From October 22-28th the JAARS training staff and orientees camped out at the Avery County Airport, in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. The purpose was to gain as much experience as possible in the areas of terrain flying, canyon turns, ridge crossings, watershed navigation, and landing at short, sloped runways with obstacles, as well as a bit of practice doing aerial drops. The Lord blessed us with beautiful weather and we were able to accomplish all that we needed in a shorter time period then was planned. This was great because we were able to leave early and avoid a snow storm that moved into the mountains the day after we left! I learned a ton, and gained valuable experience! And we got some great pictures and videos!! Enjoy! I will be posting the videos from my Facebook page, so if you want to see more click here to check that out as well!!
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- Can you find the airstrip in this picture??? There is one I promise.
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- God made a beautiful earth!
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- Lake Lure near Chimney Rock.
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- On our way there we spent a couple of hours flying in canyons, and crossing ridges, learning how to safely operate near terrain!
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- Filling up!
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- The view from our base airport for mountain week!
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- I got a birds eye view of Chimney Rock! And the tourists got a great pic of an airplane flying by!
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- Aren’t iPads amazing? While I’m flying they can check my approach angle, direction, and how much I cleared obstacles by!
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- The view for Valhalla for takeoff.
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- Landing in farmer Brown’s hay field. 1400ftX40ft. He is nice enough to let us put our cones in his field and use it as a runway when he isn’t growing hay in it!
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- The view for takeoff from Farmer Brown’s field. Finally a flat runway! Just have to make sure you veer to the right after takeoff to miss the mountain!
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- 900ftX40ft with 11% upslope for landing slowly decreasing towards the top. Trees on the end as obstacles, and because of the slope you can’t see the bottom of the runway from the top!
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- The white cones are the 100ft Touchdown zone that we had land inside, in order to safely stop before the end of the runways!
