Former senator's death in crash focuses national attention on role, risks of air service in rural Alaska

The death of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens in a single-engine airplane crash has illustrated how dependent the roadless areas of Alaska are on air service, both public and private, and raised new questions for Alaskans about the risks. "The people who know it best, the pilots who daily crisscross the wilderness here and the safety experts back in the state's largest city, say travel by air is getting safer," Craig Medred and Joshua Saul write for Alaska Dispatch from Dillingham, where Stevens' plane was headed. (National Transportation Safety Board photo of the plane)

Stevens, famed for funneling federal money to his state, had something to do with improving its air safety; his funding included better airports, safety programs and "and a greater emphasis on safe operation, something advocated by Stevens," a World War II army pilot who lost his first wife in a 1978 plane crash that he survived.

"An Alaska-ignorant national press attracted to the 49th state by Stevens' death has been focused on the flight safety issue in the wake of the crash," Medred and Saul write. "To the average American reporter, the single-engine airplane is an exotic machine, something right out of the movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' even if the airplane is to many in rural Alaska the local taxi. People die in plane accidents in Alaska the way they die in automobile accidents in the rest of the country." The story examines why Stevens' plane may have crahsed. (Read more)

A 1972 plane crash killed the state's sole congressman, Nick Begich, and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, "seared the political establishment in Washington, and caused a 40-year shift in Alaska's balance of power," Jason Horowitz recalls for The Washington Post.