ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Nine days after he died fighting a wildfire in California, helicopter pilot Greg King is coming home.
Emergency responders, agency partners and community members will line the road from Anchorage toward Palmer shortly after 5 p.m. Tuesday for an honor procession, the Alaska Department of Public Safety said.
The procession will depart near Raspberry Road and travel north on Minnesota Drive, east on Sixth Avenue and out the Glenn Highway toward Palmer. It will then turn north on Palmer-Fishhook Road and end before North Snowgoose Road.
King and Ryan Cutter were killed Sept. 20 when the Super Puma they were flying for Precision Helicopters crashed while battling the Dome Fire in Yosemite National Park. The large, Type 1 helicopter was working the fire from above with a water bucket slung beneath it, said Andy Jones, chief of aviation for the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Jones said the aircraft suffered what investigators call a significant event, a term that covers any possibility, mechanical or otherwise, until the cause is known. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating, and Jones said a final report could take anywhere from six months to more than a year.
Cutter’s name had been withheld pending family notification. The Payette National Forest in Idaho identified him Monday in a statement that said both men flew an exclusive-use helicopter for the forest and were assigned to the Price Valley Rappel Crew in New Meadows, Idaho.
“These were skilled pilots working diligently in suppression efforts and had been instrumental to ground crews in gaining progress on the Dome Fire,” forest leadership wrote.
Cutter will be returned Tuesday to Park City, Utah, through Heber Airport, where a separate procession is planned. The Forest Service asked the public to respect the privacy of both families.
“The hardest thing we encounter as land managers is the loss of life,” the statement said.
King built his reputation in some of the most demanding flying in Alaska, Jones said: long-line and construction work, then ferrying heli-skiers into the mountains of Southcentral Alaska.
“Utility work is not an easy job and it takes the most skilled pilots in the world to do this job,” Jones said.
He later spent more than five years flying wildfires for the division as a contract pilot. Jones said the state holds exclusive-use contracts on seven helicopters, each committed for more than 120 days of the fire season, and the arrangement makes the line between employee and contractor all but meaningless.
“Really what that means is they’re here every day,” Jones said. “They practically sleep with us.”
Jones said that even though contract pilots are not state employees, “they’re family.”
King eventually moved on to other companies, as helicopter pilots tend to do, Jones said.
“We’re nomads,” he said. “You’re always chasing that next dream.”
By the time of the crash, King had flown rappel support, bucket missions and multi-mission helicopter work, a résumé Jones described as the summit of the profession.
“Greg hit that pinnacle of what all of us are trying to hit as a helicopter pilot or as a utility pilot,” he said.
His reach extended well past the cockpit. Jones said King “had a profound effect on many of our engine crews, our field crews, our hotshot crews,” along with prevention staff and nearly every corner of the division.
“Many of us helicopter pilots like to focus in on what we do,” Jones said, referring to the cyclic and collective, a helicopter’s primary flight controls. “Cyclic, collective, go fight fire. But Greg went above and beyond that.”
King was a son, a husband and a father, said Emery Johnson, the division’s statewide public information coordinator. His wife works full time for the division and has asked for privacy while she grieves. Johnson said the division is serving as a liaison among the family, the fire’s incident management team, the federal agencies and the helicopter company.
Johnson said the crash came during a fire season that has already claimed the lives of numerous aviation and ground firefighters.
Jones said the pilots hold a particular place in the lives of the crews who depend on them.
“They’re the ones who take us out to the fires,” he said. “They’re the ones who bring us home, right?”
And on Tuesday evening, Alaska will bring one of them home.
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