Bush flying
8
MENTIONS
3
EPISODES
1
PODCASTS
Search complete. 8 mentions across 3 episodes found for "Bush flying".
Oct 18, 2026
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Unknown podcast
Bob Reeve, the Mud Flats at Valdez, and the Glacier Pilot Who Landed Where Every Other Bush Pilot Turned Around
Oct 18 · 1 Mention
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10:56Tail DraggerHOST
And Bob Reeve had all of that in abundance.
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10:58Tail DraggerHOST
That's Bush flying at its core.
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11:01Tail DraggerHOST
Not the romance of it, though.
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11:03Tail DraggerHOST
There is romance.
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Unknown podcast
Harold Gillam, the Lockheed Electra, and the Last Flight of Alaska's Most Daring Bush Pilot
Oct 8 · 5 Mentions
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3:50Tail DraggerHOST
In conditions that had grounded everyone else, Gillam delivered.
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3:53Tail DraggerHOST
There is a particular kind of pilot the Alaska bush flying world produced in those years, and they are worth understanding because they were genuinely different from what the Lower Forty-Eight was producing at the same time.
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4:04Tail DraggerHOST
Commercial aviation down below was moving toward standardization, toward instrument flight, toward the procedures that would eventually become modern airline operations.
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4:14Tail DraggerHOST
Alaska was on a different track entirely.
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4:16Tail DraggerHOST
A track defined by terrain, by isolation, by the complete absence of infrastructure, and by the absolute necessity of the airplane.
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4:24Tail DraggerHOST
Bush flying was not optional in Alaska in those years.
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4:27Tail DraggerHOST
It was how the territory survived.
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4:29Tail DraggerHOST
Miners who needed supplies, villages that needed medicine, trappers running lines in country that had no roads, government agents reaching communities that had no other link to the outside world.
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Unknown podcast
Bob Reeve, the Valdez Mud Flats, and the Glacier Pilot Who Ran an Airline on Tidal Cycles and Axle Grease
Oct 7 · 2 Mentions
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6:05Tail DraggerHOST
He was not reckless.
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6:07Tail DraggerHOST
This is a thing worth saying plainly because people who have never flown serious backcountry tend to confuse courage with carelessness.
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6:13Tail DraggerHOST
The Alaska bush pilots of that generation were calculating in a way that made ordinary risk management look casual.
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6:19Tail DraggerHOST
Every variable they could control, they controlled with real precision.
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6:23Tail DraggerHOST
The ones they couldn't control, they prepared for as thoroughly as available resources allowed.
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9:49Tail DraggerHOST
The accumulated weight of every flight you have ever made, every mistake you have survived, every near thing that taught you something without actually killing you.
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9:56Tail DraggerHOST
Reeve had that.
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9:57Tail DraggerHOST
The Alaska bush pilots of his generation all had it to some degree.