KETCHIKAN -- This Southeast town went back to work last week in the one big industry that still remains here: accommodating the thousands of tourists who arrive each day on the giant cruise ships that crowd its harbor.
A week after the plane crash that killed eight sightseeing visitors and their pilot, floatplanes were buzzing in the skies like almost nothing had happened.
Ketchikan, the first and last stop in Alaska for many of the massive cruise vessels, has about a dozen flight services, far more than one might expect for a town of about 8,200. It used to have a pulp mill with 500 workers and hundreds of well-paying logging jobs, but now the shuttered mill is an EPA Superfund site and the main economy emerging from the Tongass National Forest here is tourism.
Ten of the flight services are arrayed along Tongass Narrows, and when a reporter stopped at each to ask about the plane wreck and its aftermath, no one wanted to talk, not even to answer a direct question about the flying weather on June 25, the day of the crash.
"We just want it to go away," said a woman at Island Wings Air Service. Additional scrutiny of the industry was bad for business, she said.
Its regular weekly schedule unchanged, the 1,900-passenger Westerdam pulled into port early Thursday morning, a week to the day after the eight passengers died on the side tour run by one of the biggest flight services in town, Promech Air. The flight through Misty Fjords National Monument had been promoted onboard the Westerdam.
The Westerdam was one of four liners scheduled for a berth that day, and as its tourists streamed down the gangway, vans and people with placards waited at the dock.
Some passengers simply walked into town to shop for souvenirs or took the sidewalk steps uphill past quaint wooden houses, quite a few rain-weary and in need of paint. Other visitors loaded into vans to Ketchikan's floatplane docks for their waiting Beavers, Otters and Cessnas -- billed in the brochures as authentic Alaska Bush planes.
Promech's vans were missing from the parking lot next to the Westerdam's berth Thursday, and the company's floatplane dock was quiet. A spokeswoman from Promech didn't respond to a question last week about the current extent of the company's operations.
The new group of visitors had to move quickly: The Westerdam, a Holland America Line ship, would depart in only six hours -- two to three hours sooner than most cruise ships that dock in town. The Westerdam had the same scheduled six-hour layover June 25.
Later in the day, as passengers emerged from the vans and hurried back toward the gangway for the Westerdam's 12:30 p.m. departure call, among them was Terrance Travis, 50.
"The only thing I was worried about was getting back in time," he said.
Travis had just taken a Misty Fjords flightseeing tour with his son, though he booked with Island Wings, not Promech. He said he had no fears about his safety in the air, describing his tour as "awesome."
"It's a business -- nobody wants to go up and crash a plane," said Travis, a Chicago resident. "Accidents happen."
Karen Perry, 52, an Arizona resident, sounded similarly nonchalant over the phone about safety fears when she described her sightseeing visit to Misty Fjords on June 25, soon before the accident.
Perry, herself a pilot, arrived in Ketchikan on another Holland America ship, the Noordam, which had an eight-hour scheduled layover. She flew for about 20 minutes on a Promech single-engine Otter, just like the one that would soon crash.
"Our pilot was excellent and seemed very confident and I was very impressed with their whole operation," Perry said. A light rain fell, she said, "but it wasn't a big deal."
"There was weather around us that seemed to be changing rapidly -- obviously, anywhere in Alaska, the weather is like that," Perry said. "The scenery was magnificent."
Her plane landed on the water in Misty Fjords in Rudyerd Bay. There it met a boat with passengers from the Westerdam. Perry and the Noordam tourists swapped places with those of the Westerdam. Among the planes that took off from the water there was the 10-seat Otter piloted by Bryan Krill, the 64-year-old pilot from northern Idaho.
About 20 minutes into the boat ride, Perry said, the crew received word that a distress signal had activated.
"They didn't really tell us what it was," she said. "They said, 'Oh, there might be a kayak in distress.' And I'm going, 'This is really remote.'"
The boat turned around, Perry said. People started looking, though they weren't quite sure what to look for. Perry said she had a feeling they were looking for a plane.
"We looked and looked and looked," she said. "And we didn't see anything."
After about 90 minutes, the boat got another radio call and began the trip back to Ketchikan.
By the time Perry and her boyfriend reached the Noordam, they'd learned a plane had crashed, killing all on board.
Promech and Ketchikan's other tour companies operate in uncontrolled airspace in Misty Fjords, which means they don't have to communicate with Federal Aviation Administration controllers, according to an agency spokesman, Ian Gregor.
"The decision on whether it's safe to fly is up to the pilot in command," Gregor wrote in an email this week.
After last week's crash, Holland America Line indefinitely halted all business with Promech. The line removed the "Misty Fjords Cruise and Floatplane Adventure" from its online list of shore excursions and handed out refunds, Sally Andrews, Holland's vice president of public relations for Holland America Line, said in an email.
The cause of last week's Misty Fjords crash remains unknown.
The National Transportation Safety Board will release a preliminary report on the accident early this week, likely laying out the basic facts of the crash, though not its cause.
NTSB officials say their final report will not be released for a year.