On 27 February 1974, a Soviet Antonov An-24 came down the approach into Gambell, Alaska, with one engine already dead from fuel starvation. It was not supposed to be there. It was supposed to be in Provideniya, 62 miles away across the Bering Sea in the USSR, but Provideniya was fogged in and the aircraft did not have the fuel to argue.

Aboard were three crew and twelve scientists on an ice-reconnaissance flight. They rolled to a stop on American soil at the height of the Cold War, in a Yupik village on St Lawrence Island, and waited to find out what happened next.

What happened next was that the village walked out to the airstrip and brought them space heaters and food.

The Ice Curtain

The Bering Strait is 55 miles wide. For most of human history the Yupik people crossed it freely; families lived on both shores and thought of it as one place with water in the middle.

In 1948 that ended. The border was sealed, and Indigenous Alaskans and their relatives in Chukotka were cut off from each other for forty years. People on St Lawrence Island could see the mountains of Russia on a clear day and could not reach the cousins living under them.

It had not always been hostile airspace. During the Second World War the United States ferried some 8,000 aircraft to the Soviet Union along the Alaska-Siberia route, much of it staging through Nome. Lend-Lease fighters and bombers went west over the same water that would soon become the most closely watched gap in the world.

A Wing Dip Over Gambell

Which brings us back to that An-24 sitting on the gravel in February 1974. Word went round the village fast, and people came out to look. There was, by every account, a friendly meeting. Souvenirs were swapped. Locals organised heaters and food for men who had expected something considerably worse.

The official machinery ground on in parallel. An Alaska State Trooper and Alaska National Guardsmen flew in from Nome to stand guard over the aircraft. The Soviet Embassy in Washington called the State Department and the Pentagon and asked for fuel. A US Air Force C-130 loaded fuel bladders of JP-1 at Anchorage and flew it straight to Gambell.

At 7:30 in the evening on the 28th, the An-24 lifted off, came back over the airfield, dipped its wings, and went home.

Gambell, on the tip of St Lawrence Island. The airstrip that briefly hosted a Soviet crew.

The Flight That Reopened the Strait

Fourteen years later, aviation did the thing diplomacy could not. On 13 June 1988, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-200 flew from Nome to Provideniya carrying 82 passengers: the governor of Alaska, Steve Cowper, business people, academics, artists, elders and students. The flight took 45 minutes.

On the tarmac at Provideniya, Siberian Yupik families met Alaskan relatives they had not seen since 1948. David Ramseur, Cowper’s press secretary, was on board and later wrote the book on it.

That is his term for the Alaskans who made it happen. Not statesmen, not negotiators. People who wanted to see their families and used an airliner to do it.

Anchorage to Magadan, Scheduled

The Friendship Flight cracked something open. On 17 June 1991, Alaska Airlines began scheduled service from Anchorage to Magadan and Khabarovsk. Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky followed in 1993, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in 1997. Boeing 727-200s at first, then MD-80s fitted with auxiliary tanks for the distances involved.

This was not glamorous flying. Siberian weather data was close to nonexistent, alternates were hundreds of miles apart, and ground services were whatever the airport happened to have that week. Crews on overnights lived on boiled potatoes. Russian passengers flew to Anchorage largely to shop at Costco.

The Vodka Incident

The best story from the whole operation is also the one that got the airline in trouble. At Magadan, 400 miles south of the Arctic Circle, an unexpected temperature drop iced up an MD-80’s wings. There was no de-icing fluid anywhere on the field.

Bill Boser, then Alaska’s assistant vice president of flight operations, went to a local liquor store and bought 25 bottles of vodka. The crew mixed it with glycol and sprayed the wings with a garden hose.

It worked. It also appeared in an in-house Alaska Airlines newsletter in December 1993, which regulators read with interest. Investigators pointed out that vodka’s alcohol and sugar content could have ignited or gummed up the engines, and enforcement action followed. Improvisation has limits, and one of them is putting spirits through a turbofan.

Alaska Airlines’ “Golden Samovar Service”, from the charter era of the early 1970s.

Closed Again

The ruble collapsed in 1998 and took the demand with it. Alaska Airlines cancelled all Russian service that autumn. There has been no scheduled flight between Alaska and Russia since, and after 2022 there is no realistic prospect of one.

So the strait is shut again, and the mountains of Chukotka are once more just something you can see from Gambell on a clear day. But for about a decade, an American airline ran a timetable across the Bering Strait, and for one afternoon in 1974 a village in the middle of the Cold War decided that fifteen stranded Soviets were mainly just cold.

The Antonov An-24, the type that put down at Gambell — built for exactly this kind of unimproved strip.

Sources: Wikipedia, AvGeekery, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska World Affairs Council, Zócalo Public Square, The Nome Nugget.