god, these guys were upper echelon pilots and Tanya, too, was – you know – just all good, good people.”
