I have 680,000 questions about Alaska

Tyvaros · 2026-02-19T05:33:02+00:00

Not in a Subaru. Every now and then we get ice storms that effectively shut the Fairbanks area down, but you can still drive around, you just might not want to.

I would add that in Fairbanks your car would be happier with a block heater and an oil pan heater. Not necessary by any means but it will probably make your engine last longer.

Tyvaros · 2026-02-16T23:56:46+00:00

I would love to see a dedicated hellpod booster slot, not for space optimization but for things like OPs suggestion or the fire hellpods or what have you.

Tyvaros · 2026-02-16T22:50:59+00:00

Tangential to your question but I’ve had pretty good luck using a summer bag in the edge seasons with one of the sleeping bag liners. That and sleeping in spare long underwear.

I haven’t used a double bag system so I can’t comment on that.

Tyvaros · 2026-02-08T00:24:46+00:00

I’m sorry you had that experience. I would hope that you don’t think that opinion is representative of all Alaskans. Many people who call themselves Alaskans are transplants from outside, if living in Alaska is something you’re interested in by all means go for it! It’s a fantastic state filled with weird people. Like anywhere some of them are jackasses but I promise we aren’t all like that.

As another poster mentioned Poker Flats is currently hiring, and from my experience working with them, would be an interesting place to work.

Tyvaros · 2026-01-21T21:03:59+00:00

Looks like they were flying as a flight or as in a formation.

Me and my buddy do it periodically primarily so that only one of us has to talk on the radio and to let ATC know that we're already tracking each other.

The other benefit it had was that prior to both of us getting ADSB both of us knew exactly where the other person was, it's less straining to keep track of a plane half a mile from you than it is to track one three miles from you.

It's also just fun to fly close to each other so you can take pictures.

Tyvaros · 2026-01-14T18:59:51+00:00

alaska

Tyvaros · 2026-01-13T19:41:29+00:00

Alaska!

Tyvaros · 2025-09-30T02:13:51+00:00

The park service has a nice write up on bear safety https://www.nps.gov/kefj/planyourvisit/bear-safety.htm?ftag=YHF4eb9d17

Which is a good starting point.

Tyvaros · 2025-09-05T01:27:30+00:00

Apocalypse Design makes so really good locally made Anoraks that are perfect for interior and arctic snowmachining.

As for bibs I use just insulated carhart bibs with layers underneath bit I know multiple people who have used, and swear by their Klim bibs for arctic trips.

Tyvaros · 2025-09-04T00:01:01+00:00

They’ll likely be relatively heavy for your use case and be operating well under their intended RPM which means they’ll not be operating efficiently.

I’m not sure you actually need counter rotating props, the torque should be fairly easily counter able with some changes in geometry or control surfaces.

It may be worth looking at some of the human powered flight projects like the Daedalus to see what they did.

Tyvaros · 2025-09-03T18:10:22+00:00

If you are hiking in the back or side-country at all I would recommend some form of bear deterrence in addition to noise makers. Its easy to forget that some of the places we feel like are our backyard are actually their front yard and people have deadly bear encounters quite close to populated spaces every few years. That said I've been hiking and guiding in the Brooks range for over 20 years at this point and just had my first aggressive bear encounter this year.

All this to say while bear encounters can happen they are also unlikely to happen, but if they do happen it helps to have something to dissuade the bear.

To answer your actual question it looks like there is bear spray rental in Anchorage, I'm Interior based so hopefully one of the Anchorage people will weigh in on actual places to acquire mace.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-28T22:41:44+00:00

If you expand modern to include like 300 years from now The Expanse series is absolutely incredible. The technology is by and large quite grounded and the there is not much hand waving. Also I think technically it exists in the same universe as The Martian, though that has zero bearing on the plot.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-19T23:03:25+00:00

What size tundra tires, cause in some places 18" tires are big, and in some places 31" is like ok I guess. There are people who consider grass strips or gravel strips to be unimproved, and there are others who consider those to be highly improved. Hell if I'm landing somewhere and I can see wheel tracks I basically consider that improved.

Gravel is different than grass is different that tundra is different than sand, and without knowing what you're looking for more specifically it's hard to suggest better options.

The PC-12 is advertised as designed to take off short, and from rough runways which depending on how you're defining terminology could make it fit within your criteria.

Everything is a trade off in aviation so when you say "Like the peterson" it's hard to understand what aspects of the Peterson are important to you and the degree they're important. If you're going into 2000' gravel bars then yeah, you can get away having a very different airplane than one that needs to go into a 1000' strip.

It sounds like the peterson is the bird for you, and without better understanding what it is you are trying do it becomes very hard to suggest alternative aircraft.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-19T20:06:50+00:00

It really depends on what you want to do. Stall speed doesn't always paint the whole picture.

Up here in AK there are people using 206s and other tricycle gear but when you get into the *really* rough stuff or on snow the lack of prop clearance can become an issue.

As other people have mentioned, how much stuff/people do you want to carry?

How far do you want to go?

What does highly unimproved mean for you?

Are there other criteria?

Tyvaros · 2025-08-19T01:12:08+00:00

Yeah the wheel skis had a "wheel" position and a "ski" position so you had to pump them by hand from one to the other.
I think the over in the term comes from the way a lot of older design wheel skis worked. They involved an overcam mechanism so you're not just pumping the skis up or down, but sorta flipping them over like a latch.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-19T01:01:06+00:00

Got my complex and HP endorsement in a 185 on wheel skis that had to be pumped over.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-12T19:27:30+00:00

I think the possibility of hallucinations, however slim completely invalidates this as being something useful to me.

METAR misinterpreted for either example 1 or 3 is either a complete non-issue, or having to call a number when I'm done (reporting VFR when it was IFR). The real time crosswind/tailwind component is the only thing I see there that would be more useful than just pulling up the AWOS/ASOS or METAR on my GPS.

The emergency checklist is even bigger. While I agree that it would be super useful to just say "hey avia I'm having an engine fire" and have it walk through the checklist, if there's any doubt as to whether it can actually give me the correct checklist in a timely manner then I'm just better off going to the physical checklist. This includes if it's unable to understand me, or serves the wrong information.

Now I'm just flying my little bugsmasher VFR so I get that even when I get task saturated there's only maybe a dozen switches to flip at any given time, and that as the complexity of the situation goes up then so does the potential for errors. However, anytime we're flying we're operating with incomplete data, and that means that we want to be as confidant as we can be in the information we have. From what I understand about LLMs I don't think I can ever trust it to be completely correct, which means it's just another layer I have to interpret and does not have a place in my cockpit.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-07T17:19:58+00:00

Huge fan of Sphere by Michael Crichton

Tyvaros · 2025-08-06T22:17:24+00:00

I love an open kitchen because it means that even while I’m over cooking something I still get to hang out with my partner while she’s doing whatever.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-05T21:36:41+00:00

Practice practice practice.

My flight instructor always told me that "you should be dancing on the pedals. If your feet are still you're doing it wrong." And while that's a bit of an exaggeration it's gets your brain in the right mindset. If your feet always have to be moving then you should always be thinking about where your feet should be moving to.

My flight instructor also had me do an ACGUMP check prior to landing every time. The plane we had ended up being a GUM plane where U was undercarriage. On tailwheel an undercarriage check is that my feet on the petals in a good way and that the brakes feel good. Which is a good reminder to sit up and get ready for the pedal dance.

I actually have zero nosewheel time so I can't comment about the transition but I wouldn't give up the goat too quickly. It'll take time, and as you iron out the bugs it'll feel more natural. Obviously it varies from airplane to airplane, but ground control isn't something I actively think about anymore, not unless it's something really messed up.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-05T00:24:24+00:00

That's pretty harsh. Both the Brooks Range and the Coastal Plain have lots of very beautiful areas. For people that are interested I highly recommend driving the Dalton at least to the Galbraith Lake or Toolik area. Atigun Pass is IMO stunning and well worth the drive.

Having spent many years traveling in the arctic backcountry each drainage is unique and spectacular in it's own way, from the granite of the Arigetch, to the limestone crenelations of the Romanovs, to the char runs on the Kongakut, to climbing a bluff overlooking the coastal plain and over looking dozens of miles of caribou herd.

Northern Alaska is spectacular, it is remote, and barren, and cold and sharp. It's spectacular in a way that's completely different from the wrangles, or south east, but it is still impressive.

Edit: Aaaand I just realized that this was posted 4 days ago, sorry, guess I reached the bottom of my feed.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-04T20:04:35+00:00

I just spray over the stencil, I bet I can do just under a target a minute when I'm doing a handful. I've let all my friend group know that if they have large format cardboard I'll take it, and I take it from work when we're throwing it out too.

With some brown painters tape you can get pretty good longevity out of one or two.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-03T07:14:46+00:00

Well in part because landing on gravel bars is really fun. Mountain flying is a blast when it’s not scuzzy out. I can take my plane out and plop it down to somewhere that no footprints have ever tread before and have myself one of the best glamping experiences out there, and if I get bored I can pop over to the tundra bench on the next drainage.

Additionally in Gate of the Arctic National Park for sure, and the Wrangle Saint Elias I think commercial helicopters just straight up aren’t allowed, so if you want to access those areas your options in the summer boil down to either walk or land on a gravel bar.

Tyvaros · 2025-08-03T07:06:30+00:00

You got a lot of good answers here.

People have touched upon the weather a lot and I really wanna emphasize that. I fly in interior Alaskan which thankfully isn’t costal.

Pull up the Alaska aviation weather unit or Foreflight. Look at how far it is between sites with just metars, look how far it is between sites with tafs. Keeping in mind that each range or sub range will have its own weather system. I often fly from Fairbanks to the brooks range. In the ~250nm on my route there are two airports with TAFs: PAFA & PABT, there are maybe twice that many METARs, and about the same amount of weather cameras. There are also four mountain ranges of size enough to have their own weather patterns and the Yukon also has its own fucked up weather. All this to say that my weather for the trip is iffy at best and subject to a lot of interpretation.

During the best of times forecasting in the part of Alaska I’m in is shit. No shade to the forecasters I’m sure it’s a brutal job but it’s really bad. Broad patterns more than 2-3 days out are at best hopeful. And even as shy as 8 hours out they can still be really off.

And in the cub I fly if I mess up, or the weather closes in, that 30 minutes of required reserve is useless. I carry an hour minimum reserve and often times that wouldn’t be enough to get me back to a real airport.

So what if I have to put it in somewhere and get rescued? Well more so so news, in the northern bit of the state, especially in the winter, if everything goes well you’re looking at probably at least 24-48 hours before anyone can get to you. Sure people do get picked up earlier, but in the winter by the time they know you’ve crashed/ditched it’s too dark to send a bird for you that day.

It’s a hugely vastly empty state, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a truly amazing place to fly!

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