A Coast Guard helicopter crew is standing around a long table in Air Station Sitka’s hangar. They’re suited up in orange, and Lieutenant Commander Mick Klakring is reviewing their flight plan for the day.
Sitka High School junior Bristol Clifton is standing at one end of the table, taking it all in. It’s her first flight in an MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, and Klakring says it’s about time.
“Bristol’s been around, gosh, for a couple months now, right?” Klakring says. “Took a bit of an internship upstairs and now we’re getting her airborne, which, sounds like it’s a little late in the game, but we’re gonna fix that.”
Clifton is a lifelong Sitkan and her interests reflect that fact. She loves the outdoors, and she’s planning to work as a fly-fishing guide this summer. She likes math and science. Her eyes light up when she tells me she’s also interning with the Sitka Sound Science Center’s hatchery program.
But she’s really interested in aviation. In an interview weeks before today’s helicopter flight, I ask her if she gets nervous when she’s airborne, and she responds with a quick and comfortable, ‘no.’ She’s had a lot of exposure to flying. After all, you can’t take the bus to an away game when you live on an island.
“I do sports all year round, I do volleyball, basketball, and softball, so anytime we travel it’s flying, so I just feel like I fly all the time,” Clifton says. “I like going to different places in Alaska, and like seeing different communities and stuff. I think it’s really fun.”
So this semester, her teacher Mike Vieira set her up with an internship at the Coast Guard base through the school’s Career and Technical Education program. So for the past few months, Clifton has been at the air station twice a week. While she initially was interested in commercial aviation, she is eager to explore every path toward becoming a pilot.
“My brother is a Marine, and my stepdad, he was also marine, so like I have family that’s been in the military before, so I’m just interested in learning more about that, or like what they do, to see if I would want to go into the Coast Guard,” Clifton says.
Back at the hangar, flight mechanic Cameron Rex shows Clifton where she’ll be sitting on their flight today, and reviews the safety protocol, including what to do in the event of an emergency, and how she may be able to help.
“If you see something we don’t, feel free to speak up. You know, maybe it’s an eagle coming our way. The eagles don’t really respect us, they don’t understand there’s other predators in the sky, or bigger things than them,” Rex says. “You’ll be part of the crew in that sense.”
“Crystal clear? Or clear enough?” he asks, and Clifton laughs and nods her head.
Then, they’re off, and for their first stop, they fly over some familiar territory — her house.
“Everything just looks so much different from up there, obviously,” she tells me the next day.
Over the next four hours, they flew to Hoonah, Gustavus, and landed at the Cape Spencer lighthouse. And her lack of fear was helpful, because, as the crew told her, it’s not unusual to get a touch of motion sickness on the first flight.
“Compared to obviously flying in the big jets, like Alaska Airlines, it’s completely different, because it’s just so much smaller,” Clifton says.
“Luckily I didn’t get motion sickness, which I thought I was going to, and at the beginning, I was kind of, a little like, ‘whoa,’ because obviously it just feels different,” she adds “But then I got used to it, and I was fine.”
Clifton says while the weather wasn’t great, she took everything in, and got a lot out of it.
“You couldn’t really see the tops of the mountains so much, but you could still see all the ocean and like the muskegs and everything,” Clifton says. “Just to get to see everything from a new perspective, I think is really cool.”
So cool, she plans to go up in the Jayhawk again tomorrow.
