Alaska Students Learn to Return From Plane Crash

On a wintry afternoon, 18 men and women gather at an indoor pool to learn skills they hope they’ll never need.

One by one they line up to be strapped into a crash simulator before being plunged upside down, fully clothed, into the water.

They struggle to get their bearings and calm their nerves in the blur of bubbles. Then they unbuckle their seat belts, swim through a makeshift “fuselage” and unlatch a door before surfacing.

The whole exercise takes about 15 seconds. To the students, it feels like 15 minutes.

“Good job! You got it,” instructor Brian Horner calls to the students as they bob to the surface of the Elmendorf Air Force Base pool, catching their breath.

Horner’s two-day aviation land and water survival class is no pool party.

Thinking clearly while holding your breath as you’re suspended upside-down underwater takes some practice, and the urge to panic can be overwhelming. But this is the most popular class offered by Horner’s Anchorage-based survival school, LTR Training Systems.

“Education without experience is no education at all,” says Horner, who spent 13 years in the Air Force teaching survival skills before he founded LTR 14 years ago. “This training is supposed to be fun, interesting and rewarding.”

For Horner’s students, preparing for the possibility of a plane crash isn’t just an intellectual exercise. Many work for state and federal agencies and oil companies, flying frequently in small planes and helicopters to remote areas of Alaska. They include wildlife biologists, pilots, health care workers, law enforcement officers and petroleum engineers.

During the last decade, 106 pilots and 86 non-pilot workers were killed in plane crashes in Alaska, according to the National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health. That works out to almost 20 people a year.

The idea that you can improve your odds of surviving a crash is not new. The military has historically included crash-survival training for its flight staff.

Certainly, many plane crashes are not survivable. But helicopters and the small planes commonly used in Alaska have less weight and mass than big jets. That means smaller aircraft produce less impact force in a crash and have less space in which passengers can become trapped, Horner says.

“The crash is either going to hurt like hell, or it’s not going to hurt at all,” he said.

The aim of the course is to give luck a helping hand by giving the students confidence. Horner says LTR--which stands for Learn To Return--has trained about 6,000 students around the world in crash survival.

Kim Speckman knows firsthand the value of preparing for the worst.

Speckman is an enforcement officer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In July 1992, within six months of completing Horner’s class, she crashed while trying to land a Piper Cub on a narrow strip of beach near Shishmaref in northwest Alaska.

Touching down, she lost control of the plane and it landed upside-down in the Chukchi Sea. She and her passenger managed to get out of the plane safely and waited on the beach for a rescue.

“I definitely reacted to my training,” Speckman said. “It definitely went through my mind that I’d been here before and I knew what to do.”

Speckman, who now works for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Essex, Vt., says the class taught her something about herself.

“I’d lived in the Arctic for 10 years and hadn’t spent much time in the water. Before I took the training, I didn’t realize I wasn’t comfortable in that environment. I was a floatplane pilot, and I had no idea I’d have trouble with egress,” she said.

Speckman says the class taught her the value of thinking ahead about what she’d do in the event of an accident. It also gave her what she calls “muscle memory”--the ability to react instinctively when water began rushing into the cockpit.

“There are all kinds of things you can’t suddenly think about in a survival situation,” she said.

In addition to the underwater training, the two-day course includes classroom and field training.

Back at LTR’s training center in Anchorage, Horner is animated in the classroom.

He uses videotapes and slides of crashes, both real and reenacted, to explain why some people survive and some don’t. The students are somber as they study the grim images.

“This is not a high-frequency event, folks,” Horner says. “But research shows that even though this rarely happens, people who don’t have experience generally don’t do very well.”

The students move into a warehouse adjacent to the classroom, where they “board” a mock-up of an airplane fuselage, made from plastic pipes, plexiglass and folding chairs. They strap themselves into their seats, bend forward to prepare for impact and then practice making emergency exits.

It sounds simple enough, but each time the exercise is repeated Horner adds another element--smoke, falling debris, blindfolds, a blocked door, bulky winter clothing and life jackets. There is a surprising amount of confusion as the students scramble out of their chairs and try to find the exits.

In the four-hour field portion of the class, students head outdoors to learn the basics of first aid and survival skills. It’s after the crash that real survival begins, Horner says.

Students don’t just learn to build a fire in the snow, they do it with one arm in a sling. They also learn how to make a shelter, find food and use flares and other signaling devices.

The students hobble around in improvised boots made with plastic bags, duct tape, carpet and the foam insulation from an airplane seat. Even after several hours in the snow, their feet are warm and dry.

Horner’s classroom text lists three dozen survival uses for the parts of a downed airplane. Engine cowling can be used for a windbreak. An oil filter can be burned to make black smoke for signaling.

“We’re making people realize there’s a gold mine there,” Horner says.