One man’s trash, everyone else’s treasure
- Chilkat Valley News
- Jul 19
- 3 min read
How a 58-year-old plane lived on in local imagination after crashing near Haines
By Rashah McChesney and Chisel Triezenberg
Chilkat Valley News
A plane built in the 1960s has flown away with the interests of several Haines residents, even after a debilitating crash left it grounded.
The fixed-wing, single-engine Piper PA 28-140 was built in 1967. Early records of its travels were not immediately available, but a 1978 registration sticker from Oregon is still peeling from the fuselage. Later, it was transported to Alaska where it was last registered to big game hunter and pilot Steve Wilson in Gustavus, who started the air-taxi service Air Excursions.
Wilson was still the registered owner of the plane when a 25-year-old pilot with three passengers crashed it on a beach near Haines in 2001.
According to a National Transportation Safety Board report from the incident, the pilot took off and was about 20 feet in the air when a downdraft pushed the plane back to the ground where it skidded about 215 feet before slamming into a log, damaging its landing gear, one of the wings, and a flap.
No one was injured, but that crash considerably decreased the plane’s airworthiness, and appears to be the last time that it flew. But that did not appear to decrease its value to locals, who proceeded to buy the plane from each other for decades.
The most recent victim of the plane’s influence was Rune Monstad, also known as the “Viking Biker,” who cycled around the world for five years before settling in Haines Junction with his wife Amelia. They have two sons Hugo, 7, and Thor, 5, and a 3-year-old daughter, Signy.
The Monstads drove into the parking lot of Mountain Market on Sunday pulling a trailer with the plane strapped to it. The two said they were enjoying their time in Haines but needed to get home because, among other reasons, they’re hosting a triathlon in Haines Junction this weekend.
Rune Monstad said he intends to clean the plane up and suspend it in a Quonset hut as a playhouse for their kids. It will join a Westfalia bunk bed and dollhouse already set up for them.
The two said they were driving through Haines when they spotted the plane in Elliot Durr’s yard.
“I guess they were driving from the grocery store and two minutes earlier they had said, ‘you know what would be cool, to hang a plane from our Quonset hut,” said Durr.
Rune Monstad, who is Norwegian, said among its other charms the plane is white with blue and red striping, the colors of the Norwegian flag.
“I wasn’t ready to sell it, but when he brought the kids out, I could just see the vision with the three kids of his just kind of playing around on it,” Durr said.
As it happens, Durr bought the plane under similar circumstances from Rod and Rhonda Hinson about two years ago.
“I saw it in his yard, kind of just passing through to the dump,” Durr said. “There are certain things that catch my eye and that was one of them.”
Durr later saw the plane on Facebook marketplace and jumped at the chance to pick it up for himself. He said he’d planned to turn it into a camper that could be towed behind a vehicle.
“I shortened the wings to make them stubby and road legal,” Durr said. But now he’s found himself buried in projects like building a house and has an estimated seven project cars as well.
Rod Hinson recalls also buying the plane off Facebook from some people in town who had also planned to make a playhouse but were moving.
His thought he could use it to solve the problem of people having a hard time finding his house by suspending it from some trees on his property.
“Just the idea of hanging a plane in a tree; it looked like it was crashing and I thought that would be pretty cool,” he said.
But Hinson said that plan stalled because his wife was not as thrilled by the idea as he had been.
Still, despite that he does not fly, Hinson said he enjoyed owning the plane and teasing people online with the idea that he might refurbish it into something airworthy.
“That plane has had quite a life,” he said.
• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
