Backcountry Pilot

For more than a century, pilots have been intrigued by the challenges of flight in the highest mountains and the deepest canyons on every continent. Mountain, canyon, and backcountry flying allows pilots to get off the beaten path and enjoy the outdoors. It opens up a whole new world of recreation, including airplane camping, hiking, fishing, and staying at guest lodges or bush camps in areas without roads or easy access by land or water. Flying in these enticing environments often entails operations over relatively inaccessible terrain in a challenging and sometimes unforgiving environment. This necessitates the proper mindset, discipline, and procedures to operate efficiently and safely. Operating over mountains, navigating through canyons, taking off and landing on unimproved, high-altitude airstrips in confined areas, and maximizing airplane performance requires specialized skills. The authors and guest writers share information and tips gleaned from more than 150 years and 100,000 hours of collective experience as professional mountain and backcountry pilots and flight instructors. Recreational pilots to mountain flying instructors will find this book useful, and college and university professors can use the text to supplement their classroom instruction. Fundamental concepts include preparing for and conducting mountain and canyon flights, airport operations, situational awareness, aircraft performance, risk management, and emergency operations. Analysis of accident scenarios, accounts from the authors’ own experiences, and contributions from seasoned backcountry pilots and instructors expand on material detailed in the text. Each chapter includes exercises to help the reader understand and apply the information to their own flying, and beautiful color illustrations will inspire pilots to seek out these awe-inspiring destinations. Foreword by Rod Machado. Full-color illustrations.

This training guide diminishes the dangers and doubles the thrill, and safety, of flying single-engine aircraft at high altitudes in mountainous regions. Logically organized by phases of flight, from preflight preparation to landings, the author combines statistics, techniques, and examples of actions (correct and incorrect) that real pilots have taken in actual flight scenarios.

In this updated edition, Sparky Imeson will not just brief you, but thoroughly explain the conditions and problems that may be encountered at high altitudes in close proximity to the ground. He will then explain, step-by-step, in plain English the rules of thumb and procedures used by experienced mountain and bush pilots to determine go - no go conditions based on the terrain, the weather, your airplane's performance and your own skills and experience.

Steve Woerner-- a Certified Flight Instructor and commercially rated pilot-has written and edited many books and articles, including several for Alaska Flying magazine. Doug Geeting is also a Certified Flight Instructor and verteran pilot, who operates a commercial flying service near Mt. McKinley. These distinguished authors cover everything readers need to handle mountain flying: the weather, pilot fitness, special equipment, charts, the wind, night flying, aircraft performance, flight planning, and emergency procedures. Each section is packed with appropriate tables, graphs, checklists, and illustrations-as well as abundant good advice. This excellent guide is a must for any pilot preparing to fly into mountainous terrain for the first time.

If you ain't a taildragger pilot, you ain't *#@%. This is a bunch of malarkey. Taildraggers are not harder to fly than tricycle-gear airplanes; they are different. Once the differences are mastered, the pilot has no more trouble operating the taildragger than the tricycle gear, despite the fact the taildragger has stricter limitations concerning crosswind operations. The book has been structured to allow one to read from the beginning to the end much like a novel. Each chapter builds and expands upon information that was presented in the previous chapter; however, each chapter is also self-contained to allow one to read only the chapters desired. Flying a taildragger requires knowledge and skill. The knowledge is imparted in this book. The skill is something that must be developed in the airplane.

Hal Terry's book on backcountry and off-airport flying may be a little less refined than its big publisher-edited contempories but the content is spot-on, endorsed by real world bush pilots who have worked in Alaska for entire careers as a worthy training manual for any pilot who aspires to fly the wild.

Pilots invariably find themselves in situations where the weather has decreased to the minimum standards for visual flight (VFR). This book helps to prepare them for these times. It also aids the decision making process to determine if it's safe to continue flight (it does not encourage flight below VFR minimums).

"Survival Flying" is a candid examination of Alaskan aviation history and a proposal for a new form of flight training. Using stories from the Alaskan bush, Jay Baldwin examines the myths and procedures that have claimed so many aviators in the North. By examining accidents, including a few of his own, he combines his rich military and civilian flight instruction careers,with his decades of flying gliders, float planes, jet trainers, tactical fighters, wide body airliners and bush planes to develop a flight training philosophy that turns our current programs upside down.

A comprehensive guide to advanced bush & mountain flying techniques and procedures by South African instructor C.C. Pocock.