#AIRPORT RUNWAY LIGHTS AT NIGHT DRIVERS#

The plane made several low passes over the airfield to see if they could land in these tough conditions. This Alaskan man is making a 14-hour boat trip to Costco every week to supply his small city with groceries amid the pandemicĮverything needed to line up right for the crew to consider landing, Edwards said. I don’t recall that runway lights not working has ever kept us from landing,” he said. “Runway conditions, icing and snow, have kept us from being able to land. It is rural Alaska and things get tricky sometimes, said LifeMed Alaska CEO Russ Edwards. Then the pilot relayed a plan to the neighbor who was rallying the residents.Įveryone needed to line up on one side of the runway, one vehicle at each light and some in between, she said. The pilot hopped into his own plane and started communicating with the LifeMed crew, Nelson said. Her neighbor told Nelson she made 32 calls to locals. They needed more vehicles to illuminate the runway, so Nelson’s neighbor called for reinforcements. Nelson offered to light up one end of the airport and that’s when her neighbor called to find out if the plane was landing. That failed and so did turning on the lights manually from the ground. Normally, a pilot can turn on the runway lights from the aircraft. A local pilot was assessing the problem and he told her the runway lights weren’t turning on. Nelson hopped on her ATV and sped a few hundred yards to the airport. “Once the plane flew over, I looked over toward the runway and the lights were not working.” “Normally planes don’t fly around at 11:30 at night, so I instantly knew something was wrong,” she said. It sounded like a vehicle.īut when Nelson looked outside, she realized it was a LifeMed plane and it was flying really low.

She was taking what locals call a steam bath – others call it a sauna – when something loud went by. Risky medical flight from South Pole arrives in Chile

The Twin Otter aircraft flying an Antarctic medical-evacuation mission has left the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station en route to the British Antarctic Survey's Rothera Station. South Pole Medical evacuation flight, June 22. The plane was able to land, load the patient and take off while the community kept the lights on.

#AIRPORT RUNWAY LIGHTS AT NIGHT DRIVERS#

“The only thing I could think of was how quickly I could get other people here to help because what if that was my baby’s plane?”Ībout 20 vehicles came within 20 minutes, with the drivers ranging in age from 8 to about 70, she said. “I was feeling nervous, anxious because this is late at night and this is someone’s child,” Nelson said. Residents and the LifeMed Alaska crew came up with a creative solution in a dangerous, tense situation that could have turned out very differently.ĭozens of residents assembled cars and 4-wheelers to light the runway so the plane could land and pick up a child who needed medical attention, Nelson said. The village of 70 people is about 280 miles from the nearest hub city. In the remote community of Igiugig, Alaska, the expression “it takes a village” rang true last weekend as the community came together to save the life of a child.Ī medical evacuation team descended into the darkness on Friday night only to find out there were no runway lights to guide the plane, head tribal clerk Ida Nelson told CNN.

Airport runway lights at night