Flying Across The Rocky Mountains At Night

For me, seated upon crushed velour and snug in my metal cocoon, the world is a safer place. I listen to the reassuring drone of my engines, turbochargers glowing soft orange through the louvers of twin cowlings.

The Rockies are geologically the youngest high terrain in the southern 48 states. They spring, knife-like, from the semi-high plateau of Arizona/Utah to the west without the benefit of foothills and drop off nearly as precipitously to the east, bordering a 1,000-mile expanse of prairie, the American Great Plains.

Yet I fear no evil, for I'm at least a mile above the tallest of the local peaks. From the darkness below---soft starlight and moon glow the only illumination---is sprinkled with occasional city lights, very occasional. Level ground is hard to find in this neighborhood.

For those flying to or from it, canyon-captured Telluride has only one way in and one way out, unless, that is, like me, you're cruising far above the steep, granite walls that hem it in. Fortunately, I am high above Telluride and even nearly 10,000-foot Leadville, America's highest municipal airport. Both runways recede behind me as I continue east. My strobes flashing into the dark, I see Pikes Peak barely emerging from the black of mountain night, with an occasional streak of what I know are headlights winding uphill toward the mountain's 14,115-foot apex.

I know exactly where those cars are going, yet I wonder if any of their drivers look up at my strobes and speculate on my destination. It's not likely, but if they did, I would wager none of them would guess it's Helsinki. As I travel east, the mountains abruptly fall away, and the lights of Denver overpower the night to the north as I emerge above the high plains, slowly sloping downhill toward the Midwest. Though two-dozen instruments paint impressions of my tailwind-assisted, 230-knot groundspeed, and a half-dozen radios confirm that I'm now far from where I was and closer to where I want to be, I seem to be suspended in a silent embrace, detached from the reality of solid ground.

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If the weather holds and the winds continue to rip from the west, the little Seneca I fly toward Wichita tonight and Bangor tomorrow will eventually alight in Finland in three days.

This is too easy, it occurs to me. I should be paying the client for the privilege of flying his airplane to Finland, not the other way around. I decide not to mention it.

How did we come so far so fast, I wonder behind the gentle chaff of my oxygen mask? Can it really be only a little over a century since humans first flew powered aircraft? It seems somehow a monstrous joke that the most significant steps forward in human mobility took something like 700 years to achieve; yet, once realized, progress in the new discipline of flight has been nothing short of exponential.

Between the 13th and early 20th century, the cleverest form of transportation known was the back of a horse, plodding along at perhaps 7 mph; yet today, many prop-piston, general aviation aircraft achieve a 200-knot cruise speed on a regular basis, and corporate air travel is gaining on 550 knots, nearly Mach 1.0, while the airlines have already pegged out at Mach 2.0 with British/French Concorde. It seems everyone is gradually discovering the advantages of traveling fast and high. Business and professional men and women are beginning to take airplanes for granted, as the safety record of aircraft and the pilots who fly them improves on practically an annual basis.

Of course, I recognize that the readers of this magazine are more than a little prejudiced. I've been addicted to airplanes since the age of 13, when I first looked over the fence at Merrill Field in Anchorage, Alaska, and dreamed of someday flying Cubs, Porterfields, Luscombes and perhaps even the one Navion in the local CAP squadron.

Since then, I've owned a half-dozen different models over 50 years and have logged 15,000 hours. That's not nearly enough. I still haven't got it right. Given the option, I'd fly general aviation practically every time to pretty much everywhere.

Despite what you see in the media, private aircraft are safer and easier to fly than ever. Many of "those little airplanes" are routinely sold with shoulder harness that feature built-in air bags and seats constructed to absorb 26 G vertical impacts. These days, some airplanes are even being fitted with whole-aircraft parachutes (including one small, private jet) designed to lower the aircraft and its passengers to the ground with minimal or no injuries.

Along the way, GPS has relegated navigation to pilot's play, and flat-panel displays have simplified situational awareness to the point where even newbies have to work hard to get lost. Flying airplanes is no longer the mind-boggling task it used to be.

All of the above might be construed as preaching to the converted, the ravings of a CAP Cadet who never grew up and dreamed of becoming an astronaut, the absolute, unchallenged peak of the aviation pyramid.

Speaking of which, as every aviation buff must know by now, last July marked the 50th anniversary of the most momentous event in aviation history, some say in the history of humankind.

Against all odds, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew a quarter of a million miles to the moon in a spacecraft consisting of some 2 million parts, virtually all of which had to work if the crew was to return home safely. Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the moon's surface in the lunar lander, appropriately named Eagle, collected some 47 pounds of rocks and surface material, while some 600 million people, the largest TV audience in history, watched the video broadcast, live and in glorious black-and-white. The astronauts then rejoined Mike Collins, who had been orbiting overhead, and returned to Earth a few days later as if they did this sort of thing all the time.

During the next few years, six more missions went to the moon, and another 10 astronauts descended to the lunar surface and carried out extensive scientific research. It may be a while before such an adventure becomes available to the pilot/non-pilot public, but who knows. NASA recently announced it will soon be possible for anyone who can pony up $60 million and pass the physical to travel to the International Space Station, spending a few days floating in zero G and witnessing the Earth rotating below at one revolution every 90 minutes. Could SpaceX founder Elon Musk lower that cost on one of his company's crafts?

Regardless, for those of us limited to flight inside the Earth's atmosphere, lesser aero mobility is becoming a key concept in the business world and means more and more to the recreational traveler than ever before.

General aviation has proven its worth as an alternative to automotive, rail and airline travel. Now, perhaps more than at any age in history, time most emphatically is money.

As I drift along at an easy 4 miles a minute above winter Kansas, a negligee of snow reflecting my night's companion, the moon, I can only wonder why everyone with the means and the need to move people and things from A to a distant B (okay, I admit, Santa Monica to Helsinki in January may be a little extreme), it's hard to imagine a better and more fun way to travel than the fast lane in the sky.

Cross-country flying stories from Bill Cox offer fantastic insight into what pilots face on long-distance flights. Dig into our Cross-Country Log today.