DILLINGHAM -- Wild and rugged Alaska has always been a dangerous place to fly, but the people who know it best -- the pilots who daily crisscross the wilderness here and the safety experts back in the state's largest city -- say travel by air is getting safer. The high-profile death of former Sen. Ted Stevens and four others in the crash of a single-engine Otter on a mountainside 17 miles north of this community, however, underlines that there are still risks.

Mountainous terrain, fickle coastal weather, limited weather reports and great distances between airports make Alaska flying inherently more dangerous than in most of the Lower 48. Still, an emphasis on safety, improving technology and other factors have cut the average death rate among commercial pilots by about 13 percent since 2003, according to figures from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

"The accident rate is down, especially if you look back 15 or 20 years," said Carl Siebe, board chairman of the Alaska Aviation Safety Foundation. "We are definitely making progress. It's about two steps forward and one step back."

On the ground in Dillingham, a fishing village on Bristol Bay, pilots point to better airports, something Stevens helped fund with federal dollars; Federal Aviation Administration safety programs, something Stevens helped fund with federal dollars; and a greater emphasis on safe operation, something advocated by Stevens and pushed by the Medallion Program, in large part, funded by state and federal dollars.

Safety, said 37-year-old Chris Miller, director of stations for Grant Aviation, is, "a business decision we've made that we're not going to be the ones making headlines." The fearless, hairy-chested Bush pilot of old willing to fly anywhere, anytime for any reason, might have played well in books and movies, he added, but "the sexiness wears off when the coffins come out."

Just before Miller made that observation, a military C-130 Hercules rolled down the local runway past the windows of Grant. It was the same plane that had flown back to Anchorage the bodies of Stevens, 86; GCI Inc., executive Dana Tindall, 48; and her 16-year-old daughter Corey; former Stevens aide Bill Phillips, 56; and the pilot, 62-year-old Theron "Terry" Smith, of Eagle River. All died Monday in the crash of a GCI-owned, turbo-powered, single-engine Otter floatplane. Four others -- former NASA chief Sean O'Keefe, his son, Kevin; businessman Jim Morhard; and William "Willy" Phillips Jr., a son of Bill Phillips' -- survived the accident.

An Alaska-ignorant national press attracted to the 49th state by Steven's death has been focused on the flight safety issue in the wake of the crash. To the average American reporter, the single-engine airplane is an exotic machine, something right out of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," even if the airplane is to many in rural Alaska the local taxi. People die in plane accidents in Alaska the way they die in automobile accidents in the rest of the country.