by Jeff Durhsen, Passage Air Service LLC, Anchorage, Alaska

Last July 13, Kent Power landed at Anchorage's Merrill Field, the first (so far as we know) deaf pilot to fly his airplane to Alaska from the Lower 48 states. His arrival made a strong impression on at least one hearing pilot in Anchorage. This was Jeff Duhrsen, proprietor of Passage Air Service LLC and a pilot who keeps, on his Web site, a daily journal of observations and musings about his life as a bush pilot. Here is what Duhrsen wrote in his journal about Kent:

The other day while I was sitting in the flight office, an older, gray-haired man poked his head in the door, pointed at his ears while shaking his head, and walked across the room towards me with a smile. I surmised that he was deaf. He was followed into the room by his wife, also deaf. On a pad of paper he wrote, "I am Kent Power of Phoenix, Arizona." Beneath it I wrote, "I am Jeff Duhrsen of New Mexico," which elicited a grinning nod and a warm handshake. Then he wrote, "Will you help me? Need weather from here to Juneau," as he pointed to a Cessna Centurion parked outside the window on the tarmac.

For the first time I realized that he was a pilot himself, and that despite his hearing impairment he had flown his aircraft across the continent to get here. I'd not known that one could have no hearing and still be licensed to fly, but it occurred to me that airplanes everywhere are operating without radios, really no different from the situation of this person before me. Over the course of the next half-hour I received a weather brief, filed a flight plan, and coordinated with air traffic control facilities at Merrill Field in Anchorage and in Juneau on his behalf. Everyone was exceptionally helpful and bent over backwards to help this pilot make his way safely through the airspace system to his next destination. I communicated everything to him through his pad of paper. When we finished he picked up my business card, promised to e-mail me from home, and walked confidently to his airplane, which he taxied out and flew away south twenty minutes later.

I watched him depart, not with concern but with admiration. For me, flying is an endeavor which requires all my senses, and I cannot imagine operating an airplane without hearing the comforting drone of the engine or the disembodied voices of air traffic controllers.

Here was a person for whom sound meant nothing, who no doubt faced frustrated and complicated planning each and every time he went flying, who couldn't just hop in the plane for a quick spin the way most of us can. Yet he did it anyway, with a smile and a purpose in flying that I can only surmise may have its roots in the same paradoxical senses of control and humility that lead me to take wing as well.

Or perhaps he flies for the same sense of worldly wonder and the joy of discovery which are probably the overwhelming factors in my own compulsion to fly . . .

Reprinted with permission. For the full text of Duhrsen's journal entry for July 13, 2000, go to: www.passageair.com/content/Archives/071300.htm.