Inbound for where? Juneau, Gustavus, Hoonah?
I well remember how challenging JNU could be when the weather turned crappy.
Charles Luck, wife Liping Tang-Luck lived to help others
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By Klas Stolpe
JUNEAU EMPIRE
Charles Luck, 77, and wife Liping “Rose” Tang-Luck, 51, were much more than just the bodies’ recovered late Friday evening when weather finally cleared from their Cessna 182 crash site on the Douglas Island rock cliffs high above Eaglecrest Ski Resort.
They died on July 24 when their Cessna 182 struck a mountain on Douglas near “The Wedding Bowl,” an area known for breathtaking scenic visuals of Alaska.
Charles was an outdoorsman who loved to fish, Rose a caring woman with a beautiful voice; and together a couple that lived to improve the lives of others.
“He was a pretty personable guy,” son Steve Luck, 52, said. “He has always been an outdoorsman, hunting and fishing.”
Steve Luck said his father was always interested in talking to people.
“He certainly enjoyed helping people,” Steve Luck said. “He touched a lot of people. He enjoyed the outdoors and loved life and lived it to the fullest. He loved fishing and he loved flying and the last couple things that he did were just that.”
Charles Luck had been flying since age 20 and was a commercial instrument rated pilot. He owned his Cessna 182 for 30 years and had GPS. Luck flew while he was obtaining an engineering degree from the University of Southern California and when starting his own company Sound COM Engineering.
He flew between cities in California after his first divorce from Verna Luck whom he married in 1957, to pick up his children on visitations.
“He really did love his kids,” son Ken Luck, 47, said. “He made quite an effort to see us. He would pick us up in Southern California and fly us up to visit him in Sacramento, every weekend. I have flown with him since I was eight years old.”
Ken visited Charles in Alaska in 2003, fishing in Kotzebue, Kenai, and Kodiak. Charles just visited Ken in April; one of his many visits during medical conferences.
Charles flew as scoutmaster, hunting guide, driver’s education teacher and other typical father activities to kids Steve, Ken, Cindy, now 51, and Daniel, now 43.
He flew with a church group and became involved with dentists and doctors flying private planes to Mexico. Hehelped build a medical-dental clinic and church for Oaxacan Indians in Rancho Piloto, Southern Baja. This led Charles to form an organization called Baja Wings of Mercy.
That experience prompted a career switch and in his late 50’s Luck applied and was accepted to the University of Southern California Physician Assistant masters program.
“We remember Chuck for his generosity of spirit, his kind and giving nature, and his willingness to put the welfare of others above himself,” wrote Janice Tramel, the associate director of clinical education in the USC PA program. Tramel recounted Charles collecting blankets for people in Mexico and another student wanted to donate a pair of shoes. Charles was hesitant. He explained that in order to offer shoes there needed to be an ongoing, long-term commitment to provide shoes, because feet grow. Ifthere are not enough shoes provided on a regular basis to keep up with the growth pace of the individual children, their feet become soft from short- term shoe wear which puts them in jeopardy of injury and infection.
“That made me aware of how knowledgeable and how committed he was to the well-being of those that are disadvantaged,” Tramel said. “To always provide the best that you can but be sure that best will work within the culture and circumstances of that, or those, individuals.”
Luck began his medical career with a brief stay in Sheridan, Ore, before working 11 years as a physician assistant in Alaska.
His first Alaska experience was at the Samuel Simmonds Memorial Hospital in Barrow and then Adak. Charles Luck’s second divorce was with Jeanie Luck while working in Adak, where he was also elected mayor, keeping both the political and physical health of the town in tact.
For the next five years were at the Maniilaq Health Center in Kotzebue and then two years in orthopedics and emergency room/urgent care at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage before the move to Hoonah.
“He has flown in very austere conditions,” Steve Luck said. “That’s why it is interesting to me that he hit a mountain. The guy has flown and landed on dirt strips in no visibility and has been flying in Alaska since he has been up there.”
Steve Luck said he has flown to Mexico many times with his father and landed in the middle of Baja.
“He was always very safe,” Steve Luck said. “He checked things and was very thorough.”
Luck had just started working as a physicians assistant for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium in June of 2011 at the Hoonah Health Center.
“He was really a very kind man,” SEARHC PA-C Jeff Chelmo said.” He was very outdoorsy and extremely personable. He made friends easily here. For Chuck the glass was always half full.”
In Hoonah the Lucks fit right in. Upon arrival, landlords Wes and Sue Tyler took him on a picnic.
“He asked if he could bring his fishing pole along,” Sue Tyler said. “And he caught a ton of dollies. He just took a great interest in our community and the people and had a great desire to help.”
Charles Luck was trying to get his wife, Liping, — known as “Rose” — to Juneau the day of the crash, Sunday July 24, so she could get an Alaska Airlines flight to Anchorage. They had just returned from Anchorage that Saturday.
Rose was attending English as a Second Language classes at the University of Alaska, Anchorage with her 19-year-old son Sunny, and Charles was visiting his good friend Glen Welker, 52, and fishing on the Kenai.
“We were dip netting and each had about 20 fish before our bladders ran us off the river,” Welker laughed. ‘We always gave each other a hard time.”
Traffic snarled on the drive to Anchorage so the two pulled off the road and talked for hours.
The two had first met when both were working urgent care in Barrow and became fast friends.
“There was only seven miles of road,” Welker said. “Not a lot of driving to do so we hung out a lot.”
They would go out and see the polar bears or fly to Homer on fishing trips. They continued to get together no matter where either was working in Alaska. They deep sea fished for halibut in Seward and Homer, dip netted Salmon in Kenai, and fished Byers Creek on the way to Fairbanks.
“It was like having a dad up here,” Welker said. “We would talk and go fishing.”
Charles Luck even invited Welker to meet him in Hong Kong in 2004 to introduce him to Rose, who he had met online. When Rose tutored math, science and Chinese during the day, the two men would explore China with then 12-year-old Sunny or 14-year-old Henry as their guide.
“For 77 he had done a lot of stuff and seen a lot of places,” Welker said
Just prior to the crash Rose had just taken second place in a UAA music contest singing in Mandarin Chinese “Serenade of Green Island.” Rose wanted to be a kindergarten teacher and Sunny wants to be a pharmacist and learn languages.
“She loved to sing,” Sunny Chan-Luck, 19, said. “She liked fishing, too. After we fished we would give fish to every person we know. and he loves my mom. They were always happy. They liked studying and learning. My father, his first language was English, and he knew a little bit about Cantonese, so they liked learning from each other, it was really cool and they were patient to each other, too. He always liked to help people, even if he doesn’t know them, they both liked to help people.”
Charles and Rose married in Hong Kong in 2005. The family came to Kotzebue the next year and spent three years ice fishing, riding snowmobiles, four-wheelers and being a passenger in their plane. On family outings to Kenai they used the “motor house.”
Rose and Sunny shared a place in Anchorage during school the past nine months.
“This accident happened too sudden,” Sunny said. “I had not been to Hoonah yet. My father loved us a lot, he treated me like a real son.”
Sunny will take Rose’s ashes back to Hong Kong to be placed with his grandmothers in a family temple. Sunny’s brother Henry Chan-Luck, 19, is in the U.S. Army.
Charles Luck and Liping Rose Tang-Luck’s children include: Steve and Jennifer Luck (Avery, Jackson, Conor), Ken and Denise Luck (Lawrence, Briana, Micah), Cindy Luck-Sakamoto and Eddie (Cole, Kiana), Daniel and Noni Luck, Henry Chan-Luck and Sunny Chan-Luck.
The siblings have not met but they plan to spread Charles’ ashes in Alaska.
“He was doing what he loved,” Ken Luck said. “His passion was the outdoors. He loved to fly.”
Cook Inlet plane crash survivors live to tell harrowing tale
BY ZAZ HOLLANDER
For the Frontiersman
Published on Thursday, August 4, 2011 11:59 PM AKDT
MAT-SU — As soon as the floatplane’s engine dropped from a roar to an idle 3,000 feet over Cook Inlet, everyone in the Cessna 185 knew something was very wrong.
Nobody said a word.
Nobody panicked.
A Cessna 185 owned by Scott and Karis Johannnes floats on a lake near Mount Redoubt. The plane crashed and sank into Cook Inlet July 24 with four people on board. All survived unharmed. (Courtesy of Scott Johannnes)
The plane began dropping out of the sky.
Pilot Scott Johannes set to work looking for what had suddenly gone so wrong with the fuel system: valves, pumps, controls, breakers — the aviator’s checklist when the power cuts out.
“I immediately realized it was something serious. I looked — we were 20 miles off the coastline and four to five miles the other way. I just immediately turned the plane toward Kalgin Island,” said Johannes, a 48-year-old from Wasilla.
In fewer than five minutes, Johannes would have to bring the plane down in wind-chopped, six-foot seas and hope for the best.
Johannes, a vice president with Criterion General Inc., helped build the AT&T Sports Center on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. His wife, Karis, 48, is a popular soccer coach there. She sat in the back of the plane the day of the crash, July 24.
The couple’s friends of more than 20 years, Doug and Jill Warner, came along, too. Doug Warner, 52, works at the Division of Agriculture offices in Palmer. Jill, 55, teaches social studies at Teeland Middle School. The group has traveled extensively together on hiking and hunting trips.
Earlier in the day, the group had headed out for some bear viewing at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park, but was turned back by bad weather in the passes. They were flying back to Kenai to fuel up in case the weather broke.
Near Kalgin Island — a 12-mile-long, boot-shaped piece of land due east of Mount Redoubt — the weather aloft was fine: a thin layer of clouds at 5,000 feet. But the seas below were another story: waves at four to six feet in unpredictable chop from all directions instead of regular rollers.
Johannes, interviewed by phone between meetings this week, said he looked down and knew that landing in that water was beyond his abilities as a pilot. He initially hoped to set the plane down in a relatively smooth trough between the waves, but soon realized that a trough one minute would fill sideways with a breaking wave the next.
“I’m looking at where I’m trying to land and it didn’t look like it was wide enough to get the wing tips between the waves,” he said.
At the last minute, Johannes said, he just nosed the plane down and picked up speed so he could “flare” the plane and turn into the wave simultaneously, making sure to keep the Cessna’s nose up so the plane didn’t flip when it hit the water.
When the plane smacked into the face of one wave, the impact snapped the struts that held the float to the passenger side of the plane.
The Cessna bounced and came down in the face of a second wave. That’s when the struts holding the pilot-side float snapped.
Inside, the plane’s occupants did a quick welfare check. Somehow, everyone was OK. (Later, they’d notice a few cuts and bruises.)
As the plane began filling with water, the people inside grabbed inflatable lifejackets and scrambled out. Johannes set off the SPOT personal locator beacon clipped to the plane in hopes of sending out a GPS signal to potential rescuers.
Everyone stayed calm.
“Thankfully, Scott had all that gear on board,” Doug Warner said. “We were just thankful everybody was fine.”
In hopes of adding buoyancy to the sinking aircraft, the two men grabbed a rope from the plane and lashed the floats back to the fuselage.
Even so, the choppy water made it hard to hang on, Warner said. Karis Johannes and Jill Warner stood on the plane’s tail, clinging to it for purchase. Steady six-foot seas sometimes gave way to bigger waves. Warner started warning the women when a big one was coming, Scott Johannes said, but they quickly asked him to stop. Whenever he did that, they would look over at the nasty water moving toward them and start to panic.
After about an hour, the group started to wonder if their emergency signal had been heard. The plane went down about four miles from the coast of Kalgin Island. A swim to land was impossible.
“I said, ‘You know, God, I think we can use a little more help here,’” Warner remembers saying. “Within (what) seems like five minutes, the satellite phone floated by.”
The phone, in an orange case, was part of a steady stream of debris exiting the plane as it filled with water.
Scott Johannes grabbed the phone, perched on the tail, tried to keep the waves from drenching the phone and called 911.
He couldn’t get through. So he tried information and realized he was talking with an operator in Canada who didn’t even know where Kenai was. An 800 number for a weather briefing that usually connects to the Kenai weather station this time sent Johannes to an Air Force base Outside.
The group realized they’d have to think of a local, direct number where someone could call for help.
“We all started hollering numbers of friends we could recall off the top of our heads,” Johannes said. “Five or six times in a row, I got a recording.”
He left one message, on his son’s answering machine. He would later realize the line was busy because his son was talking with authorities responding to the locator signal.
Then Doug Warner remembered the direct line to Palmer police, where his wife used to work. From there, the call went to the Palmer post of the Alaska State Troopers, then to the Soldotna post.
“They said they had a chopper that couldn’t rescue us but it could spot us,” Johannes said. “Once we knew somebody knew where we were it was a great relief. It’s a pretty empty feeling sitting out there in those waves not knowing if anyone knows where you’re at.”
Soon, the group heard a helicopter, but couldn’t see it. They phoned in a more specific location. Soldotna-based Alaska Wildlife Trooper Shane Stephenson came into view in his Robinson R44 helicopter. Stephenson, 51, had been conducting commercial fishing patrols and was parked on a beach at Clam Gulch when he heard about the plane crash.
Arriving on scene, Stephenson saw a Cessna 185 sinking into the rough seas of Cook Inlet with four people on the tail.
“I was amazed that the plane was still floating because the wings were just below the surface of the water,” Stephenson said this week.
The trooper opened the helicopter door and tossed out a four-man life raft. He’d attached a cord to the raft’s lanyard just in case he ever ran across a rescue situation and needed to deploy the raft fast. But he said he figured that would be for a boat, not a plane.
“I opened the door, unbuckled everything and held on to that little string for dear life,” he said.
The raft deployed at some point, either then or on the way down. Stephenson lowered it to the people on the plane.
They grabbed it for use just in case the plane sank.
Stephenson struggled to get close enough to the churning water to rescue anybody.
“I was afraid I was going to end up in the drink with them,” he said. “With the rotors turning, that would have been a bad scene.”
At one point, Scott Johannes hoisted Karis up toward the pontoon of the helicopter. She tried to get her arms around the slick pontoon but couldn’t get any purchase and fell back. That’s when Stephenson lifted up, circled and headed for the nearby island in search of the closest potential rescuers: the commercial fishermen he knew to occupy a few cabins on Kalgin’s shore.
He tried three cabins. Nobody there. At the fourth, Stephenson found a group of set net fishermen just back from a trip out. One had just fired up a sauna to ward off the chill. Without hesitation, the set netters got back into their 24-foot skiff and headed for the plane.
Stephenson returned to hover over the plane so the fishermen knew where it was.
“When we first saw the boat it looked like a tiny little fisherman,” Warner said. “It was bigger than it appeared. The waves were so big you think, ‘This is a tiny little boat. I’ll happily get on it,’ but they were coming through some very big waters to get us.”
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service aircraft circled above as the skiff brought them in, according to the troopers.
The group made it cold but safe to the island where the hot sauna waited.
.................. sad
