Flying Somewhere New Can Reinvigorate You
The mountains of Japan are simply stunning.
It is hard to admit that sometimes I get a little bored flying, but I do. For the first few years I was on the C-130, most of my flying was at about 300 feet above the ground out in the open terrain of Arkansas. While the skyline was not particularly magnificent, and the terrain was not exactly rugged, it is an incredible rush to move that fast, that low, in a plane that big.
Coming to Japan has been an incredible experience with all of the places I have gotten to visit and the incredible people who I have gotten to meet from so many different countries. With that being said, the flying in the local area can often be a little less than spectacular.
As you may know, Tokyo is the most densely populated city in the world so it can be challenging to find a piece of land that isn’t covered with people. For that reason we are forced to fly more than three times higher than I was accustomed to before coming here.
You have to get a good steep bank angle in to really have fun, and fly safe, in the mountains.
However, the reason that Tokyo, and most of Japan for that matter, is so densely populated is because about 73% of the country is mountainous and uninhabitable. What that means for flying, is that there is some incredible terrain out there to be explored. The obvious question then is why don’t we spend all of our time flying in those areas? The short answer is weather. Wind, turbulence, and cloud cover all keep us out of those areas a lot of the time. (To read more about the challenges and dangers of mountain flying check out my post on the Advanced Mountain Airlift Tactics School.)
As luck would have it last week, I was scheduled to fly on a pilot’s last flight here in Japan and he wanted to go and rage through the mountains one last time. It even looked like the weather was going to cooperate for us. I had never been to this area before, but in his 6+ years here our pilot had flown it numerous times. It is worth mentioning that if you are not familiar with mountain flying you should really take a course or at least go with someone who is before attempting it.
The aforementioned weather that cut into the route but still didn’t stop us from some amazing fun.
My biggest regret was that I didn’t bring my GoPro because the scenery was simply stunning. The weather did force us to skip a big chunk of the route, but overall it was just a wonderful experience. As you can see from the few pictures I took, the mountains were the most beautiful shade of green and it was just all around beautiful.
While I could go on and on about how stunning it was, and how much fun it always is to rage through the mountains, that is not what I would like to focus on today.
It is not uncommon when you fly for a living to get into a rhythm and fly the same stuff over and over. That may be flying the same routes repeatedly as an airline pilot, or flying the same maneuvers as a flight instructor, but it is easy to get into a rut. As easy as it is to get into that rut I would submit that it is just as easy to get back out of it, assuming you want to.
The ground breaking solution to getting out of this rut is to do something different. Maybe that is getting back into a small general aviation plane and go and get a $100 hamburger for the first time in decades. Maybe you could go and get your float plane rating (I have often heard this referred to as the most fun rating a pilot can get). Or maybe you could take an aerobatics course and pull some G’s and improve your understanding of how an aircraft handles in all different attitudes.
Full yoke deflection means you are about to feel the pull through a turn.
It doesn’t really matter what you do as long as it breaks up the monotony for you. For me it was getting into a new area of Japan that I had never seen before. We raged through some amazing scenery and just had an amazing time. By the end of the flight, which I am a little ashamed to admit was only about three hours, I was pretty exhausted because I hadn’t flown like that in a long time and it takes it out of you physically. In my defense I do stand the whole time, but it was an incredible feeling to be so tired after a flight again.
Flying is the most fun thing you can do in this world in my opinion. It is one of the few ways we can overcome the laws of physics and put ourselves somewhere that the human body cannot go on its own; flying through the air. If you have gotten bored with it, or thing it is just not fun anymore than you need to change it up and get out and do something new. Life’s too short to not enjoy something so incredibly fun.
