Cessna 206

Great rifle for certain things.

Kind of the same thing with a Cessna 206 in the sense that if you live in Wyoming and pretty far away from just about everything you want to-

Mm-hmm

...

in other words, it's out there.

Mm-hmm.

And if you wanna go do business somewhere, do you really wanna get in your Cessna 206 and fly 600 miles to a location to have a business meeting in non-pressurized slow-

Sure.

Jack ...

Uh, when John bought it, he, he bumped it up to 12 guests a week, and we went to from two Beavers and a 206, a Cessna 206, which is a little smaller, up to running three Beavers so that we had room for seats for every angler that was here during the week without having to do any double trips each day or anything like that.

So, you know, 12's a pretty good number with, um, the layout of the airplanes and the size of the lodge and, you know, it's, it's a, it's a pretty nice size for, you know, being able to get people into good fishing every day of the week, you know? And not necessarily have to fish the same rivers over and over, you know-

Right

Uh, I'm gonna start this in a way I never thought I would start a live shot, and I've done a lot of them over the years, Ali.

I just minutes ago got off a Cessna 206 with my bush pilot, [laughs] Joshua, and he did indeed take us to Seldovia, which I know to some people may sound a little bit like a, a Hallmark made-up town, but believe me, it's not.

It is part of a system in this vast state of 82% of communities that are essentially off the grid, and by that I mean you cannot get there by road.

You have to take either a boat or a plane.

Those are all Cessnas.

It's a Cessna 206.

Yep.

Good point.

can we turn that three-day trip to that hospital into a one-hour flight with a float plane and could we save their life and the second part of that was could we do it without charging the local people because we knew that these people don't have running water they don't have electricity and they have no way to pay for an airplane to get to help when they need

it yep absolutely now i've been privileged enough to interview the folks over at flying doctors in australia

similar yeah i would say somewhat similar they're doing remote communities and uh they're probably more technical than we are i think they're flying king errors and some more bigger um bigger aircraft we're we're flying a cessna 206 on amphibious floats you know we have oxygen we have basic medical supplies we have a nurse with us and we have anti-venom if there's a snake bite so we're doing the basic things and our real our goal is how do we get them to the hospital as quickly as we can keep them stabilized So then the doctors there at the hospital can take care of them and give them the treatment they need.

For us, too, we're a Christian organization, so we don't just bring patients in.

Art, his wife Joyce, and their two daughters were actually supposed to fly into Moose Creek with the rest of the crew on June 11th, but at last minute, Joyce decided she wanted to arrive a day early so she could bake a cake for everyone ahead of the season's orientation.

So on June 10th, the Seamans family flew into Moose Creek aboard a smaller Cessna 206 instead.

On the morning of June 11th, pilot Marvin Whitey Hatchmeister and co-pilot John Slingerland were preparing to fly the Moose Creekers from Grangeville into the ranger station for the beginning of their summer season.

If there were two men you would feel comfortable making that flight with, it was Whitey, his nickname was Whitey, and John.

Yeah.

These were powering Alaskan bush planes like the Cessna 206, hauling cargo over the frozen tundra and powering turbocharged twin engine planes flying over the Rockies.

And because of that shared architecture, the internal parts were largely interchangeable.

So if a mechanic knew how to fix the little four-cylinder trainer engine, they already had the knowledge to fix the massive six-cylinder cargo engine.