230169 Resource 81303 216331 216331 1239209169890 1240438369258 Controlled Mountain Flying Adventure | AOPA Pilot April 2009 Issue

Telluride, Aspen, Leadville & Glenwood Springs Top The List

I opened my mail box yesterday and much to my delight, the cover story for April 2009 AOPA Pilot is Mountain Flying Adventure - Backcountry Adventure and to Ten most Challenging Airports.&nbsp; <br /><br />I thought this was a great piece.&nbsp; The second piece was the survey results from asking AOPA members about the most challenging mountain airports.&nbsp; The top four were here in Colorado - Telluride, Aspen, Leadville, and Glenwood Springs.<br /><br />I thought summary of Telluride, Leadville,&nbsp; and Glenwood Springs was on the money.&nbsp; For Telluride the author didn't mention the extreme runway gradient from end to center.... oh yea, forgot to tell you about that.&nbsp; I think that is one additional factor that makes Telluride as challenging as it is.&nbsp; Telluride runway is being redone, we'll see if the gradient is the same when it's finished.<br /><br />I think Aspen was made out to be slightly more complicated than it really is.&nbsp; Outbound traffic (especially piston aircraft in the summer) will not be able to stay right until above the inbound traffic due to the high density altitude.&nbsp; As a result you'll normally follow the Roaring Fork river out of the Valley and watch very closely for in bound aircraft as you cross the extended center line.<br /><br />Throughout the summer I offer instruction for pilots that want to experience mountain flying.&nbsp; I combine several hours of ground instruction with a tour of Colorado's mountain airports and mountain passes.&nbsp; Generally, the tour will visit a variety of airports that each present different challenges.&nbsp; One reason I thought this AOPA article was so neat, is because as part of the training we usually visit each of these four airports.<br /><br />If you would like to be introduced to mountain flying and visit some of the most challenging airports give us a call.<br /> 10 application/xml false aopa ase aspen glenwood springs gws leadville lxv mountain flying adventure telluride tex Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.9) Gecko/2009040820 Firefox/3.0.9 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 itechnologydesign 64.91.4.74 false true false false true 81303 blog blogsite/MountainCFI/web