When a small plane loses power less than a mile above the western Alaska tundra, passengers want a pilot with the training and the instincts to set them down safely. Luckily for the seven passengers flying Yute Air from Bethel to Kipnuk on Nov. 18, their pilot had both.

Pilot Bradley Amos was about halfway between the flyover city of Tuntutuliak and his destination when the trouble began.

"His engine quit at about the worst spot," said Ron Dudley, Yute Air's director of operations.

When Amos noticed the Cessna's oil pressure dropping, he made the decision to turn the plane around and aim it back toward Tuntutuliak. Before the engine failed, Amos trimmed his speed from 110 knots down to about 80 to increase the plane's efficiency, and glided over land he knows well, bringing his passengers safely to the ground.

"The landing spot was my second choice," Amos said. "The first one had a little bump, so I chose the second and it turned out to be just fine."

Amos landed the plane in a dry lakebed without a scratch, and, according to the Anchorage Daily News, without even waking twin 8-month-old girls who were flying back from a doctor's appointment in Bethel. The seven passengers stayed in the plane, keeping warm, until they were rescued by a team of snowmachiners from Tuntutuliak.

Amos grew up in Mekoryuk, an island village less than 100 miles west of the point where the Cessna's engine failed, and now lives in Napakiak with his wife and four children. Like many rural Alaskans, Amos grew up traveling in small planes, and he said he knows the area "like the back of my hand."

That knowledge of the region's geography bought Amos time he might not otherwise have had. Tony Spangler, the Bethel station manager for Yute Air, said a pilot unfamiliar with the area would have had to spend time figuring out where the nearest villages were.

"His experience in the area here and the fact that he knows the area so well helped quite a bit," said John Amik, director of Yuut Yaqungviat, a Bethel flight school where Amos worked as a flight instructor in 2001.

Yuut Yaqungviat was founded in 1999 by the Association of Village Council Presidents with the mission of training locals to be commercial pilots, according to Amik. The idea was that local pilots with knowledge of the region's terrain and weather would be able to provide safer transportation than greenhorns with little knowledge of the challenges of Alaskan aviation. Yuut Yaqungviat graduates have gone on to fly for Alaska carriers, including Yute Air.

"Our company's experience is that the Native pilots have innate abilities that make them good pilots," Dudley said. He added that locally-trained pilots tend to have better positional awareness, which means they know where the plane is in relation to the area around it. It's a huge asset in a situation like the one Amos handled last week.

Yuut Yaqungviat is currently training 16 students -- 13 men and 3 women, all of them from the area. Amik said the school has had a lot of success recruiting students from nearby because they're closer to home and family, and they don't have to travel far away or worry about getting lost in the system at a bigger school.

"We're trying to train people from the area so that they can stay here and provide safe and efficient air service to the communities around Bethel," Amik said.

Derek Beans, a 19-year-old from Pilot Station, started learning to fly at Yuut Yaqungviat in January. He said he chose the school because it's much closer to his home than other choices, and he's comfortable there and knows everyone. He also likes learning to fly over terrain that he already knows well.

"You're flying in an area where you're familiar with everything," he said. "It makes everything so much easier. I flew home last weekend looking around at the trees and the hills, and I knew where I was going."

It's unclear what caused Amos' engine to fail last week. Spangler said the plane is still out on the tundra, but the company will probably sling it back to Bethel by helicopter sometime in the next few days.