Mountain Flying 101

what's up guys and good morning beautiful day out here at stead and uh yeah today is the day that i think we should talk about some mountain flying i very briefly kind of touched on it in my last video flying with haley it was actually i cut most of it out of there but the part where i was talking i could be a glider pilot and talking about a little bit of lift we were getting from the windward side of a mountain kind of touched on it there was a few comments asking more so i figure i am past due we should make a little video talking about mountain flying [Music] [Applause] that's the traffic freedom fox taking runway three we'll be straight out as well instead [Music] all right so we are talking about mountain flying which as you guys know i uh i learned to fly here at stead reno stead which is in the sierra nevada mountains it it's at 5 000 feet then most of our playground goes up from there obviously there are bigger and more mountainous areas in the united states but we're definitely in an area that uh is affected by most of the the factors that come into play with mountain flying and as always before i get too far into this i got to get my fair disclaimer i am not a cfi i'm just a private pilot with a youtube channel so this is just a casual conversation don't ever let any of my videos replace proper instruction if you're looking to get into mountain flying go take the proper training course and also if you haven't yet pick up this book it's the mountain flying bible revised by sparky einstein this book has everything in it when it comes to traffic experimentally seven now i'm not gonna get too in depth with this but i do wanna talk about some of the theory that you'll see me doing um a lot of the time in this channel as far as where i place myself when i'm flying when i don't like there's do's and don'ts with mountain flying that are pretty basic and that's all i want to get into on this one the first of which is density altitude and i know i've talked about this a few times on this channel but for anyone unfamiliar basically density altitude is the equivalent altitude or the equivalent altitude that the air is acting like so as you go higher from sea level air gets thinner and at the same time the warmer air gets the thinner air gets so as you go up in elevation and on a warm summer day you could be at say our airports 5000 feet but on a hot summer day the density altitude is at 9000 feet meaning that the air is as thin as a 9 000 foot elevation and really density altitude just affects the performance of your aircraft engine makes less horsepower assuming it's a naturally aspirated engine your prop has less bite and your wing makes less lift i think the rule of thumb is for every thousand feet of density altitude your takeoff roll uh extends about 12 i think that's just a rough rule but basically on a hot summer day at high altitude you're going to land with a higher ground speed because the air is so thin and then your takeoff roll is gonna be extended because the air is so thin that your engine's not making power and all that so density altitude is something that gets a lot of people into trouble um it's something that unfortunately we see pretty much every summer up at truckee's airport that someone comes up does the wrong calculations you know assumes that they're going to take off like they do at sea level and unfortunately they aren't able to make it off the runway and normally run long on the runway so anyway density altitude not a huge concern on a cool morning like today but it's still something to factor in for the other big factor is wind now for anyone that flies in you know the flat area most of the united states is relatively flat so wind is no more than just a little bit of a nuisance saying that oh man i'm gonna go really slow one direction or i'm gonna have to deal with a crosswind landing now things differ quite a bit when you get into mountainous areas the reason being that you know a mountain is gonna disrupt wind and make it do a whole bunch of wild things i've always been taught to look at it as if it's like water because air does flow like water so if you had a wind blowing a certain direction and assuming you know which direction the wind's blowing from you can look at the terrain and kind of get a decent understanding of how the wind is gonna flow over it based on what water would do right so let's give an example this mountain range in front of us like pretty much all mountain ranges in the united states runs north to south and like most places in the united states the prevailing wind is going to be from the west so if we had wind which we barely have any right now it would be wise of me to be on the windward side because as the wind gets pushed up into this mountain it's going to rise with the terrain creating an updraft and likewise on the back side of the hill there's going to be a downdraft because the air is going to spill back over that other side now this is a very simple way of looking at it but for the most part a simple flow over the mountain like that is going to be true as long as the wind is less than 20 knots that seems to be the rule of thumb that at 20 knots the wind will remain laminar or attached to the surface and for the most part just follow the contours of the terrain and the updraft that you'll find on the windward side is probably going to go about as high or maybe a little bit higher than the ridge but not by much and the downdraft should normally sit at or below the ridge's level now when things get interesting is when you start factoring in higher than 20 knot winds that's when you'll find that the updraft on the windward side is going to extend above the height of the ridge and push beyond the ridge and then also on the leeward side the wind will become detached and rotor and turn into mechanical turbulence which is not where you want to be so if you are flying in the mountains in the wind you always want to be on the windward face not in the rotor on the backside face and even if it is less than 20 knots the leeward side is going to have a downdraft whereas the windward side is going to have an updraft so use that free lift fly in that updraft now another thing you're going to hear pilots talk about is mountain wave or standing wave and that's kind of an event that only happens under certain conditions basically the the requirements would be that there would have to be fairly strong winds above 20 knots with escalating winds as you go higher and basically what happens is the wind will come over spill over the back side of a hill and because it's rapidly descending on the backside it pushes through its original altitude and then it ends up spending sometimes hundreds of miles leveling back out and those waves can radiate way up into the flight levels and a lot of times you'll see a lenticular cloud on each crest of each wave that would indicate that okay if you're seeing a whole bunch of lenticular clouds going on the backside of a mountain range it's a pretty good indication of mountain wave big thing to take into account with mountain wave is that there's probably going to be some pretty strong up and down drafts and just to be aware you need to know where to fly for the most part for me i think i'd probably uh stick to the windward side of that whole mountain range or pick a different day to fly because there can be some pretty gnarly uh wind effects and pretty unpredictable winds when you're dealing with scenarios like that another little rule is you never want to approach a ridge at 90 degrees to the ridge normally within the last half a mile or so from a ridge you should just make a 45 degree turn that way if something uh you end up in a downdraft you didn't suspect or you get into something you really don't like or you have any engine trouble you aren't making a full you know 90 degree turn to get away from that ridge you only have to turn 45 degrees or maybe slightly more so that's always the smart way to approach a ridge now canyons are gonna have their own different set of kind of etiquette and rules and safety requirements this is a very small canyon i'm putting myself in but what you will notice is i always try to fly down canyon if there was a river i would fly with the flow reason being is that you're never gonna be boxed into a canyon if you're flying downhill well you still could so be aware of how the canyon flies you should never just drop into a canyon without doing a surveillance pass anyway to look for wires but the overall rules with canyons is fly the canyon wall common etiquette in idaho is stay on the right side and the reason that you're flying the canyon wall is you know this is obviously just a small little canyon run that i'm doing but in some of the bigger deeper canyons there may be a time that say you have weather in front of you you don't like or maybe the canyon closes out you didn't expect it you need to turn around and if you're just dead nuts in the center of that canyon you're gonna have to do a big old teardrop and you're really not in a great spot to just turn around whereas if you're flying up against the train on one wall you have a much better ability and a much larger turning radius to be able to start on that one wall turn and make a canyon turn and also the canyon turn that's a whole other thing i'm not about to get into get the mountain flying bible to know what the canyon turn is so yeah that's the the basics uh of mountain flying and what makes it different and it's gonna explain a little bit more why um some of you guys might see me say that oh it's pretty windy out i'm not flying today and it's not really blowing that hard but you know yeah if i was down in the flatlands and it was just going to be a smooth laminar wind or just rolling hills then hell yeah i'd go out playing it it's going to make my landing roll shorter but up in the mountains we can have some pretty turbulent days and it leads to pretty unpredictable swirling wind that's just not as desirable to fly in and at a certain point it definitely becomes unsafe enough with the talking i want to land somewhere i am uh just climbing through 6 500 on the west side of the petersen mountain range and i have a landing spot right up here at the top i think it's at about 8 000 feet pretty sure that this mountain range has about 2500 feet of vertical if i remember so from the just the bottom or the the base of it up to the tops about 2500 feet so on a good uh windy day there's a decent amount of ridge lift or updraft on the windward side of this range and the spot that i have to land up here is uh is one that it's just very condition dependent i have been able to land with a pretty good west wind that was right around that 20 knot range that was staying fairly laminar and it just ended up being like an aircraft carrier landing that i come from the far side stay above the downdraft on the backside and then uh go ahead and just drop down and because i had so much wind i was able to get stopped pretty quickly but on a relatively calm wind day like today we normally land on this little uphill slope which i am going to look at right now and see how it looks there might still be snow looks pretty clear this is another thing too when you have an uphill landing you're not going to be able to you know fly and drag it a lot of times you don't have a clean go around that one does but making a pass perpendicular to it to feel the wind out and see what it's going to be like on your approach is always a smart move so since i did my little pass perpendicular to the landing i'm going to circle back get set up and see how it feels uh one other thing to factor is wind as it goes over a mountain or hill or any of that basically the wind is going to get accelerated as it gets pushed up and over kind of a venturi effect and because it's accelerated you can plan on expecting up to twice the wind speed on the top of the ridge as you would out in the open air in front of it so if there was a 20 knot wind coming up to this mountain i could barely safely assume that the wind could be as high as 40 knots up on the ridge so that's something to keep in mind as well right now i am showing a uh five mile per hour tailwind this is an uphill landing so instead of having a standard descending approach my approach i'm gonna do it at my standard speed but i'm gonna do it pretty much flat that allows me to have less time arresting a descent and using that energy to initiate a flare going uphill the other thing is too a lot of times on these steep uphill landings you don't actually bring your throttle all the way back to idle and that one got me i named this place sucker punch and that's exactly why the air just falls out of under you right in that last section but hey that is why we run big tires and shots so what happened there was probably a little mixture of two things but like i mentioned i had a tailwind so as the wind was pushing at my back and coming up the hill the closer it gets to the mountain the more it accelerates so it probably shifted into a little bit more of a tailwind right on landing also because it was rising terrain and i didn't carry as much speed as i might other times i just probably ran out of energy a little sooner than i expected and plopped down again with the right equipment that's not that big a deal i do it a lot more than i'd like to admit but like i said that's what the shocks and tires are for so i'm going to re-trim this plane i do take off with full nose down trim on takeoff because when i'm under high power settings i actually have to trim forward but as i bring back the power for landing i end up at full half trim when i land so it's kind of one of those things i if you see me reaching down and waiting you know before landing and take off that's normally what i'm doing is just resetting my trim it's a little you know jack screw or whatever the electronic trim that takes a minute to run the entire range of travel so again we are at 7 800 feet i'm gonna take off going downhill which is gonna help and uh should have a little headwind so this shouldn't be too much of an ordeal for a takeoff let's get going there and we're up and off now another thing i should mention aside from just understanding what the the standard prevailing wind is doing in the mountains you got to understand in the summer there's going to be convective and thermic activity that's going to even stir things up more so basically just throughout the day there's a bunch of temperature changes that will create a lot of air movement and can lead to some pretty unpredictable not only wind but mountain weather sometimes you'll see thunderstorms that pop up out of nowhere so the big take home on this is that you just need to be a lot more cautious when flying in mountainous terrain understand that weather can be un unpredictable always give yourself an out as i am now i'm flying sideways along the hill because if there was any issue i can use altitude to gain air speed just turn down the hill you try to do the same thing when you're flying in a uh canyon and when you're crossing a mountain range like i said don't cross it at a 90 degree angle across it at 45. anyway i've blabbered long enough my battery's getting low on my gopro so i'm probably going to just play for a little bit and then see you guys back in the hangar still stuck in this house with a mind full of doubts tired of staring out the window eating too much drinking too much tired of watching the grass grow channel two channel three back to channel two i watched everything in my queue so put me on a train i don't care where it's going fly me on a plane baby [Music] you and me i need to go somewhere helicopter moped golf cart minivan skateboard cruise ship submarine delorean a horse and a porsche on a boat with t-pain swim like a mermaid nearly all the way to spain listen karen i'll even ride on my roller [Music] blades [Music] all right well i definitely wouldn't consider this any sort of educational class i'm hoping that it just kind of gets the juices flowing on some of you guys to go out and learn a little bit more about mountain flying keep us all safer when we're out there because hell as pilots we all know that we are always learning and growing and while on the topic of learning and growing it's probably a convenient time for me to tell you guys about the sponsor of this video skillshare which i conveniently used to learn how to animate those little drawings of the wind blowing over mountains now what's funny is i've been doing film and video stuff my entire adult life starting back in high school and i have gotten a pretty good understanding and a lot of experience when it comes to non-linear editing and motion graphics but actual animating is something that i've never gotten into and it seemed like this was the perfect time for me to try to learn a new skill because i really couldn't come up with a better way to graphically represent what wind does over mountains so i jumped on skillshare which for those of you that don't know skillshare is an online learning community for creative and curious people and they have classes for everyone from beginners to pros dabblers to masters their class topics include illustration graphic design photography animation film and video and more members get unlimited access to thousands of inspiring classes with hands-on projects and feedback from a community of millions class that i used on this one was actually called procreate animation make fun gifs and videos it allows you to use the procreate app on an ipad draw out very simple sketches but animate them in a way that has a very cool look and it's something that again i feel like i've been lacking in some of my videos is just having that more raw authentic illustrated look that i wasn't able to get any other way so rich armstrong does a very good job on this one i think it's an hour long total there's 11 little lessons so you can kind of separate it into bite-sized pieces but i thought it was pretty cool that i could sit down and learn a new skill just in my little breaks throughout a day so the first thousand of my subscribers to click the link in the description i'll get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity anyway thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this video anyone that wants to learn more about mountain flying go get the mountain flying bible i hope you were able to learn something and i'm going to wrap this one up here you guys know the drill like this video if you do subscribe if you haven't come be my wingman see on the next one peace

Channel: Trent Palmer

Views: 104,690

Rating: 4.9766197 out of 5

Keywords: mountain flying, aviation, mountain, flight training, flying, mountain flying training, mountain flying tips, Kitfox, kitfox aircraft, flight vlog, airplane, bush plane, trent palmer, freedomfox, airplane crash, instruction, tailwheel, landing, plane, pilot, helicopter, oshkosh airventure, airventure 2018, STOL, low and slow, student pilot, first solo, freedom fox, flying cowboys, oshkosh2019, airventure2019, airventure, EAA, Oshkosh

Id: 9eLcDcQ3Z-0

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021