Tag Archives: landing zones

Off-Airport Landing Zones

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A helicopter is almost an all-terrain vehicle.

As a helicopter pilot with a reasonable amount of experience, I’ve been in many situations that required me to land off-airport. And although I prefer landing on pavement rather than on non-paved areas, sometimes I can’t find a stretch of pavement near where I have to land. That means landing on grass, dirt, rocks — anything nature presents to me that’s relatively level and can support a helicopter.

As a new pilot, I was uncomfortable with off-airport landing zones (LZs) that either weren’t well established — by being one of the approved LZs used by my flight school — or unfamiliar. But over time, as I became accustomed to finding my own off-airport LZs and landing there, I also became more comfortable landing off airport.

This is what experience is all about.

Yesterday’s LZ

During the winter months, I operate an R44 in Arizona. I have a few regular clients who call me out to do survey or photo jobs out in the desert. They don’t always meet me at an airport or anywhere near any kind of pavement at all. It’s up to me, as pilot in command, to identify and land on a suitable spot.

Like yesterday’s spot:

Desert Landing Zone

I posted an image like this to Twitter yesterday with the comment:

I love landing zones like this.

I got a rather funny response from @Instructor[redacted], someone I didn’t know, who said:

That’s a lot of loose rocks. How does the aircraft escape damage in that environment?

I don’t mean to poke fun at [redacted] — a guy that uses a headshot of himself wearing an aviation headset with boom mic as his profile picture, seeming to indicate that he’s a pilot — but come on now. Was he kidding?

And that was my response:

You’re kidding, right?

I don’t think he was. I can’t find his tweet in my @Mentions stream this morning; it was saved in my Twitter client on my cellphone, though. I assume it was deleted. Perhaps he realized belatedly how silly his question was. That’s why I won’t use his name here. I don’t want to embarrass him.

But I do want to clear up a few misconceptions about landing zones, for other new pilots and instructors who don’t yet have much off-airport landing zone experience.

Rocks Don’t Fly

I’ll admit it: my first response to @Instructor[redacted] was rather snarky, something like:

Rocks generally remain on the ground and don’t damage aircraft.

Maybe my Twitter client has a snarkiness filter that prevented the tweet from being sent. More likely, it was because I was near that LZ and my 3G connection sucked. In any case, as far as I can tell, my snarky response never went to Twitter.

Which is a good thing. Snarky doesn’t teach. It embarrasses and belittles. If it had been delivered, I would have felt compelled to apologize.

But the point is this: rocks don’t fly. They remain on the ground and other than possibly scratching up your skids or hooking a skid to create a dynamic rollover hazard on departure, they’re pretty much harmless.

The LZ in this photo has nice small rocks. While there are some tiny ones — the kind that get caught in the tread of your shoes and are tracked inside the aircraft, forcing you to use the ShopVac back in the hangar to remove them — most are fist sized or smaller. None of these rocks are small or light enough to become airborne from downwash — at least not the downwash caused by a landing/hovering/departing R44. I can’t vouch for what a Huey might do to them, but I’m pretty sure that although movement is possible, flight is not.

What to Look for in an Off-Airport Landing Zone

When I tweeted that I loved landing zones like this, I wasn’t kidding. This landing zone has all the components I need to make a safe landing:

  • Level terrain. While almost no off airport terrain is completely level, this one comes pretty darn close. So I don’t have to deal with the risks and concerns of a slope landing — which I absolutely hate doing.
  • Smooth ground. Instructor[redacted] probably didn’t think the LZ was very smooth ground at all. But in the grand scheme of things, it is. I have seen (and landed on) ground pitted with holes and mounds of rock and scrub. This piece of land looks almost as if it had been graded smooth.
  • Little dust. Rocks may not be a flight hazard, but dust is. With a ton of light dust, brownout conditions can occur on landing. I blogged about that here. With any amount of dust, the hazard is to the aircraft’s rotor blades. Dust is extremely corrosive and simply takes the paint off the blades. The more dusty landings, the less paint on the blades. Eventually, the blades need to be repainted. Mine have been repainted twice in 1350 hours and might get painted this week again. (It’s in for its annual now and I’ll let the mechanic decide; I think it can go another 6 months.) I should point out that simply landing in a mildly dusty area is not going to “damage” the aircraft to the point that it’s not flyable. (Actually, there’s a lot to say about dust and the potential for aircraft damage; it’ll make a good topic for a future post.) This LZ was not dusty at all, partially because it had rained a few days before and partially because the area was not trafficked.
  • Good size. Although the area is surrounded by low bushes — mostly creosote — there’s enough clear area for my skids and tail rotor, as well as space on either side for pilot/passenger access.
  • No obstacles. Sure, on the way in I did have to thread my way between a few tall saguaro cacti and a decent-sized palo verde tree. But there were enough options on my approach and departure paths to make a safe go-around if I needed to abort the landing. Departure would require more altitude than on a runway/taxiway, but not enough to qualify as a max performance takeoff over obstacles. Indeed, I was able to make my takeoff run at about 10-15 feet AGL, pretty darn close to the suggested profile of the Height-Velocity diagram for my aircraft.
  • Photographic. Okay, so that’s not required for a good landing zone, but it is something that turns a good LZ into one I love. Why? So that when I share photos like the one above to help educate people about what helicopters can do, I can also show off how pretty the desert is. (And yes, how pretty my helicopter looks parked in it.)

So yes, I love this landing zone. Any helicopter pilot who has landed in worse places would.

In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that there’s nothing really wrong with this landing zone. It’s about as perfect as an unpaved off-airport landing zone could be. Hell, I’ve had on-airport landing zones that were less suitable than this.

Flight Instruction Failures?

And that brings me back to Instructor[redacted] with his headsetted face smiling out at Twitter users. Here’s a guy who appears to be a flight instructor, teaching other pilots how to fly. Yet he asked a very silly question that demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge and experience about landing zones.

And that bugs me.

People doing flight instruction should have better knowledge about what a helicopter can and can’t do. They should be able to identify what makes a suitable off-airport LZ.

I can only assume that this CFI was not properly trained. Perhaps his CFI lacked the same knowledge and understanding about off-airport LZs. Perhaps every CFI (and pilot) coming out of that flight school lacks this knowledge.

Does that mean these pilots won’t learn how to find and identify a suitable LZ until they get a job that requires them to do off-airport landings? If so, the flight school is doing a serious disservice to its students and their future employers. After all, when a pilot has the 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command flight time that most employers want, shouldn’t they already have the basic skills and experiences the employer should expect them to have? Isn’t landing off-airport one of those skills?

Maybe it’s because my flight school was based in Arizona and there are so many places to land out in the desert, but we were taught right from the start about off-airport landings. In fact, I can’t recall ever thinking that it was unusual to land somewhere other than at an airport or helipad.

After all, we’re talking about a helicopter here.

(I feel a major rant coming on, but I’ll stop right here, take a deep breath, and finish up instead.)

I hope Instructor[redacted] reads this. I hope that he understands that I’m not trying to poke fun at him or insult him. (After all, I did redact his name so he can remain anonymous.) I hope he learns from what I’ve written here.

But more important than that, I hope he talks to the Chief Flight Instructor at his school about their failure to properly educate him about off-airport LZs. I hope he helps them add some material to their curriculum to better educate their other students, pilots, and CFIs.

It’s a flight school’s job to churn out pilots — not guys and gals with pieces of paper that say they’re legal to fly. I sure do wish more flight schools would take that job seriously.

One Gig, One Dozen Off-Airport Landing Zones

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Testing my skills out in the desert.

For the sake of my clients’ privacy, I won’t go into too many details about where I flew or why I flew there. But I will say this: it was the most challenging day of flying I had in a long time.

LZ1
LZ2
LZ 3
LZ 4
LZ 5
LZ 6
LZ 8

No, I wasn’t chasing desert racers or boats on Lake Havasu. And I wasn’t flying around a bunch of photographers who don’t speak much English. I was flying miners around their claims in the desert mountains.

Their claims spanned a mountainous area at least 80 square miles in size. My job was to show them the sites from the air and, if they wanted to land and there was a suitable landing zone, land so they could check things out on the ground. Of course, all this was going on 100+ nautical miles from my Wickenburg base at about 500 to 1500 feet elevation on an 85°F day. And since I had three passenger seats, each flight had three passengers.

Fortunately, there were no fatties. (Well, maybe one.)

I started collecting photos of the landing zones but gave up after the seventh one. I tried to send each photo to TwitPic as I took them, but I didn’t have cell phone service for most of the day. In fact, my BlackBerry’s battery nearly drained just searching for a signal all day. The doors are open on the helicopter in most of the photos because it was so damn sunny and hot. I left the doors wide open each time we stopped just to keep air flowing through the helicopter. Otherwise, we would have been baked.

I wish I’d brought a better camera with me. These photos are all from my BlackBerry. The one with the cactus flower is supposed to be artistic. I can pull off that kind of shot much better with my Nikon and a wide angle lens.

The landing zones ranged from smooth, almost level clearings to old dirt mining roads. Some spots were wide open; others were relatively tight. Some spots were definitely slopes. I hate slope landings. I mean I really hate slope landings. The fact that I did about 10 of them yesterday says a lot about what I’m willing to do for money. No, none of the slopes were too dangerous. I just prefer more level ground. And, near the end of the day when I was really tired and probably a bit dehydrated, I was having a lot of trouble making those damn slope landings. At one place we stopped, I tried four different spots before I found one I liked.

Some of the landing zones were quite close to the mine features my clients wanted to explore. Others weren’t. At two sites, my clients had quite a climb to get where they wanted. They didn’t seem to mind — which was nice of them. Some folks expect fancy one-skid landings on mountain sides — which they won’t get from me. These folks were my kind of people — “safety first,” the leader told me at the start of the day.

The weather was as close to perfect as you can get — if you don’t mind mid-March desert heat. Perfectly clear blue skies, with just enough of a breeze to keep us cool without making for sloppy low-speed flying.

My helicopter performed like a champ — despite the heat. The density altitude was about 4,000 feet for most of the day. I started the day with about 3/4 tanks of fuel, fully expecting to need at least one refueling stop. But since we shut down at nearly every landing zone, I didn’t burn much fuel.

The first round of flights started at 9 AM and went until about 2 PM. We took an hour for lunch. I was glad they brought enough for me, since we ate it right out in the desert where they’d left their trucks. (No restaurant for miles.) Then I made another round of flights, finishing up at about 5:15 PM.

Of course, I didn’t have enough fuel to get home and, when I reached the nearest airport, it was closed. So I had to call out for the fuel guy and pay an extra $25 to get my main tank topped off.

I got back to Wickenburg about 20 minutes after sunset. It was dark when I left my hangar and made my way home.

I slept very well.

Real Life Flying: Researching Client Requests

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Doing your homework is part of flying safely — and legally.

This afternoon, I got a call from a potential client. He’s the manager of a country club that does catering for weddings and other big events. He wanted to know if it were possible for me to land my helicopter on the country club property after dark, pick up a couple — say a new bride and groom — and fly them around Phoenix for about 45 minutes before dropping them off at a hotel with a helipad or an airport where a limousine would be waiting. He also wanted to know whether it was okay for them to have some wine while aboard the aircraft.

Off the top of my head, I said, yes, we should be able to do that. But then I listed the things I’d have to check out before giving a definitive answer.

I thought this might make a good topic for a blog post for commercial helicopter pilots interested in real life helicopter missions. You see, commercial helicopter flying is not always as easy as picking up two passengers at an airport, flying them around for a while, and returning them to the starting point. So, as an example, I’ll discuss the things that come into play for this particular kind flight.

Landing Zone

Mansion LZ

Off-airport landings are something I’m accustomed to. Photo by Jon Davison.

First and foremost is the safety of the landing zone. How big is it? Is it level? Are there obstacles such as trees, buildings, or wires? What are my approach and departure paths like? Can it be controlled to prevent onlookers from coming too close or walking behind the aircraft? How about neighbors? Are there homes in the area? Is it close to another airport where air traffic control might be an issue? Since landing and departing will be at night, can the landing zone be properly lit so I can find it and land safely on it?

I made an appointment to meet with the client to see the landing zones he had in mind. Hopefully, one will work. I also checked the location of the country club using the satellite view of Google Maps. Although its golf course is indeed surrounded by homes, there’s also a nearby freeway and shopping center that’s likely to be empty at night. I could see some possible approach and departure paths, but could not judge obstacles, such as light posts or wires.

As for a destination hotel — if one is found, I’ll have to go through the entire process there, too. It’s more likely, however, that I’ll just land them at Deer Valley Airport, which is my home base.

Local Ordinances

Of course, no off-airport landing would be possible without a lot of hoop-jumping if there were a local ordinance that prohibited off-airport landings. Scottsdale has such an ordinance, enacted, primarily, to prevent local helicopter pilots from doing asinine things like landing in residential subdivisions. (I guess it was done one too many times.) Wickenburg’s ordinance isn’t quite as restrictive; it states that landing is possible with the permission of the Police Chief. When I asked the Police Chief about this some years ago, he had no idea what I was talking about.

The client said that the mayor the country club’s city is a member, so if there was an issue, he might be able to get permission on an as-needed basis. But when I hung up the phone with him, I started making other calls. First, the local police, to see if they knew of any ordinance. They directed me to the city’s compliance office. They told me they had no ordinances, but that I should check with the FAA. I already know that the FAA is fine with landing a helicopter on private property, as long as it is done safely and in accordance with any related FARs.

So this would not be an issue for this particular location. No hoop-jumping necessary.

Passenger Loading

Night Flight Over Phoenix

The lights of Phoenix are beautiful at night. Photo by Jon Davison.

The client wants to use the helicopter as part of the event’s entertainment. At the predetermined time, the guests would be guided to “the patio” (wherever that is) where they could watch the helicopter come in for a landing. The bride and groom would climb aboard and the helicopter would take off, perhaps doing a quick circle of the area before departing.

This sounds great and its sure to make a memorable wedding party. But passenger loading could be an issue here.

Is the client willing to wait for the helicopter to cool down and shut down before the passengers are loaded? And then wait again while the helicopter starts up, warms up, and spins up before departure? If the wait is okay, the pilot (me) can do the passenger briefing and loading. While this might not make for good entertainment, it is the safest option.

The other option is “hot loading,” where the passengers board the helicopter while the engine is running and blades are spinning. Many people will simply not do hot loading, but I will — provided there’s a qualified ground crew to escort all passengers to their seats and ensure they’re buckled in. That means operating with someone on the ground — likely my husband — who would arrive before me and handle briefing and loading duties.

While you might think I prefer the first option, I actually prefer the second. It minimizes the amount of time I’m on the ground and ensures a qualified person is there to handle my next concern: crowd control.

Crowd Control

I firmly believe that a spinning helicopter is more dangerous on the ground than in the air. My tail rotor is literally invisible when it’s spinning — even at idle speed — and if someone walked into it, they’d be dead. That’s why I always set down in a landing zone with my tail pointed away from where people are most likely to be. Any helicopter pilot who doesn’t do this is looking for trouble.

Unfortunately, when landing in an uncontrolled area, there’s nothing to stop people from running up behind the helicopter. There’s a restaurant in Peoria, AZ that I used to land at for lunch quite often. It’s in a relatively remote area with lots of open desert around it. I always landed just outside the parking area with my tail rotor facing away from the building. The last time I landed there, however, a bunch of kids on off-road motorcycles saw me come in and began swarming around the helicopter as I was shutting down. Good thing my husband was with me to keep them clear. I haven’t gone back since.

When I inspect the landing zone, I’ll try to determine how well it can be controlled. And then I’ll put a plan in place to control it for my arrival. Having a reliable and experienced ground crew person will certainly help when the time comes for me to operate there.

Alcoholic Beverages

The final request that requires research is the glass of wine during the tour. FAR 135.121(a) states:

No person may drink any alcoholic beverage aboard an aircraft unless the certificate holder operating the aircraft has served that beverage.

This means they can’t bring their own alcohol aboard — it’s also why you can’t legally bring your own alcohol aboard an airliner!

If you’re wondering who the “certificate holder” is, well, so am I. It’s either me personally — since I have a single pilot Part 135 certificate and I’m the pilot — or it’s my company, Flying M Air. If it’s me, serving wine while I’m at the controls of a helicopter will be nearly impossible. If it’s my company, I can theoretically have an employee or agent of my company serve the alcohol for me, preferably right before we take off.

If there are any pilots out there who have real knowledge about this, please do use the Comments link or form to share what you know with me. Otherwise, I’ll just ask my FAA Primary Operations Inspector (POI). He’ll either tell me or help me figure it out for myself based on what I know.

One thing I do know: if I can’t legally serve alcohol on the flight, I won’t. No client request is more important than my certificate.

FAR 135.121(b) and (c) offer two other rules regarding alcohol:

(b) No certificate holder may serve any alcoholic beverage to any person aboard its aircraft if that person appears to be intoxicated.
(c) No certificate holder may allow any person to bard any of its aircraft if that person appears to be intoxicated.

That means I can’t serve them if they’re drunk and I can’t even allow them to board the aircraft if they’re drunk. This is something I need to make sure the client knows. It would be a shame if I brought my shiny red helicopter in for a landing at the big party and the bride or groom was too shitfaced from champagne to fly. (It would be a bigger shame if one of them puked on my leather seats.)

The Other Usual Stuff

Every flight has the usual collection of pilot tasks before it can be completed. I’m talking about things like calculating weight and balance, getting weather and NOTAM information, creating a flight plan, preflighting the aircraft. I might want to do a daytime landing at the landing zone in advance, just to make sure I was familiar with it. There’s lots of the usual responsibilities, none of which can be taken lightly for any flight.

This Is What It’s All About

This should give most folks an idea of what goes into planning what seems like a simple mission. Any pilot faced with a client request like this who doesn’t look into these things — at a minimum — is simply not doing his job.

I’ll know by Saturday, when I review the landing zone, whether we’ll be able to work for this client. I hope so. It would be great to have some regular gigs like this throughout the year.

The T3 Helistop at PHX

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I show a fellow pilot my favorite LZ at Sky Harbor.

It’s a little-known fact that there’s a helistop atop the Terminal 3 parking structure at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. This is where I pick up passengers for Flying M Air‘s multi-day excursions. It’s extremely convenient, not only for my passengers, but for me.

PHX Helistop
This diagram of the Terminal 3 Helistop refers to the old tower, but it no longer exists. This is part of the Sharp Echo letter of agreement for helicopter pilots operating at Sky Harbor.

I’ve been landing at the helistop since it reopened in 2007. It’s been there for a long time but was closed while they built the new FAA tower beside it. When the new tower opened and they took down the old one, they opened the helistop back up.

I blogged about landing there at night. I also put a video of a daytime landing there on this site and Viddler.

When I say few people know about the helistop, I’m not kidding. The last passengers I picked up there said they’d asked at least six people at Sky Harbor how to get to it and every one of them had told them it didn’t exist. Then they followed my instructions to go to the top of the Terminal 3 parking structure and there it was. Just as I’d told them.

I don’t think too may pilots know about it either — and that’s okay with me. There’s only room for one helicopter up there and if someone’s already there when I need to use it, I’m out of luck until it leaves. It’s not a parking spot — it’s a landing spot. That means that although I can land there, I can’t leave the helicopter there for any extended length of time. I also can’t just walk away. That’s why it’s up to my passengers to find it without my help. I simply can’t leave the helicopter to find them.

My friend, Don, who also flies an R44 Raven II, often needs to pick up his wife and other family members at Sky Harbor. When I mentioned the helistop to him, he wanted to know more. So I explained the intricacies of flying into Phoenix Class Bravo airspace in a helicopter, which is much easier than you might think. I also told him how I make my approach to and departure from the helistop. The conversation ended with me promising to fly with him for a landing there.

Don't Helicopter at PHX
Are we a bunch of tourists or what? Mike jumped out to take this shot of us when we landed on the helistop. Don’s flying; I’m in the front passenger seat.

We made the flight yesterday afternoon. My husband, Mike, came along for the ride, too. I recommended to Don that he not do the trip with a heavy load. The landing is a confined space pinnacle — yes, there are such things — so it needs to be approached with care. As shown in the diagram above, there’s only one way in and out. A heavy load on a hot day — or with a tailwind — could make for a dangerous situation.

Anyway, the flight was uneventful. The airspace was pretty quiet. Just one Southwest Airlines 737 landing as we came in; Don slipped in behind him. He came into the pad a bit lower than I would have, but the landing was smooth. Mike hopped out to take this photo. Then he climbed back in, Don called the tower again, and we took off right behind the next landing 737.

I just hope that Don’s helicopter isn’t sitting on that helistop the next time I need to land there.

Landing Zones: Howard Mesa

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Not my regular landing zone, but it worked.

A while back, I started a series of posts showcasing some unusual landing zones. I knew I had a picture of this one, but couldn’t seem to find it. Today, while labeling old backup CDs, I found it.

Howard Mesa LZN630ML at Howard Mesa, November 2008

This is my helicopter at our Howard Mesa property. You can see our camping shed in the background. I normally don’t land here — instead, I have a regular landing pad that’s covered with gravel. But because we didn’t get rid of the tumbleweed on the pad during the season, it had grown to be several feet tall. Landing on it with a hot engine would probably have caused a fire. We we landed nearby where the tumbleweed was a lot shorter. When Mike got out, he cleared away any dead tumbleweed from the back of the aircraft where the engine could heat it up. Since then, we’ve manually burned a lot of it away, hoping to kill the seeds and curb future growth.

I land here several times a year. It’s a good LZ, protected by intruders — including open range cattle — by a barbed wire fence.