Travel Reference
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The Only Way to Fly
MY FIRST JOB WAS working for an air taxi, Cook Inlet Aviation in Seldovia in 1965, the
summer I was thirteen. I was unquestionably the worst employee Bob Gruber ever had, but
since my mother was his bookkeeper-slash-ground support, he couldn't fire me.
Which was why I liked the idea of buying a house in the flight path of one of the busiest
sea plane bases in the world. It feels like home to be working in the yard and look up to see
Beavers and Cessnas and Super Cubs, all on floats and all on a short final into Lake Hood.
There are so many of them, and so many of them bearing the Rust's Flying Service logo,
that I got curious. I called up my friend, former pilot and fellow author Megan Mallory
Rust, and said, “Where are all those planes going all the time?” and she told me to call her
brother Todd, who runs the business nowadays. Todd said, “Wanna go for a ride?”
Of course I did. I very nearly always do.
So one sunny Sunday morning in June, I climbed into the cherriest Beaver I'd ever set
foot in, November 712 Tango Sierra, a dark teal fading to a darker blue paint job on the ex-
terior and an interior that looked like it had just that moment rolled off the factory floor.
“So, you like flying Beavers?” I said to the pilot, a man named Hans Munich. I asked be-
cause Alaskan pilots seem to love Beavers almost as much as they love Super Cubs.
“I like flying this one,” he said, and grinned. “It's mine.” He looked too young to have
thirteen years' flying time under his belt, too young to have spent the last four of them fly-
ing out of Lake Hood for Rust's, and entirely too young to have rebuilt the DeHaviland
Beaver that was holding my behind seven hundred and fifty feet up in the air at the mo-
ment.
We had left Anchorage a little before seven-thirty, the Chugach Mountains showing in
bold relief against the rising sun, making the city look like a Monopoly game sitting in a
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