Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosRusty Wilkerson, the owner of Wing and a Prayer, uses his 1947 Stinson to scatter ashes over a place that held significance to the deceased.
Andy Tullis / The Bulletin
Rising with the ashes
Bend pilot offers aerial burials
By David Jasper /The Bulletin
Published: May 31. 2009 4:00AM PST“There are a lot of people that want the service, but they’re still alive. That poses a problem.”
It does if you have a business scattering people’s cremated remains from an airplane, says Randal “Rusty” Wilkerson, a 46-year-old pilot living in Bend.
An electrician by trade, Wilkerson’s side business, Wing and a Prayer, was just beginning to take off in Portland two years ago when he moved with his family back to Bend, where he grew up.
“I work construction, so we moved back just in time to have it fall apart over here,” he says.
To make matters more challenging, he was laid off a week ago. “I knew it was coming,” he says. “I finished a big job, and they didn’t have anything else, so we were kind of knuckling down for it.”
He may even be loading up his tools in his RV and traveling a bit for future work.
He may not have to, though, if Wing and a Prayer successfully rises from the ashes. Or make that rises with the ashes.
Wilkerson recently resuscitated his unusual sideline: For a price starting around $200 for flights within 30 square miles, Wilkerson will fly up in his 1947 Stinson airplane and scatter ashes over a place that held significance to the deceased.
To get the word out, Wilkerson’s wife has a sign for Wing and a Prayer on her car.
He’s also opening the service to dispersing the ashes of cremated pets.
Wilkerson began flying 25 years ago, around the same time he began his electrical apprenticeship. “Probably not my brightest moment,” he says. “I had a lot of homework.”
He’s worked both as a private pilot and instructor, he says, but has only made cremation flights a handful of times since he first started the business five years ago.
In a sense, the idea for the business was around for years before Wilkerson started it; the catalyst was the death of his uncle Earl in 2001.
“My uncle, before he passed away, he always said, ‘When I die, I want Rusty to take my ashes up and spread ’em around’ some property in Idaho that my family homesteaded. My family’s got some cabins and stuff up there, and he loved the place,” Wilkerson says. “He’d been telling my grandmother that for years.”
After his uncle died several years ago, “I flew over and met his son, my cousin, over there and we took his ashes up in a different plane that I had at the time, and it was neat to take him back to where he wanted to be,” Wilkerson says.
“He’s all over up there now. It was kind of a neat thing.”
He can’t take friends or family of the deceased with him on scattering flights (“It’s a whole different level of bureaucracy and insurance that gets into it,” he says). However, he was able to take up his cousin Mark on the flight that sparked the business.
“That’s something my dad really talked about,” Mark Wilkerson says. “That’s what he wanted, and a year and a half later we finally got the whole family together and made it happen.”
He calls the moment of casting the cremains out the window “really moving, really spiritual.”
Later, talking to family members about it, Rusty Wilkerson decided he should offer cremains-scattering as a service to others.
“Because there are people out there who want that. They don’t want to be buried in a cemetery, or in a vault or whatever. They want to be cremated, and a lot of people want to go back to the place that they liked to fish or hunt or play golf or what have you.”
That’s true, says Mark Stehn, executive director of the Oregon Funeral Directors Association.
Oregon and Washington have a high number of cremations, on the leading edge in the increasing number of cremations nationwide. Some 65 percent of Oregonians choose to be cremated after they die, Stehn says.
Michelle Gaines, executive director of the Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board, says the figure for Oregonians getting cremated may be as high as 80 or 90 percent.
Gaines says some studies that have been done on the boomer generation show that, collectively, “they’re not interested in (having) their parents’ funeral. They don’t want to have the big ballyhoo; they just want to be cremated.”
She also says that “once the cremated remains are turned over to the family member or the person who was controlling the disposition, that … ends the chain, so (the remains) effectively become that person’s property.”
“That person has a legal right to do what they want with the remains,” she says. “There isn’t really a law that explicitly makes it easy to generally say where they can be scattered or where they can’t.”
Federal law stipulates that someone wanting to scatter cremains must have the property owner’s permission, which could be a government or an individual, Gaines says. She adds that it’s popular to scatter cremains at sea three and a half miles or more out, “where you’re outside U.S. jurisdiction.”
Nationally, there are quite a few companies that offer services akin to Wilkerson’s, including one San Diego outfit called Final Flights.
Jerome Daniel, a pilot and funeral director at Niswonger-Reynolds Funeral Home in Bend, owns and operates an “air hearse,” a twin-engined Piper Seneca, that can scatter cremains or fly the deceased to other states should a body need to be moved.
According to Daniel, only 3 to 5 percent of the cremated are later scattered, but estimates he makes flights a couple of times a month.
“It’s not a very big business,” he says. He can take as many as five people in the plane during the distribution of the cremains.
“We don’t call them ashes,” Daniel says. “It’s not ash. It’s not fireplace ash. These are particles of human calcium, so it’s cremated remains,” or cremains.
“Most people really don’t want to scatter because it’s a permanent method of disposition. There is no retracing that if you decide to move back to Montana, and bring your loved ones with (you),” he says.
“Oregon is unique in that they still do allow this to happen,” Daniel says.
Wilkerson says that one must use common sense to avoid mishaps such as a 2002 incident in which a plane dropped a container of cremains of a former Mariners fan onto the roof of Safeco Field, triggering “a full-blown hazardous materials emergency response that prompted closure of streets around the field, evacuation of sightseers from the stadium and a bad case of jangled nerves citywide,” reported the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a former newspaper.
For his part, Wilkerson has two pipes he uses to neatly deliver his payload to the sky.
One memorable job came over Mount St. Helens in Washington, for which Wilkerson needed a permit. That was a few years ago, “when it was still kind of active,” he recalls. It was “a little eerie going up there and having Mount St. Helens burping around you. But it was fun.”
The Coast Range and the coast itself were also popular final destinations for cremated Portlanders.
“Some people have said, ‘When I die, I want my family to have your information, so they can get a hold of you,’” Wilkerson says. “Maybe one of these days it will take off, and I’ll just be swamped.”
If you’d like to get a hold of Wing and a Prayer, Wilkerson can be reached at 541-306-3332. To reach Niswonger-Reynolds Funeral Home, contact 541-382-2471.
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