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Aircraft wins Valdez competition, then becomes another Alaska plane crashBush Pilot previously reported that a plane crashed Sunday on Alaska’s Kayak Island -- 49 miles southeast of the community of Cordova -- and the two occupants had to be rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. The downed plane, known to many as “Cuzoom,” had a weekend filled with ups and downs. On Friday, the plane sheared off its left landing gear as it touched down in Valdez, then won the prestigious Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) competition the next day at the popular Valdez Fly-In, before crashing again on the grizzly-populated island Sunday. Cuzoom, a Piper PA-18 Super Cub with so many modifications -- including a 238-horsepower engine supplemented by a canister of nitrous oxide and an 80-inch propeller -- that it is classified “experimental,” won the alternate bush class -- the most competitive division -- of the competition with a takeoff distance of 43 feet and a landing distance of 35 feet, for a combined total of only 78 feet. That beat the next closest competitor, Randy Goza of Wasilla, by a combined total of five feet. The STOL competition is one of the premier events of the annual Fly-In. The event ended on Sunday, and Cuzoom, owned by Mike Olson of Yakima, Wash., and piloted by Ed Doyle of Manhattan, Kan., took off back for the Lower 48, with Doyle’s friend Dan Wild in the passenger seat. Olson, the owner, was flying home on a commercial airline. Following the crash, the Coast Guard said the plane had suffered a hard landing after running out of gas, although that initial report may not have been accurate. Bush Pilot contributor Rob Stapleton, who attended the weekend Fly-In, reported that Valdez had run out of aviation gas on Sunday, potentially due to mechanical problems with a truck bringing more fuel that Stapleton encountered while leaving Valdez on the Richardson Highway. Era Helicopters in Valdez was the fueling station for this year’s event, and Jan Gundersen, a helicopter pilot with Era, confirmed that there had been a brief shortage of fuel, but estimated that the time between when the fuel ran out and a truck arrived with more avgas to offload was around 15 to 30 minutes. He said that there was a line of planes at the pump when the fuel arrived, and they had to push some of the planes out of the way in order to allow the truck through. Gundersen also said that it’s always difficult to predict the amount of fuel needed to accommodate the many planes flying into Valdez on the weekend of the event, and that there are more every year. “It’s hard to tell just how much fuel we’re gonna need,” Gundersen said. “You can’t just get fuel at the snap of a finger" in Valdez. Gundersen also said that it was his understanding that the plane hadn’t gone down because of a lack of fuel. “To the best of my knowledge,” he said, “that airplane that went down on Kayak (Island), that wasn’t fuel related.” Gundersen’s assessment was partially confirmed by Cuzoom’s pilot, Ed Doyle of Manhattan, Kansas. Doyle was flying the plane when it came down on Kayak Island, and said that although his first instinct was that the aircraft had run out of gas, it was probably due to another problem known as carb icing -- or carburetor icing -- caused by a mixture of water vapor and cold temperatures in the engine’s carburetor. The problem is common in light aircraft such as Cuzoom. Aircraft are typically equipped with carburetor heating systems, manually controlled by the pilot, to prevent icing problems. Cuzoom had made a hard landing two days before, in Valdez, likely due to the same problem, according to Doyle. In that instance, the plane was circling around before landing when the engine suddenly stopped. “The engine absolutely quit,” said Doyle, who was not piloting the plane in that incident. The pilot "couldn’t quite make the runway, and got crossways in the gravel,” shearing off the left landing gear, as Doyle recalls. They got the plane fixed that evening, and the next day, won the competition with Cuzoom under Doyle’s control. “We definitely had a better day Saturday than Sunday,” he said.
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