As pilots, we’ve all looked down at the landscape below and muttered the words, ” I could land there”. It’s almost always followed with a line of excuses, “Well, if I wasn’t so heavy on fuel, and the wind was from the North ….” blah blah blah. Occasionally we even mark the spot on our GPS and return at a later date to check-out the spot more carefully. Maybe it’s your brother-in-laws field in his front yard, or the road out in front of your cabin, or the gravel bar next to that moose horn, wherever it is, the end result is almost always the same, It looks horrible when you get down and dirty and start working the thing over for a potential landing. The power lines are higher than you thought, the mailbox is too close to the road, or it’s just simply too short.
It’s amazing how flat and tame the earth looks when viewed straight down from above. I learned early-on in this career that if it looks “a bit rough” from the air, it will rattle the teeth out of your head. If it looks “a bit short” from above, it will stun you how fast you run off the end, and if the bushes look “a bit close” you’ll get re-acquainted with your roll of duct-tape. It’s a no-brainer when you think about it. Of course everything looks flat from above, you don’t crown a board by holding it at arms length and looking at it from the side. You get your head right down on the edge of it, and eyeball down the length so you can see every twist, turn, and blemish. It’s the same thing when you get down and dirty with checking-out a strip, you’ll notice that side slope for the first time or the big boulder hidden in the middle. I’ve been tempted to use a lot of bad 2×4’s in my house because they looked good from a distance, and I’ve been tempted to land in a lot of nasty places when I’ve looked at them from above. Don’t get sucked in.
These two images attempt to demonstrate my point. The first picture shows the strip from above, and the second shows me on the ground 2 minutes later. You can see that the glacier looks flat and smooth. Look at the picture below and notice the incline. That is pretty doggone steep, and it has a nasty little crown, and the small crevasse on the low end is itching to tear the landing-gear off the cub, and all those little rocks sliced my tires, but the first time I flew over this I muttered, “I can land there”…
