From there he got passage as an ordinary seaman to Shanghai, where he took a job in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, serving on the Yangtze and Taku rivers.

A picture of the aviator Carl Ben Eielson was on the wall at the fraternity house, this inspired Reeve, George Gardner, Monk MacKinnon and Ora McMurray to skip classes to spend time at Madison airfield, where Cash Chamberlain had a Curtiss Jenny.

In exchange for two months' work at the airfield, Reeve got three hours flying instruction (which was called five) and soloed.

The new airline, Pan American-Grace Airways (Panagra) flew weekly airmail from the US to Lima, Peru via the Canal Zone.

He had met a Klondike prospector, Swiftwater Bill, in Chile, who had told him of the Gold Rush thirty years earlier.

At Valdez airfield, Owen Meals had a wrecked Eaglerock aircraft with a Wright J-5 engine that had been a spare for Sir Hubert Wilkins when he made his flight across the North Pole to Spitsbergen.

His first charter was to Middleton Island, where the beach looked fine to land on, but the aircraft sank up to its wheels in the soft sand.

Reeve managed to take off, and attempted to fly back to Valdez, but was forced to land at Seward owing to a storm.

Reeve quickly learnt that the bush pilot's biggest worry was paying for gas, which could be $0.25 a gallon in one place, and $1.50 in another.

[4] That winter, Reeve was hired to fly supplies to Chisana at 20¢/lb, his base for this was at Christochina, where a small airstrip had been created with high obstacles each end of the runway.

[4] Reeve's first trip in the Fairchild was to fly Mr and Mrs Ole Hay and their two children, aged 4 and 4 months, to Nome.

Just out of McGrath, they ran into dense ice-fog, a complete white out, so Reeve landed on the frozen Kateel River and then made camp.

He and his passenger used snowshoes to walk the 20 miles (32 km) to the Nabesna Mine, where owner Carl Whitham assisted them.

The landing spot turned out not to be as good as had been claimed, but although the aircraft was partially buried in soft snow, no damage was done.

In the summer of 1934, Reeve's exploits, including landing on mudflats (having manufactured skis from stainless steel to fit to his aircraft) regularly reached the papers.

He received some fan letters, including one from Miss Janice Morisette, who asked if he needed an extra hand.

He earned enough money to buy basic equipment for the Ruff & Tuff and later he and Thompson sold the mine, with Reeve getting the contract to supply it.

[4] Reeve received a letter from Bradford Washburn in January 1937 asking if he could fly a party of climbers to the glacier at the base of Mount Lucania in Canada.

When he flew Washburn and Robert Bates to the site, the weather had turned unseasonably warm and the plane sank up to its belly in slush.

Pilots were assigned routes under a "grandfather rights" scheme based on the territory they had served for four months prior to August 22, 1938.

The work available would not support a growing family (at this time they had two children, Richard and Roberta) so they left Valdez in January 1941 for Fairbanks.

While the Army and Navy concentrated on building bases at Anchorage and in the Aleutian Islands, the CAA was responsible for constructing the airfields in the interior.

Supplies were trucked via the Richardson Highway and a summer trail to the Nasbena Mines, 60 miles from the airfield site, and then flown by Reeve to Northway, where an airstrip had been hacked out of the woods.

[5] Although Reeve was working from dawn to dusk, he couldn't keep up with demand for supplies at Northway, and a backlog built up at Nabesna.

It took five weeks to modify the plane, and when he returned with it to Northway, found a 3,000 feet (910 m) runway at what was now Reeve Field.

The Fairchild was left at Burwash Landing, and Reeve hired a pilot to fly the Hamilton from Washington to Alaska.

The plane crashed in Washington, killing the pilot and Reeve was broke again, not having enough money even to buy the fuel to fly the Boeing to Alaska.

He returned to working for the CAA, now earning $80 an hour with fuel supplied flying supplies, materials and workers to the new airfields being constructed at Big Delta, Tanacross, Galena, Moses Point and Nome, doing all the flying and maintenance himself and regularly working 15-hour days.

In November 1942 Reeve signed a contract with the Alaska Communications System (ACS) and moved his family to Anchorage.

On July 5, 1943, Reeve was flying radar equipment and four technicians from Cold Bay to Amchitka when he ran into zero-zero visibility conditions.