Sometime in your training, a helpful friend probably sent you a list of “Rules of the Air.” All of them are good, but perhaps the best one is this: “No one has ever collided with the sky.”
One of the principles many new pilots find hardest to absorb—not just accept, but really believe—is that altitude is your friend. It increases the range of your radios, both transmitting and receiving. Better radar coverage improves your chances of getting flight following or other help from ATC. Higher altitude allows you to see farther when visibility’s good, and to stay farther from all the things you can’t see when it’s marginal. If something goes wrong with the aircraft, altitude means both time and distance—time to sort out the problem or call for help, and a wider choice of landing fields within gliding range if you have to put it down. In a stall—or, worse, a spin—entry altitude is the first thing that determines whether the airplane or the pilot will ever fly again.
And bad things happen down low. Cables stretch across rivers, waiting to trip the unwary. Cell phone towers sprout as you fly along the highway. Guy wires supporting radio towers can be almost impossible to see. Even if you notice the obstruction in time to swerve, the sudden evasive maneuver can cause an accelerated stall from which there’s no room to recover. And aircraft just flying along, minding their own business, have hit everything from turkey vultures to radio-controlled model airplanes (this happened to a Colorado pilot last August, and he was in the traffic pattern at the time).
Unless you’re a crop duster, there’s almost never a good reason for you to be below 500 feet agl between initial climbout and final approach. Low-altitude strikes with stationary objects are often fatal and always tough to explain. A pilot who was lucky enough to survive the close encounter with a marked power line that separated his airplane from its right main gear complained that the balls marking the wire were hard to see at dusk.
OK—but if you hadn’t been buzzing 70 feet off the ground to begin with, it never would have become an issue.
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