Mike Eynon Web

November 24, 2006 -- Coyote Flats

Coyote Flats is somewhat of a right of passage for California backcountry pilots. Unlike states such as Utah, Idaho, and Alaska, California is relatively sparse when it comes to really cool backcountry dirt strips. All that said, we do have the famous Coyote Flats.

Coyote Flats is located on the eastern side of the High Sierras above the town of Bishop, CA. The strip is about 2000 feet long, and was once used by the US government for high-altitude testing. Located at 9987 feet above sea-level, this is the one of the highest strips in North America. Backcountry pilots from all around consider this one of the more challenging strips to get into and out of simply because of the altitude.

The area around the strip is mostly baron with little vegetation. At 10,000 feet, you are still a couple thousand feet below the tree line, but still high enough to get winded after any prolonged physical exertion. The ground is relatively soft, and the strip appears to have been recently groomed. There are signs of other planes landing and taking off from this strip, which is interesting being that the strip has been listed as off-limits for many years. I have heard the strip mentioned by grizzled old pilots over the last couple years, but few talk about it more than in general terms. Being that that landing the strip is well beyond the performance of most planes, my guess is folks are not all that excited about advertising where it is, and how cool it is to land. Something like your garden-variety Cessna 172 or Piper Archer would be able to land the strip, but would need to be disassembled and trucked out as there would be no way for either of those planes to get off the ground before the barbwire fence at the end of the runway.

I have been drooling over Coyote Flats for about 2 years now. I originally wanted to fly in with my Citabria, but knew it would be a little close, and that there was probably only 1 week in the year when the temperature would be low enough without snow (or melting snow) on the strip. As such, I have been planning for about 1.5 years to land this strip on Thanksgiving weekend. This last weekend was my weekend!

Drew and I set out from Watsonville Airport at 8am on Saturday morning. We would have liked to have left earlier, but oh well. Once in the plane, we did a straight shot for Coyote Flats. Being that I had over-flown the strip a gazillion times, I already had a waypoint in my GPS and was able to make a straight shot from Watsonville. The air was pretty crisp, and Drew and I were seeing temps well below 0 degrees above 10,000 feet. What a perfect start to a day of high-altitude flying!

Once we started crossing the Sierras, I started to get focused. Granted, the landing is the least of the two when looking at landing and taking off from a high-altitude strip, but still, you need to pay special attention to what you are doing. With that, you need to make sure the plane is setup correctly, and that you are focused on what you are doing. Things happen pretty fast, and can leave you little time to recover if something goes wrong.

Drew and I immediately setup for a couple fly-overs. Since there is no windsock at Coyote Flats, I wanted to get a precise idea for where the wind was blowing from, so as to decide which direction to land from, and what my ground speed would be. On this day, there was a bit of a crosswind, from about 20 degrees, and favoring a downhill landing. Again, since we knew our take-off was going to be the most difficult part of our trip, I was pretty happy with this setup. Even at 10,000 feet, I was relatively certain I could land the mighty Skywagon in about 500 to 800 feet… even downhill. Now all we had to do was land.

For those of you who are not pilots, the air at 10,000 feet is much different than at sea-level. Obviously, there is less Oxygen, but … there is also less air. What this means is that your ground speed must be higher to sustain the needed airspeed to fly. When you are flying long distance, this is usually an advantage as your ground speeds are generally higher, and the air-fuel mixture burned by your engine requires less fuel – in short, you fly faster using less gas; but the plane also flies with less power. Unfortunately, high-altitudes are troublesome when landing. The increased ground speed means that it will take you longer to come to a stop, and the lack of air means that your take-offs will require much longer ground rolls before the wings will generate enough lift to leave the Earth.

After our fly-overs, Drew and I figured out that our ground speed was going to be about 10-15mph faster than normal, and that was flying mostly into our crosswind! The problem with this is that you want to land with your head outside the plane watching everything around you, but you can’t – you need to be fully aware of your airspeed from the gauge inside the plane. This is tough to do, you are flying faster, trying to focus more, but now you have more to focus on. If you are only looking outside the plane trying to fly by ground reference, you will come in way to slow and stall the plane on final… which is usually a bad thing ending with the insurance man wanting to know why you were trying to land an airplane on top of a mountain at 10,000 feet… and that is only if you live to talk to the insurance man.

I had landed strips at over 7000 feet before, but this was quite a bit differently, with the increased airspeed, it’s a little different setting up an approach. You need to setup your descent a lot further out. I did not do this as much as I should have, and therefore missed the first couple hundred feet of the smoothest portion of the runway. But, no worries, this is why I have 8.50x6 tires on my plane. I simply had to be conscious of the small tail-wheel. With that, I plopped her on the ground, dumped the flaps, and held the yoke forward in an attempt to unweight the tailwheel. Worked like a charm, and we ere stopped in what appeared only a couple hundred feet of ground roll.

What a rush. Landing backcountry strips is always pretty cool. This one was extra special. Similar to the Dirty Devil, it’s a reasonable assumption that only a small handful of planes a year land and take advantage of the spectacular hiking and views. There are times when all you can do is the thank the good Lord above for the opportunities you have in life. For Drew and I, this was one of those moments.

With spectacular views in all directions, Drew and I opted to set out on a dirt road leading us up to what we figured would be a pretty incredible view of the town of Bishop. It didn’t take to long before we were both reminded of the fact that air is thinner up there! Even with the thin air, this has to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth. After about two hours of hiking, some of which entailed Drew and I crawling up a boulder field to get some good shots of the strip and the plane (to prove we where there!), we headed back to the plane.

Since we had been hiking for about 2 hours, I didn’t really notice the rise in temperature. I figured since I was breathing so hard, my body temp was likely rising. Well, it turned out to be a little of both. By the time we made it back to the plane, it was noon. The temp had risen a full 15 degrees Celsius! Yikes! Now I was a little nervous. We now had a lack of air, lack of oxygen, and an air temperature about 20 degrees Celsius above standard temperature! It was time to see what the mighty Skywagon would do.

One important factor when operating an airplane is controlling the air-fuel mixture. At sea-level, you simply have the mixture set on full, and do not adjust it until you start climbing to higher altitudes. But what if you take off from a high altitude? I knew what the value should be, so I asked Drew to work the mixture once we went to full throttle while I flew the plane down the runway. In reality, with the ultra thin air, the plane was not accelerating down the runway all that quickly! I could have very easily adjusted this myself.

To get the max take-off performance, the best way to take-off is to start the ground roll with 0 flaps. When you reach the rotation speed, reach down to the floor and yank in two notches of flaps. Normally, this is a pretty dramatic event when you are taking off from sea-level! Today… not so much. Rather than the usual 400-500 feet of runway needed to hit rotation speed, today we needed about 1600 feet! When we finally hit 55kts, I reached down to the floor and yanked on the Johnson Bar flaps to pull in 30 degrees of flaps. Much to my surprise… the normal 1300-1500 feet per minute climb was replaced by about a 200-500 foot per minute climb! Wow. Amazing. With that, I leveled the plane off to gain a little speed, and then eased the flaps back out as we gained a little more speed. Amazing. But, with this take-off, Drew and I had survived Coyote Flats.

What a rush.