Flatlanders

Anybody who has been flying for any length of time (and who is diligent enough to read some pilots' magazines occasionally) knows this: Mountains are killers.

Winds can be very tricky around mountain ranges. When the winds aloft are strong, weird things happen around mountains. There can be updrafts that can throw a sailplane up towards altitudes normally flown by U-2s. There can be pockets of turbulence that will damage an airplane so badly that it can either be destroyed or it will have to be written off.

Navigation is critical in mountain flying. If you fly down the wrong valley, you can wind up flying into a valley were the floor of the valley climbs faster than your airplane can climb. Then you have a very stark choice: You can either try to turn around and do so without either hitting the walls of the canyon or stalling the airplane, or you can continue on and crash. The same option is there for a box canyon, where the only way out is the way you came.

Sometimes, a glancing at an aerial navigational chart will show a way around the highest elevations. The safer route may involve a bit of detour. But it is almost always better to spend a little more time in the air and burn a little more gas than it is to go play with high peaks.

Back in the day, mountain flying, even in the best of airplanes, could kill. One of the most famous cases was BSAA Flight CS59, which smacked into the Andes Mountains and was not found for half a century. In bad weather, the old four-course ranges could give strange indications, the Banning Pass was infamous in this regard. Even in good weather, flying over mountainous terrain at night called for precise navigation, as there would be nothing to see and the mountains were higher than the airplanes flew.

It is a truism that some pilots have huge egos and overinflated opinions of their skills. But those egos will not cushion a sudden meeting of stone and metal. And that may be the real cause of the crash of Blackwater 61.