Pilot Jon King greeted 16-year-old Tess Stewart as she climbed into his six-seater.
"Is it just you? What happened to the rest of them?" King asked, referring to Tess's two sisters.
"They're sick. They got me sick, too, but Grandma's only letting them stay home," Tess said.
King taxied the plane, drove it on the short runway, then took off into the skies above the Naknek River.
For Tess, this was all perfectly normal.
"It's a little plane," she said. "It only takes, like, two to three minutes."
She's been flying to school for the last seven years.
"I like looking over and seeing the houses and stuff, and seeing the trees and the lakes and the river," she said.
It was old hat for King, too. He's been flying kids most school days for more than four decades.
"I was flying the kids across the river when I was 21 years old, so some of them weren't that much younger than me," King said.
"It's all I've ever done, for work, you know, so yeah, I think I do," he said, when asked if he liked being the school pilot.
The flight is mostly takeoff and landing, which are the interesting parts, he said.
Flying back and forth to school is just one example of how essential small planes are to rural Alaska. King said he flies Alaskans to all sorts of events.
"Weddings and funerals happen, and everything in between, and that's what these little air taxis do for these people," he said.
Every year, King flies residents to remote areas for better bear and moose hunting.
In what is now the Bristol Bay Borough, high school students used to have to leave their communities for boarding schools in other parts of the state or country: Sitka, Anchorage, or even as far as Oklahoma.
Naknek, South Naknek and King Salmon joined together to become the state's first borough in 1962 and pooled students from three villages to make a local school.
But because of the river, kids in South Naknek have to be flown in. Now, it’s three kids — Tess and her two younger sisters — but King said in the past it’s been as many as 20.
"I try to say hello to them in the morning, be nice to them," he said. "I think they feel like they're going on a school bus."
King said he’s conservative when he's flying kids. He won't fly them in the dark. So on Alaska's short winter days, students get to school an hour late.
Tess said that can be annoying.
"Especially if you're doing something fun in that class," she said.
But she said it can be nice to stay home sometimes if the weather's bad.
Back in the plane, King landed and Tess grabbed her bag.
"You're already a junior in high school now, Tess, I can't believe that happened to you," King said.
She'll have one more year as a senior flying with King before she graduates.
