Along the old airport road in Quinhagak, a patch of sky became a classroom. A dozen trainees from across rural Alaska gripped walkie talkies and control pads as they learned to fly the boxy aircrafts that hovered above. It’s a skill they’ll apply to a number of different jobs across the state’s rural communities.
Nineteen-year-old Angelina Olrun stood huddled over a drone controller. “I’m doing this so I could count reindeer, like, basically find reindeer,” she said.
Olrun searched for her instructor, who was hiding in the nearby willows. She surveyed the area using the same thermal map she would use to track reindeer as a herder in Mekoryuk.
“At first when I came here, I thought it was going to be pretty hard,” Olrun said. “But it’s pretty easy.”
Olrun said that the training put on by Nalaquq, a tech solutions-based subsidiary of Quinhagak’s village corporation, has been approachable. Back home, it will bring a new survey tool to the tradition of reindeer herding.
Visiting archaeologists first put drones to wide use in Quinhagak to survey the Nunalleq dig site. Today’s training instructor, Sean Gleason, was one of them.
“We'd have a lot of people stop by, have questions, and we're always trying to be really friendly and let people fly, explain what we were doing,” Gleason said. “And the more that we did that, coming back every year and year, it was usually, like, the teenagers and the kids who would be back every year. They wanted to fly the drone.”
Eventually, Gleason said, some of those teenagers turned into adults. Now they had a skill they could use in a career or to help their community.
Over the past several years, the skill share was formalized by Nalaquq, along with support from an Alaska Department of Transportation grant. Through it, locals can become licensed pilots in Quinhagak and beyond. Nalaquq has since opened its drone training to people from other rural areas whose trades could benefit from training in the village setting.
“The village can be a place where there's a lot going on,” Gleason said. “There are planes above you, and we find that when we bring outside pilots in, even though they have the training, they're often overwhelmed by kind of the operational environment. And our Yup’ik and Alaska Native pilots tend to excel in those spaces because it's where they grew up, it's what they're familiar with, and you really can't underestimate how much that is part of the process.”
Gleason said that the program can give locals skills to fill jobs otherwise taken by outsiders so that locals have a say in partnered projects.
At the outdoor training, Byron Petluska kept his eyes on his training group’s drone. He’s a Quinhagak resident and will use drones to count fish in the nearby Kanektok River. The local count will be used to supplement salmon run data and inform the community’s summer subsistence season.
In Quinhagak, drones have a place in some of the community’s other home-grown operations, like the village’s search and rescue team.
“We get weekly calls for search and rescue — weekly,” Petluska said. “Sometimes three times a week. Sometimes every day.”
Petluska said that drones have allowed the team of volunteers to locate missing or distressed community members sooner. “It locates people way faster. It keeps the team ready to go straight towards the person they’re looking for,” he said.
Petluska said that it’s been a big shift from over a decade ago, when drones first started dotting the sky in town.
“At first people would just stare up there. Now they just wave; people are getting used to it already,” Petluska said. “We’re in those days where almost nothing is surprising anymore.”
But then, in the training, something surprising did happen. A bush plane dipped down out of the sky, far faster and lower than anticipated, bobbing its wings playfully at the drone crew as if to say a mischievous hello.
The drone operators immediately lowered their aircraft and maneuvered controlled landings after the close call.
“Let’s get everybody circled up,” Gleason called out, gathering the students in a circle to debrief. It's a moment, Gleason explained, that gets at the whole point of the training.
“It’s why if you’re a local pilot, you’re gonna know your traffic patterns better than anyone who’s outside,” Gleason said to the trainees. He explained how village airspaces are all unique, different from Anchorage or even Bethel. Each will have its own norms and surprises.
With formal training and a license, the new drone pilots now have the skills to navigate whatever comes out of thin air.
