Piper PA-18 Super Cub

Then came the most terrifying part.

He would force her into his small Piper Super Cub airplane and fly her deep into the remote Alaskan wilderness, sometimes hundreds of miles away from civilization.

Imagine the horror from the victim's perspective.

After hours of assault, you're loaded into a tiny plane, flown over endless forests, mountains, and tundra, and then dropped off in the middle of nowhere.

Don Sheldon landed on those glaciers anyway.

He started with ski-equipped aircraft, a Piper Super Cub, a Stinson, eventually the Cessna 180 that became his signature airplane.

He rigged his gear with wheel skis, a combination that let him operate from Talkeetna's gravel strip and then set down on glacier ice without changing his entire landing configuration between flights.

This was not a new concept.

The NTSB will be there to investigate today.

A replica Piper PA-18 with two people on board crashed at about 4.20 in the afternoon when it was taking off.

The plane was registered with a limited liability company in Montana, according to the FAA.

The NTSB spokesperson said the investigation will look at things like flight data, aircraft maintenance, records, weather, the pilot's license and ratings, and a background to determine if there was anything in the 72 hours leading up to the flight that could have affected the plane's ability to safely operate.

And that was the beginning and end of the conversation as far as he was concerned.

His main aircraft was the Piper Super Cub, the PA-18, 150 horsepower in the versions he favored, fabric covered, simple as a box wrench.

He also flew a Cessna 180 at various points.

Neither airplane was engineered for the work he was asking of them.

These are isolated headwaters in the extreme.

To get bodies and gear on the ground required five flights and two-person Piper Cub and Super Cub bush planes.

Our largest duffels carried 17-foot pack boats, folding canoes on aluminum frames, which I figured to be our master stroke.

This was part of the dream too.

According to our bush pilot, Rob Kincaid, less than a handful of hunting parties raft the upper river each year.

He'd heard of no one who'd fished above the canyon, ever.

As for the paddling conditions, well, he said, it all looked workable from the windshield of a Super Cub, but we weren't paddling a plane.

The first test came fast, just after put-in.

The crash killed 42-year-old Palmer resident Cabot Pitts and 18-year-old Connor Helsel of Michigan, according to Alaska State Troopers, who released their names yesterday.

Troopers say the men were the sole occupants of the Piper PA-18 Super Cub, which crashed about 50 miles east of Nabesna a little before 8:00 PM Thursday night.

Pitts was the owner of Alaska Wildwin Adventures and president of the Alaska Professional Hunters Association.

Helsel was the son of a pastor and traveled to Alaska to work for Pitts, according to a Facebook post by his father's church.

There's one airstrip that's, like, right in this lake, and then...

But he's like, "Ah, that's kinda crappy, so we'll find some off-airport- Mm-hmm ... like, place we can land." So we, we, we get up, we go to freaking McCall, get gas, and, and this dude rolls up on this, like, like, r- regular Super Cub, belly pod, 35s.

Gets out, and he starts talking.

He's like, "Yeah, I'm just flying down from Alaska." This is in McCall? And we're gonna t- Uh, yeah.

Yeah.

This is in McCall at the, at the self-serve fuel pump.

And he's like, "Yeah, we're..." And he's got his, his wife and, like, all bunch of gear in the back, right? 160-horse Super Cub, so it weighs, like, 300 pounds more than m- me, just for reference.

So it weighs, the airplane weighs 300 pounds more, plus gear, plus a second person.

The Piper Cub.

More specifically, the Super Cub.

The J-3, the PA-18, the lineage that stretches back to the late 1930s and has never really gone out of fashion, because the problems those airplanes were designed to solve have never really gone away either.

I'm Tower, this is ATIS on Radio Hangar, and today we're talking about a machine that claims to carry that lineage forward in a very deliberate, very specific way.

Start with the engine.

The MOAC designation implies a level of capability beyond the standard American Legend lineup.

And the power plant is a big part of that story, where a classic Super Cub ran a Lycoming 0320, producing about 150 horsepower.

And some modern Cub variants push that to 180.