Red Cross honors Igiugig woman for helping light runway during nighttime medevac | Hacker News Reader

Red Cross honors Igiugig woman for helping light runway during nighttime medevac

alaskapublic.org

120 pointsDoreenMichele30 comments

> When the plane didn’t land, she went to the runway manager.

One of the fascinating dynamics of small towns is the casualness of interactions like this as everyone knows everyone and it is considered perfectly appropriate to try and talk to anyone. The plane didn't land, so she went to see the runway manager. She just did.

I wonder how often this happens in big cities. Do people ever email the airport to ask why a plane missed an approach?

I have some dealings with the Isle of Man. It is only a slight exageration to say I have conversations with my accountant there where he says "I don't know the answer to that, but my mate Paddy is Finance Minister this year, so I'll check with him later"

Leopold Kohr, the great decentralist economist, used to tell, about going to Lichtenstein and wanting to visit the Prime Minister of the country. He went to the castle, rang the bell, and the man who answered the door and ushered him in, whom he assumed to be a servant, turned out to be the Prime Minister himself. And when they were seated in his office, chatting, the phone rang and the minister answered, saying, “Government.” You see? with a tiny country like that government is always there, always responsive, always able to answer the phone and take care of your problem.

Source: https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/an-overview-o...

"Whenever something is wrong, something is too big" -- L. Kohr

> with a tiny country like that government is always there, always responsive, always able to answer the phone and take care of your problem.

I doubt it. A government of a small country does not necessarily have more resources per citizen. But Lichtenstein is one of the richest countries in the world, so the service level might be higher than the average country.

If Lichtenstein is like the typical small town, then it very much depend on who you are, if the government is going to take care of your problems when you call.

A major benefit of a tiny social structure is that it just cannot be very oppressive AND keep its members. Unhappy? Just join a neighboring structure.

This very option moderates local chiefs appetites.

In the typical small town some local public servants chose to decide who they will take care of, and how, because they feel empowered by the huge central government. You cannot escape, they are your sole way towards your goal.

I remember visiting Iceland and eating in a restaurant, where the guy at the next table turned out to be Magnús Skarphéðinsson, the founder of the Iceland Elf School, brother of Össur Skarphéðinsson, then Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Magnús was also famous for many other things, leading us to feel that Iceland needed people to take on all kinds of different roles in life because there were so few Icelanders!

Things like this don't scale. Imagine how much flight control would get done if anyone could walk in there and strike up a conversation.

I mean...at a bigger airport the runway would just have built-in lighting, a situation like this one would never occur. Even at un-monitored (read: no ATC) airports the pilots themselves can turn on/off the lights via radio command, or the airport authorities just keep the lights on during night time or bad weather. Nobody would have to call up the airport manager because the problem would be dealt with.

EDIT: I see now that the airport did have lights, but they happened to be out. Unfortunately the article gives no information as to why they were out, so I have no idea how that happened / was allowed.

Oh, no they do not, but is it a case of 100 people contacting the airport and being ignored or does awareness of it not scaling mean that a runway manager in NY is asked less than one in remote Alaska?

I don't think it is meant to scale to commercial airports.

Alan Kay once told me that there is a way to signal an unattended/closed airport by toggling the microphone three (?) times. I don’t believe he is a pilot; this was part of a story he was relating where a pilot of a small plane had done this and then explained what was going on.

I don’t know if this is universal in the US (and even if so wouldn’t work if they were inoperative as in this case)

Apparently this is true! See pages 121 through 124 of https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/media/aim_basic...

It's amazing to see how people come together in times of duress, and how people understand their relative responsibilities to each other when they know they have no one else but each other.

(It's also a mixed bag. I'm sure, if the plane could have landed, she would rather have taken a more leisurely steam.)

Yeah, on display is not only her individual heroism to rally her town, but her entire community's selfless assistance of those in need. It's important to embody that.

If it was the pilots home airport, probably. Night landings are a whole separate beast, and they aren’t easy due to shifting perspective

A fun piece of history where a similar story occurred in regional Australia too. In this case it was a passenger aircraft that was lost at night. The townspeople heard it circling overhead and lit up the racetrack. Everyone survived and the plane took off again to continue the journey in better weather conditions.

https://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2006/11/21/1793944.htm?...

>Alderman Logan recommended that we should set up a runway with the aid of motor headlamps". >My brother said they wanted any body with a car to go to the Albury racecourse and form a circle and turn their lights on. > I can remember getting into the circle around the racecourse and the plane coming down. A big hooray went up. We got out of the cars to walk over and I can remember all of the talk that was going on and excitement and seeing the crew walk around. I can remember touching the plane.

Wow... I lived in Dillingham for several years, and have been to Igiugig several times. Never ever would have thought I'd read about it on the web, let alone HackerNews.

That’s fascinating! Care to share more about your experience living there? Alaska has always been a place with so much intrigue for me.

Also - shouldn’t your username be miss_chanandler_bong :)

I used to live on a small island a few miles from Stockholm, we had the same thing, sometimes you'd hear a helicopter hovering above and then you'd go to the nearest landing spot with a flashlight...

Conspicuously absent from the story is why the lights were out in the first place, but good job, her.

It's a small town in a remote area, I expect the answer is simply that things break and take time to be fixed. And I bet nighttime landings are uncommon

The government funds the airport, the lights, the runway like at every small village in Alaska that has an airport. It’s because local ‘kids’ broke them all running by on quads with bats for funsies, counting on the feds or state to just replace them time after time - it costs the village nothing until it does.

Rando source with lede buried in bottom paragraph but I’m sure one could find more local ones with some digging: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-runway-lights-...

It's likely that night landings in a town of less than 60 people are uncommon - particularly in August when sunset ranges between 9:30 and 10:45 PM depending on when in the month it is. If it was early in the month they may have just barely missed being able to land without lights.

You don’t need to speculate, it’s known - see reply to adjacent comment. The lights are broken in acts of vandalism by the residents, regularly.

Interesting, I wonder if there's a direct economic benefit when someone comes in to fix the lights (along with possibly vandalism for the sake of breaking something and maybe a sense of making the state pay for perceived wrongs).

WBM: https://web.archive.org/web/20210519200046/https://www.alask...

It’s kinda the thing fire departments or police do when a citizen goes above and beyond what’s expected. They’ll present an award to create an atmosphere of cooperation and bonhomie. Whether minutia is of interest is up to you.

Truly heartwarming. Hope in humanity is returned!

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