As with most things aviation, I am a huge fan of this new show on the Discovery Channel, “Flying Alaska Wild“. The show is on Fridays and follows a family who runs a regional (puddle jumper) airline throughout Alaska. The challenges of running any airline are significant, but in Alaska weather and logistics present several special nightmares. The episode featured in this clip has a pilot flying VFR with passengers and trying at all costs to avoid fog and terrain.

This isn’t the only show about Alaskan bush pilots. The NatGeo channel did what I think was a miniseries called “Alaska Wingmen” which specifically covered the challenges of Alaska bush pilots. A little research tells me that we might expect a few more episodes of Alaska Wingmen from NatGeo.

As it turns out, if you were interested in the outdoors and owning your own airstrip and hangar, Alaska is a pretty good place to do it. While chin deep in all of these great flying shows, I also spent quite a bit of time checking out far-flung cabins in the woods with corresponding airstrips as part of some mega-fantasy about living off the grid and getting groceries with a Piper Supercub. If you are interested in owning your own airport, or living at an airpark, Aviation Acres is a pretty place to start drooling over that prospect. After searching through pages and pages of aircraft for sale, I finally discovered that some of the great low-priced, time builder planes are based in Alaska.

The Most Important Hour With all of the weather flying that they do, I took an interest in the book “The Next Hour: The Most Important Hour in Your Logbook”. It has some fantastic insights about avoiding the temptation of continuing into instrument weather when flying VFR, it also deals with managing the decision making progress to avoid the situation of compounding bad decisions.