The "Mudhen/Arctic Eagle" mentality is a flying club. It originated in the ANC base when the "boys" were flying the 737-200. They all thought they were better pilots than anyone else in the system, especially the Jet America guys.

Unfortunately, that attitude led to them "doing what ever it takes" to get the job done. Why? Because if you wanted to take extra gas due to weather or alternate considerations and left 1000 lbs of dead fish on the ramp, the Ops agent would be on the phone to the ANC CP before you got your wheels in the well. Then you got to "explain" yourself.

I once heard one of the Arctic Eagles berating a Dispatcher for carrying TOO MUCH fuel on a 2500 nm leg from ANC to ORD then DEMAND to talk to the Chief Dispatcher when the guy wouldn't take the fuel off. This on the longest leg in the system, at night, over Canada with limited alternates to the 2nd busiest airport in the U.S. in a 737-700. Why? Because the Arctic Eagles routinely carried minimum fuel. And God help you if you wanted to take on fuel in a remote station like Kotzebue. "We carry gas TO Kotz, we don't take it out of there." Begging the question, "Why then do we TAKE it there if not to use it when needed?"

In Mudhen land, if you couldn't pull the throttles to idle at FL350 and not touch them again until 500 AGL, you weren't up to par. If you had to look at a chart for an FSS frequency anywhere in SE Alaska you weren't good enough. I guess if you spend your whole career flying to 10 or 12 airports you have everything memorized, but the Arctic Eagles demanded that of new hire F/Os and "Outside" new Captains alike. (For those of you non-Alaskans, "Outside" refers to anything outside the borders of the state.)

Yeah, they were quite a bunch. Whenever they got caught doing anything "outside" the regulations their defense was always, "You don't understand how we need to operate." Unfortunately, THEY didn't seem to understand that they still needed to adhere to Part 121 regs even though they were "obviously" superior airmen.

Fortunately, that attitude is mostly gone up there, but pockets still exist. It is very telling that the Chief Mudhen/Arctic Eagle was killed a couple years after he retired scud running...a true Alaska Legend. The saddest thing of all is the "Mudhen" mentality was even embraced by Flight Ops managers even as the scrambled to cover up the errors the mindset produced. Those that they knew about at any rate.