No Road Out. Quinhagak Flies Its Own Eyes
Quinhagak has no road out, so the roadless Yup'ik village learned to fly its own drones.
The deck
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The story
In the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, search and rescue calls come weekly, sometimes daily, and outside operators cannot read the airspace. So the village corporation trains its own FAA Part 107 pilots and runs its own machine vision, a neural network that spots a small aluminum boat on a search grid.
The deck walks through the weekly calls, the class of new pilots, the machine the community actually owns, and the honest split between real AI and the human eyes reading thermal and archaeology pictures.
When your community's land, water, and people are watched from the air, who should own the machine doing the watching?
What we verified
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KYUK published its feature on the Quinhagak drone-training program on July 14, 2026, reported by Samantha Watson.
Byron Petluska said the program gets weekly search-and-rescue calls, sometimes three times a week, sometimes daily.
Instructor Sean Gleason said local pilots know their traffic patterns better than any outside operator.
Angelina Olrun, 19, of Mekoryuk, was a trainee interested in reindeer herding.
The drone program grew out of archaeologists using drones to survey the Nunalleq dig site near Quinhagak.
Nalaquq's team built a custom Convolutional Neural Network using deep learning to detect small aluminum-hulled vessels for search and rescue via consumer-grade drones.
The team used a consumer-grade drone with a polarized lens filter to track and count migrating salmon.
Nalaquq's services include remote sensing with specialized aircraft and sensors for 2D and 3D mapping of infrastructure and subsistence areas.
Nalaquq lists 'Automated Salmon Counts' and 'Detect Ancestral Archeological Sites' among its past drone projects.
A drone-training session was held June 9, 2026 in Quinhagak, Alaska.
About a dozen trainees from rural Alaska attended the session.
The story aired on Alaska News Nightly on July 14, 2026, reported by Samantha Watson from Bethel.
Nalaquq is an Alaska Native-owned subsidiary of Qanirtuuq, Inc., the village corporation for Quinhagak.
The program's course is a 14-week commitment that prepares participants for FAA Part 107 drone certification.
Applicants must be from Quinhagak, Eek, Goodnews, or Platinum, and a committee selects one individual from each community.
The training is funded by an Alaska Department of Transportation grant.
Applications of the drones include thermal imaging for reindeer counting, salmon/fish counting on the Kanektok River, and search and rescue.
Beats
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