‘It’s a bird! It’s a plane!’ In Alaska, it’s both, with a pilot tossing turkeys to rural homes

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — In the remotest reaches of Alaska, there’s no relying on DoorDash to have Thanksgiving dinner — or any dinner — delivered. For the third straight year, a resident named Esther Keim has been flying low and slow in a small plane over rural parts of south-central Alaska, dropping frozen turkeys to those who can’t simply run out to the grocery store. “I’m 80 years old now, so we make fewer and fewer trips,” Dave Luce said. “She’s been a real sweetheart, and she’s been a real good friend.” Keim makes 30 to 40 turkey deliveries yearly, flying as far as 100 miles from her base north of Anchorage toward Denali’s foothills. “We won’t drop the turkey until we see them come out of the house or the cabin, because if they don’t see it fall, they’re not going to know where to look,” she said.