CAA: GA News, "Ron Sheardown's AN-2, With Dick Rutan Aboard, Sinks at North Pole"

["Stephen Irwin" <stepheni@cwnet.com>]

Friday, May 26, 2000

RON SHEARDOWN’S AN-2, WITH DICK RUTAN ABOARD, SINKS AT NORTH POLE
GA News


Thin ice covered by a layer of snow gave way during a landing run here May
15, sending a Polish-built AN-2 to its watery death at the top of the world.

The huge biplane carried owner Ron Sheardown, famed long-distance pilot Dick
Rutan, Jim Bowden, John Pletcher, Walt Parker, and Jan Haughstad, who heads
Norway’s Polar Institute.

None of the six was injured.

The group was returning to the North Pole from a sightseeing trip over the
ice pack and had plans for continuing on to Spitzbergen, a Norwegian
settlement of 2,500.

“As the aircraft was taxiing on the ice, you could see it buckle,” said Lee
Wareham, who had accompanied the AN-2 from Anchorage in a Cessna 180. “We
tried to warn Ron (the pilot), but it was too late.”

Wareham told the Flyer that he had been boring a hole in the ice to check
its thickness when the auger punched through at a couple of inches.

“The ice was covered with snow and looked much deeper,” Wareham said. “We
had a system where we would auger a hole and then wave to Ron to signal all
was OK for landing. But they landed anyway, and it was too late once we
tried to wave them off.”

Parker, who has vast flying experience in the Alaskan Arctic, once had a
Cessna 170 go through the ice at Lone Star Lake in the state’s Interior.

“I knew exactly what was happening,” he said.

Parker flew back to Alaska with Wareham, and Canadian rescue crews rescued
the other five men when they were alerted by Fairbanks ham-radio operator
Jerry Curry.

A regular to the Arctic, Sheardown’s blue, red and yellow AN-2 was covered
with corporate logs of 1998 North Pole flights. He had traced routs that
year that were first flown by Carl Ben Eielson in 1928.

Rutan, famous for his 1987 around-the-world-without-fueling Voyager flight
with Jeana Yeager, was flying copilot.


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