Daily Archives: March 6, 2009

Finding a Legal Landing Zone

Posted on by
24

It’s not as easy as it seems sometimes.

At Lake Pateros
My R44, parked on the side lawn at the Lake Pateros Inn in Washington State. Sadly, heat from my engine browned the grass.

One of the benefits of operating a helicopter is that you can land it almost anywhere. One of the drawbacks of this, however, is that not all landing zones are legal.

The other day, I was asked by a client to find a pickup location for him that was closer to where he was staying than Scottsdale Airport. He suggested two possibilities that I knew I couldn’t use:

  • A private helipad at the resort where he’s staying. That helipad is owned by another helicopter operator who gets three times what I do per hour of flight time. They do not allow others to use their helipad.
  • A private, residential airport near the resort where he’s staying. They have a strict “no helicopter” policy.

I went through the motions and called the managers of both facilities. I was told what I expected to be told: that I could not use them.

What Do the FARs Say?

Around this time, I commented on Twitter that I was conducting a search. Another pilot, who flies airplanes, wanted to know how I was searching and where legal landing zones were covered in the FARs (Federal Aviation Regulations).

The truth is, they’re not. There’s no FAR that clearly states where you’re allowed to land a helicopter.

Instead, the Aeronautical Information Manual (AIM) offers some clear guidance on where you’re not allowed to land any aircraft. 7-4-6 Flights Over Charted U.S. Wildlife Refuges, Parks, and Forest Service Areas states, in part:

The landing of aircraft is prohibited on lands or waters administered by the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or U.S. Forest Service without authorization from the respective agency. Exceptions include:

1. When forced to land due to an emergency beyond the control of the operator;
2. At officially designated landing sites; or
3. An approved official business of the Federal Government.

I assume this is in the FARs somewhere — the AIM is generally a plain English translation of most FARs, better organized and easier to read — but I can’t track it down.

So Where Can You Land?

A Heli Outing
This heli-outing brought three helicopters, including my old R22, out in the desert near the Swansea Townsite.

When I first started flying helicopters, knowing where you were allowed to land in a non-emergency situation was a big deal. Everyone dreams of landing on their best friend’s driveway or backyard. Was it legal? How about showing up at your kid’s soccer game? Dropping off a friend at work in an office park? Stopping in at Krispy Creme for a donut and coffee? Landing along the lakeshore for a quick afternoon swim?

Is any of this legal?

My answer: it depends.

Before you read any farther, understand that I am not a lawyer. I cannot advise you on these matters. If you get in trouble for landing somewhere and use what you read here as a legal defense, you are an idiot and deserve to lose your license. I’m just sharing what I’ve learned through experience. I don’t know all the answers and certainly cannot advise you in your specific situations.

Landing in the Middle of Nowhere

R22 in Riverbed
A blast from the past: My old R22 sitting in a wash south of Alamo Lake about a day after it flowed. Hard sand makes a good landing surface.

Keep in mind that I live on the edge of nowhere. Wickenburg is on the northwest end of Maricopa County. There’s not much other than empty desert in most directions. Go southeast and you’ll get to the Phoenix metro area within 30 minutes, but go in almost any other direction and you’ll be driving (or flying) for a while before you get anywhere else.

That said, friends and I have landed our helicopters at many remote patches of desert, both privately owned and owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

I discovered through telephone calls, an exchange of mail, and a $270 fine that I’m allowed to land on BLM land that’s not Wilderness area as long as I don’t do it with paying passengers on board. Commercial flights must have permits for landing on BLM land. And trust me: BLM will drag its collective butt in getting you a permit once you apply for one. It took 18 months for me to get permission to land at the Swansea Townsite and costs $90/year to maintain that permit. (I’ve landed there once with paying passengers in the past three years; do you think I should renew?)

But land on private land just footsteps away from government-owned land and you’re okay — as long as other factors don’t come into play.

Permissions and Local Ordinances

At the Big Sandy Shoot
Parked at the semi-annual Big Sandy Shoot. The event is held on a mile-square parcel of privately-owned land northwest of Phoenix.

What are the other factors?

Well, you need to have permission of the property owner. After all, it is his property. It doesn’t have to be written permission, but if you don’t have permission, you could be prosecuted for trespassing.

You also need to be aware of any local ordinances against landing. Wickenburg has one of these ordinances, although they only seem interested in enforcing it when it’s convenient to them. (This is the case with many of Wickenburg’s rules, especially those regarding zoning.) Scottsdale also has an ordinance.

Moab, UT didn’t have an ordinance until after I landed at a friend’s 2-1/2 acre property there. The cops rolled by and I thought I’d get in trouble, but they just wanted to see the helicopter. A week later, the ordinance came out and was on the front page of the local newspaper. Oh, well.

There are two ways to find out if a locality has an ordinance against helicopters landing within town limits:

  • Land there and see if you get in trouble. I don’t recommend this approach, but it can be effective, especially in remote areas where you might not even be seen by anyone on the ground.
  • Call ahead and ask. In most cases, they won’t know. You can make a lot of calls and get nowhere. Then you can try the above approach and see where it gets you. Hopefully, not in jail.
Helicopter at HouseParked in the desert north of Phoenix. Photo by Jon Davison.

Of course, this refers to towns and cities. Within those are subdivisions that may be controlled by written rules (such as that private airport that won’t allow helicopters). And everything is inside a county, which may have its own rules.

Sounds like a pain in the butt? It is. But if you don’t do your homework before you land off-airport, you’re liable to get in deep trouble with the local authorities and FAA. You could have your pilot certificate suspended or even revoked. I don’t know about you, but I have enough time and money invested in my helicopter pilot certificate, aircraft, and business to act wisely. If I can’t find a legal landing zone where I think I need one, I won’t land there.

Please Read This

Tristan's R44
Before buying my own R44 in 2005, I leased a friend’s. This shot was taken in Congress, AZ, where I attempted to sell helicopter rides a few times.

If you’re landing off-airport, whether you have permission to land at an official helicopter landing zone or you’re just taking a risk landing where you might or might not be allowed to, please, for the sake of all of the helicopter pilots out there, keep these things in mind:

  • Only land where its safe. This applies to the terrain of the landing zone itself, as well as your approach and departure routes. Wouldn’t you be embarrassed if you had a dynamic rollover in your buddy’s backyard?
  • Land at the edge of activity — or farther away, if possible. I used to do rides at the Mohave County Fair. My landing zone was at the far end of the event, beyond the carnival rides. There were many people at the event who didn’t even know there was a helicopter around. I’ve also landed at remote restaurants far enough away that no one even heard me approach.
  • Only land where you can secure the landing zone while the helicopter is running. I’ll land places where there may be people on the ground if I have a second person on board with me to get out and keep the landing zone clear of curious bystanders. But if I’m alone, I wouldn’t even think of landing where someone might approach the helicopter while it’s running. Do you really think it would be a good idea to land at your kid’s soccer game? What if a bunch of those kids ran toward you from behind and ducked under the tailcone? Do I have to paint a bloody picture for you?
  • Do not overfly people, vehicles, animals, or buildings at low-level. This is for courtesy and safety. Engine failure on approach or departure means a possibly messy crash into whatever’s below you. Crashing into an empty parking lot is very different from crashing into a crowded soccer field or county fair arcade. (By the same token, anyone who buys a home within a mile of the approach/departure end of any airport runway should have his/her head examined.)
  • Be courteous to people on the ground. Don’t spend more time than necessary circling the landing zone at low level. Once you know your approach and departure routes, get it on the ground. Don’t give bystanders a reason to complain. That’s why localities make these ordinances. Because some jackass pilot annoyed just the right number of people to get the ordinance voted in.
  • Do not draw attention to yourself. Sure, it’s cool to land off-airport and yeah, everyone will be jealous. But aren’t you above all that? If you can land and depart in such a way that no one even knows how you arrived, that’s even cooler.
  • Do not walk away from the aircraft with the engine running and blades spinning. I can’t believe I have to include this no-brainer on a list, but here it is, for the folks who have no brain and actually leave a running helicopter unattended.
  • If asked to leave, do so quickly and without argument. Be apologetic. Be nice. Don’t be an asshole.

The rest of us are depending on you to act wisely so the FAA doesn’t add a rule that prevents us from landing off airport.

My Advice

Mansion Landing
Parked at the house of some friends just outside Wickenburg town limits. They cleared a small helipad up there for me to use. Photo by Jon Davison.

My advice is that you don’t land anywhere where safety or legality may be an issue. Do your homework and get the information you need to establish whether your landing zone is legal.

Or simply land at the nearest airport. That’s what I’ll be doing for my upcoming charter flight.

Instant Tilt-Shift Faking

Posted on by
Comment

Kind of takes the fun out of it.

A while back, I wrote a blog entry about my foray into the world of tilt-shift photography. Although I have no interest in investing cold, hard cash in the hardware to do real tilt-shift photography, I learned how to fake in in Photoshop by reading “Tilt Shift Photography in Photoshop Tutorial.” I was pleased with the results and found the whole thing fun and rather addictive.

Today, I stumbled upon a site that fully automates the entire process: TiltShiftMaker. You upload a photo and it applies the unfocus mask, which you can adjust. You toggle a check box to determine whether you want colors enhanced. It then spits out a photo with the effect applied, as shown below. Any idiot can do it. Even me.

TiltShiftMaker in Action

The photo I started with was an aerial shot of the Grand Coulee Dam, taken this summer when my husband and I flew down the Columbia River. There’s nothing special about this shot; I didn’t even bother to spruce it up for this experiment. So the colors are a bit washed out and the framing is far from perfect:

Grand Coulee Dam

After processing with TiltShiftMaker’s default settings, it looks like this:

Tilt-Shift Grand Coulee Dam

For a quick and dirty tilt-shift, it ain’t bad. I tried to manually modify the original image using Photoshop and my results weren’t significantly better. Sure, I had a lot more control over the amount of blur, the size of the in-focus area, and the amount of saturation to give it those punched-up colors, but when I compared my final product to the automatically generated one, I had to admit that the automatically generated one looked more like a photography of a model scene.

But it certainly does take the fun out of playing around with this technique.

To me, the real challenge of faking tilt-shift photos comes from trying to take photos that would work well as fake tilt-shift miniatures. Aerial photos are great for this, especially if they include buildings and/or cars. They can’t be straight-down images, though. They need to be shot at an angle, so there’s an obvious reason for one portion of the photo to be in focus while the other parts are not.

Anyway, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, give TiltShiftMaker try.

Writing Tips: Master the Basics

Posted on by
5

If there’s only one thing you do before starting a career as a writer, this is it.

Today, I’m doing a presentation for Wickenburg High School’s Journalism class. I suspect that they’re a bunch of seniors who are interested in journalism or some other branch of writing. Although I’m not a journalist, I feel qualified to speak to them about careers in writing. And since being asked to do this presentation, I’ve been giving the topics I want to discuss a lot of thought.

The Basics

The best piece of advice I can offer anyone considering a career in writing is to master the basics. I mean that quite literally: master the basics of writing. This includes the following:

  • Spelling. Yes, I know that there are spelling checkers in word processors — and even blog offline composition tools like the one I’m using to write this. And no, I’m not saying that you need to know how to spell every word you might ever write absolutely perfectly. But I am saying that you need basic spelling skills. This will help ensure that you don’t misspell a word that spells another word (and, thus, won’t be caught by a spelling checker) or use the wrong word (then instead of than, your instead of you’re, etc.).
  • Want more tips about grammar?
    Read “Grammar is Important“

    Grammar. Again, perfect grammar isn’t an absolute requirement, but a writer’s grammar should certainly be much better than average. Don’t use the grammar checker in a word processor — if you need to rely on that, you may as well give up on any idea of being a writer. The best way to learn grammar is to read and study good writing. I’m not talking about Dickens here. And I’m certainly not talking about blogs. I’m talking about The New York Times, NewsWeek, and other quality publications that are written and edited by professionals. Don’t get the idea that grammar rules are meant to be broken so they don’t matter. You need to learn the rules before you can break them.

  • Punctuation. This goes with grammar. Punctuation is pretty easy. If you can’t master it, you’re not going to impress many editors.
  • Style. Here’s where things start drifting away from what you can learn in basic English classes. Every writer should be able to develop his or her own style or voice. This is something that comes with practice — I don’t think it can be taught. Style includes vocabulary and word usage, as well as the rhythm of your sentences and paragraphs. I believe that the only way a writer can develop his or her own style is by writing and then rewriting. A lot. Every day. Once you’ve got your own style, you should be able to go the next step, which is to emulate (okay, copy) someone else’s style. In fact, a good writer should be able to write in whatever style he or she is called upon to write in.

Here’s the deal. If you try to start a career as a writer and you haven’t mastered the basics, there isn’t much of a chance of you getting a job as a writer. No editor is going to want to deal with submitted work that is fraught with basic writing errors. It’ll take too long to edit.

And if you expect to be a freelance writer, your chances of getting published are slim if you can’t submit an error-free manuscript.

It doesn’t matter what kind of writing you want to do — newspaper journalist, technical writer, advertising copywriter, short story author, novelist. If you can’t write, you’re not going to get work as a writer. It’s as simple as that.

A Story with a Point

And to finish this piece off, I’ll tell you — and that high school class — a true story. Back in 1978, when I started college, English 101 and 102 were freshman year requirements. These two courses took what we supposedly learned in high school to the next level.

I wasn’t very interested in taking English — I wanted to take a creative writing class instead. Fortunately, my college offered a way out. I could write an essay about a topic of interest to me and submit that for evaluation. if the essay was good enough, I wouldn’t have to take either freshman English class.

I wrote the essay. It was about how high school fails to prepare young people for life. I was 17 at the time — please don’t do the math — and already thinking about these things. The essay was a hit. I was exempted from freshman English.

This story has a point. Before I got to college, I had already developed above average writing skills. This served me well throughout high school and college — I aced almost every report and essay test question, mostly because I already knew how to organize and present my thoughts in writing far better than most other students.

These are the kinds of skills every writer needs to develop before beginning a writing career. If you want to be a writer, master the basics now.

Lake Powell Photos win Photo Contest

Posted on by
2

Photographer Mike Reyfman takes first place in “Abstracts” category.

Lake Powell Abstract by Mike ReyfmanI’m extremely pleased to spread the news that one of Flying M Air’s best clients, Mike Reyfman, has won an award in the Pilsner Urquell International Photography Awards. His series of photos of the sandstone canyons uplake from Rainbow Bridge has taken first place in the “Abstracts” category. Here’s one of Mike’s photos, reproduced with his permission. You can see them all here.

I’d like to add two things here.

First, whenever a photographer who flies with me wins an honor or publishes a photo taken from my helicopter, I feel a great deal of pride. Although I didn’t frame the image and snap the photo, I do feel as if I’m part of the photographer’s “equipment.” My small part in any great photo makes me feel good.

Second, Mike offers photo excursions all over world. Although most of his clientele are from Russia (where Mike is originally from), I’m pretty sure he’ll take anyone who can speak either Russian or English. Lake Powell is only one of the destinations he comes to regularly; he’s also taken groups to Iceland, the Pacific Northwest, New Zealand, and lots of other places I wish I could go. Aerial work is only a small part of some of the trips he offers. You can learn more and see Mike’s gallery of photos from his travels on his Web site.

And thanks, Mike, for letting me know about your award! Congratulations!

Abstinence-Only Sex Education Does Not Work

Posted on by

Perhaps the Bristol Palin situation will put a spotlight on this.

One of the things that bugs me the most about the Religious Conservatives in this country is its policy regarding sex education. Basically, they don’t want it taught in schools.

Social conservatives — including, ironically, Sarah Palin — promote an “abstinence-only” sex education program. My understanding of such programs is that they attempt to teach young people to abstain from sex until they are married. There’s no deep discussion of what sex is and how it works. There’s certainly no discussion of “safe sex” or birth control. Young people are simply told not to have sex. Period. End of statement.

I’m pretty sure the idea behind all this has something to do with sin. Evidently, it’s a sin to have sex before you’re married. And since most high school kids aren’t married, they shouldn’t be having sex. Doing so would commit a sin. I’m not quite sure what happens when you commit a sin like that — eternal damnation seems a bit harsh, doesn’t it? — but it’s evidently a bad thing.

Now I could go off on a tangent and bring up the theories of Richard Dawkins, who claims that parents forcing their religious beliefs on their kids is akin to child abuse, but I won’t. Although I do agree with a lot of what Dawkins has to say, I believe that parents have a right to bring a religious (or non-religious, for that matter) belief system into their kids’ lives. (I don’t, however, believe they should force their kids to marry before the age of consent, as at least one religious cult is apparently doing.)

The trouble with this is that kids can be kids. Teenagers have raging hormones. Things happen. One thing leads to another. Not all girls (or guys, for that matter) are thinking about abstinence or sin or mom and dad on a date when opportunity (and something else) arises. It’s hard to stop once you get started. Anyone who has had (and enjoyed) sex can tell you that. (Which makes me wonder if these abstinence-only supporters ever enjoyed sex, but that’s something to debate another day.)

So when the moment of truth arrives and neither party remembers abstinence and holds up a STOP sign, where are the condoms? Obviously, they’re not around. These poor kids were never taught about safe sex and birth control. They were probably even told that birth control is a sin. Neither one of them would be caught dead with a condom in their possession. At that moment of truth, all they know is what their bodies are telling them they need to do. So they do it.

The very lucky ones don’t start a baby and they don’t share a disease. But maybe that just confirms that what they’ve done is okay. So they do it again another time. Or with another partner. And sooner or later, there will be a pregnancy or a disease or both.

Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, brought up in a religious conservative household by a mother who believes in abstinence-only sex education, is the victim of her mother’s policies. I don’t know the girl and I don’t know what she was taught. But I know she made a mistake and I can’t help but wonder whether the mistake was one of ignorance rather than stupidity.

I’m angry about this. I’m angry because the Republican party is simply blowing it off, using this unfortunate situation as proof that Sarah Palin is “just like anyone else,” with the same kind of family challenges that anyone has. This teenage pregnancy is okay to them. After all. Bristol is still going to have the baby. And she’s going to get married. So everything is okay, right?

Did anyone ever stop to consider what Bristol may have wanted to do with her life? Maybe she didn’t want to start bearing children when she was 17 years old. Maybe she wanted to finish high school and go to college. To become a doctor or a lawyer or — dare I say it? — a community organizer. In other words, maybe she wanted to start a career or have a bit of life on her own before getting married and starting a family. Or maybe she didn’t want to have a family at all.

Even if she did want to start a family when she was young, do you think she really wanted to be changing diapers for her own baby when she was only 17 years old?

Now although I’ll admit that I’m pro-Choice — as every woman who isn’t held firmly under a man’s thumb should be — I’m not for a moment suggesting that she abort the baby. While I think that could have been an option very early on, it should not be an option at 5 months into the pregnancy. (And yes, folks, there is a difference.)

What I’m suggesting here is that if Bristol — and the thousands of young women like her all over the country — received proper sex education, including safe sex and birth control information, she would not be in the situation she’s in. And neither would her boyfriend, who will soon find himself in attendance as the groom at a good, old-fashioned, shotgun wedding. (After all, why potentially ruin one life when you can potentially ruin two?)

Bristol’s lucky, in a way. Her parents are well-to-do. They have good jobs — hell, there’s a chance her mother might even be vice president. They have money. Even if Mom’s away on official business, there will be nannies around to help. Bristol might come out of this okay — if the media attention doesn’t permanently traumatize her.

But what I’m hoping for is that Bristol’s predicament opens a few eyes among the members of the Religious Right. Abstinence-only sex education does not work.

And now we have a poster child for it.