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Alaska gives you the opportunity to go out and push the limits.
I had a friend who used to say, "Wow, Alaska is cool, man.
"You can walk outside your front door and die."
My name is William Fulton. I usually go by Will or Willy.
I fly for Sea Hawk Air in Kodiak, Alaska.
Well we're flying a 1953 de Havilland Beaver on floats.
A Beaver is really the best for float plane work, the best airplane ever built,
you know, for the kind of things we do.
It's big enough to carry a good size load, yet small enough to handle by...
one person can handle it on the water, you know, and pretty much any wind.
But it's built similar to the cars of that era, you know, lots of metal.
You think, how many cars from 1953 are on the road today? Not very many.
Just real well built and tough.
I really don't think too many people here take it for granted.
They still appreciate the beauty of the island, and seeing the wildlife, seeing whales.
The people that live here, a lot of them live for that reason.
And then the tourists... Kodiak isn't really a tourist-based economy.
It's commercial fishing, you know, so we rely on a lot of different things.
The weather here is always a challenge. You have to enjoy it.
If you let it bother you, you wouldn't make it here long.
But you know, when you're flying, flying or boating, any way getting around really,
you have to be very respectful of the weather.
Weather dictates when you go certain places.
A lot of delays, a lot of delays for people that we fly.
Even delays on the commercial airlines coming and going from Kodiak.
So you just have to be patient. It teaches you patience, living here.
Something we're not all born with is a lot of patience.
I look at it as the great equalizer. You know, you could have a check for a million bucks,
and we couldn't come pick you up, and then you could be trapped.
Kodiak is one of the few places in the world,
where you can actually still get weathered in.
You can get weathered in for days here, where there's no airplanes, no boats,
no way out. Which is pretty good. No matter who you are, or what you're doing,
you may get stuck.
What sets flying in Alaska apart is the necessity of it.
It's huge. Most of the places on Kodiak Island, there's very little road,
so you have to fly or take a boat.
It's vital for mail. I've flown mail planes. It's vital for groceries to villages,
or people living remote.
We're a lifeline for freight. I mean, we do a lot of medevac type trips,
when people get hurt. So, we're the first responder in a lot of that.
We see good with bad. Unfortunately, I've seen, you know, suicides, boat disasters,
airplane crashes, a lot of different things, as a pilot.
You just have to be ready, I guess that's part of it.
There's a few different people I drop off, where in the back of your mind,
you're a little worried whether they're going to be there when you come back
to pick them up. I always hope they are.
It's kind of tough when you go to pick somebody up, and there's,
they're not there, there's not much left of them.
Timothy Treadwell. The movie, the event, and all that, it seems like a long time ago now.
But it seems like just another Alaskan tragedy. There's been a few of them.
When you think of the Into the Wild story, and the Treadwell story.
There's other people doing similar things out there, so it still goes on.
Being there when people need you,
well that makes you stop and think wow, what you do is really important.