Summer Flying

After learning to fly in the wintertime, when everything was covered in white, it’s been a real treat to fly around Alaska in the summer. With help from the near 24-hour daylight, the landscape becomes incredibly lush. Flying over the lower mountain terrain is especially pretty, especially in the sub alpine environments, where you have endless expanses of green interspersed with giant patches of pink fireweed flowers and the tall white blooms of the cow parnsnip all along the hillsides.

Yesterday I took the plane out for a quick hour and flew over the town of Hope. We had mountain biked the Resurrection Pass Trail the day before, which goes south of out Hope, and so it was really neat to see part of the same area from the air.

Although this was the first time I’d been flown myself in a few weeks, I’ve been sitting right seat during for a number of days during Civil Air Patrol missions near the Chitina River, McCarthy and Logan Glacier areas. Even though I wasn’t actually flying, I still feel that I learned alot from watching the four other pilots that I had flown with during these missions. I found it quite interesting to note the differences between on pilot to the next when flying the same course to the same airport. Each one has their own way of doing things, whether it be communicating on the radio, managing fuel flow, choosing an altitude, approaching the airfield, etc…

I guess it’s like anything else, each person has their own style, so why should flying be any different?

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One Response to Summer Flying

  1. Leslie Taylor says:

    When flying with the CAP, were you on the Gary Patigler missing plane search?

    I am a relative and we are working with a private company now to come up with a grid to start a new search.

    Thank you, Leslie

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