Mountains: Handle With Care

You may have heard some of the rules about mountain flying, and if you've passed the private pilot knowledge test, you know what the textbooks told you. But as one comedian used to say, this is about the "church of what's happening now" - problems that caught pilots by surprise this past winter.

On January 3, a Learjet 45 missed the runway at Telluride Regional Airport in Colorado, landing to one side in a safety area during light snowfall with a 200-foot ceiling. The wings came off, but the two passengers walked away. No cause has been determined, but the accident underscores problems with visibility in the mountains, especially in falling snow. Runways can disappear into a white sheet that joins the sky to the ground.

One week earlier a writer and photographer had visited the Telluride airport. All operations that week were conducted safely, but there were still lessons present for the pilot new to mountain flying.

A jet rested in a nearby hangar on jacks, its tires recently replaced. The pilots had taken off from an East Coast airport in slush and had raised the landing gear immediately. The slush got between the brakes and the main gear wheels, and froze solid. Upon landing in Telluride, the nation's highest elevation commercial airport at 9,078 feet, the wheels would not turn. The tires blew and a metal brake line became kinked in two places, requiring replacement.

"Don't put the gear up immediately," said local Telluride flight instructor and former airport manager Richard Arnold. "I suggest leaving it down after takeoff from a slushy runway one minute or longer. Plan your takeoff with that in mind." Arnold also managed the airport in mountainous Aspen, Colorado, and lectures on mountain flying and aviation safety.

Here's another reason not to raise the gear too quickly, this time at a mountain airport with rising terrain. The terrain may rise more steeply than the aircraft can climb, and if there is going to be a reconnection with the ground, it's better that it be on the wheels than on the fuselage.

Arnold also suggests gaining energy, rather than altitude, after takeoff. Rotate, lift off, lower the nose, and don't climb a lot. Just gain speed. "I would rather have energy than altitude," Arnold said. When lecturing about Telluride operations, Arnold tells his audience to, "Lift the nose, accelerate, build energy, and by the time you get to California you will be 9,000 feet in the air."

He recalled a statement by a pilot who crashed during a mountain takeoff in a Cessna Turbo 210. The pilot said he had rotated, pitched to climb at the best angle, and when the aircraft began to sink in a downdraft, the pilot had pulled back. "That's a classic stall accident. Nobody was hurt, but the engine was torn from the firewall," Arnold said.

Local terrain can cause problems too. Pilots are aware that wind blowing across airport hangars can cause turbulence at their flatland airport, but they need to look for natural rock formations that do the same at a mountain airport. At Telluride, that formation is a rock pile in one corner of the airport that churns wind into rotors.

Arnold said he doesn't believe there are dangerous airports. Instead, there are airports where some pilots are more dangerous than others. He has worked in search and rescue and nearly all the accidents were caused by poor judgment or pilot error. He is working on a book, How to Participate in Your Own Rescue. A tip from the book is to get on the radio and talk, describing your location as best you can or reporting what you see, such as a barn with two silos. It's the local sheriff who will come looking for you. Local sheriffs know their turf and can probably convert such a broadcast into an exact location.

The more common type of problem at Telluride occurs in summer, not winter, when the pilot fails to look at or understand the takeoff performance charts for the aircraft. Pick an 80-degree-F day and look at what the charts say for 9,000 feet and 12,000 feet for the airplane you most commonly fly. A jet crew once did the calculations and found they could not take off if the temperature was higher than 76 degrees F. The pilots were waiting for the passengers at the door. When they arrived, it was exactly 76 degrees F, and the passengers were quickly loaded for an immediate takeoff.

Another crew realized their aircraft could not safely depart with the four charter passengers on its schedule. So they told the passengers to meet them in Montrose, Colorado, an hour or two away by car. Then they took off in the nearly empty airplane and picked up the passengers at the lower-elevation airport in Montrose.

It doesn't take long to hear the stories at Telluride of pilots who failed to check performance charts. A Cessna 182 lifted off with a full load on a hot day, reached the end of the runway that has a 1,000-foot drop-off, and sank out of sight. It followed a valley until it gained speed and could climb. A Cessna Citation jet did the same.

Don't avoid the mountains or miss out on the scenery, the snowboarding, and the skiing, but be aware that you're not in Kansas anymore, or on the flat plains of Texas. Seek training in mountain flying, ideally specific to the area you want to visit, so you will avoid the mistakes others are already making.

Mountain-flying resources

Flying in the mountains is unlike any other type of flying. Terrain, weather systems, density altitude, and aircraft performance will figure into your flight planning in ways you're probably not accustomed to - unless you learned to fly in Leadville, Colorado, or another high-altitude town.

Studying up on the special characteristics of mountain flying will help prepare you for the experience, and will give you a solid foundation for mountain flying dual instruction. Here are some resources to get you started.

The AOPA Air Safety Foundation's "Mountain Flying" online course is a free interactive tool with newly updated graphics and content.

Supplement the ASF course with "AOPA's Guide to Mountain Flying", a compilation of ASF resources and articles from AOPA Pilot.

Get tips from pilots who have flown there and done that on the discussion forums found on BackCountry Pilot.

The late Sparky Imeson's book, "Mountain Flying Bible," is considered by many to be one of the best on the subject of mountain flying. His Web site is still up and running (daughter Lori is fulfilling online orders) and loaded with useful articles about the peculiarities of what Imeson had dubbed "mountology."

- Jill W. Tallman