82-Year-Old Pilot Flies BLIND over Mountains | ATC saves his life

Accident Facts

Bill Bunten, an 82-year-old retired bank president from Topeka, Kansas, was flying his Piper Comanche from Ketchikan to Juneau when the weather turned worse than forecast. He dropped from 8,000 to 7,000 feet to shed ice building on the wings. The autopilot wasn't working. The engine sounded rough. Then, in cloud, his heading indicator and compass both started spinning — the two instruments he needed most to know which way he was pointed, failing at the same time, in the one part of the flight where he couldn't simply look outside to check.

Watching a circle form on radar

Anchorage Center controller Parker Corts was working the Comanche's approach into Juneau from hundreds of miles away. Corts noticed the aircraft wasn't following the headings he was issuing, even after Bunten read them back correctly — a mismatch that meant something onboard, not on the radio, had gone wrong. Watching his screen, Corts saw the aircraft was flying a heading of 010 instead of the 100 he'd assigned — pointed toward higher terrain rather than the airport, even as Bunten calmly read the correct heading back over the radio.

Relaying through another aircraft

Radio contact between Anchorage and the Comanche was patchy at that range and altitude. Corts, a pilot himself, brought in a second aircraft on approach to Juneau and used it to relay instructions when his own transmissions weren't getting through cleanly. With Bunten unable to trust his own instruments, Corts talked him down using radar vectors alone — effectively flying the aircraft's heading for him from the ground, one correction at a time. Rather than trying to force the Comanche back onto its original approach into Juneau, Corts routed it toward a break in the clouds he could see on radar, and Bunten eventually reported he had "excellent ground reference" and could see Gustavus below. Corts diverted him there instead of the original destination, and Bunten landed safely, radioing back, "Thanks for all your help."

Recognition, and what it says about the job

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association honored Corts with a 2015 Archie League Medal of Safety Award for the save. What made the situation dangerous wasn't a single dramatic failure; it was two ordinary-sounding instrument problems compounding in the one environment — cloud, near terrain — where a pilot has the least room to recover on his own. Corts caught it not because Bunten declared an emergency, but because the aircraft's actual track stopped matching the headings a competent pilot was reading back correctly.