Mountain Flying Courses

[trippbuckley]

Does anyone have any feedback (positive or negative) concerning the many mountain flying courses out there?

 

Thanks

[kortopates]

There are many options in the Colorado front range area. In particular, the MAPA Safety Foundation provides Mooney specific training over an intensive 3 days at several places around the country; typically including the Front Range every summer. When held there, they offer both the traditional Pilot Proficiency Program class and a mountain flying course drawing on local mountain flying instructors that know Mooneys. They get some very good mountain instructors for the students that choose the mountain program. If you can travel there and the timing works for you that would be a nice option. If you haven’t yet taken the traditional PPP or gotten good Mooney specific training yet, I’d suggest to do a PPP first.

However, if you go to their website http://www.mapasafety.com you'll see they don't have a PPP scheduled in the Front Range area for 2013 - at least not yet.

If MAPA isn’t an option this year, I’d suggest starting with the Colorado Pilots Association http://coloradopilots.org/mtnfly_class.asp - the MAPA  Mountain PPP follows their syllabus of ground school and their mountain cross-county flight which usually includes landing at Leadville. They currently show June and Aug offerings.

[The-sky-captain]

A great instructor in the Denver area is Cleon Biter and he has a lot of Mooney experience

[trippbuckley]

Thanks for the tips.

[Jeff_S]

A great instructor in the Denver area is Cleon Biter and he has a lot of Mooney experience

 

I flew with Cleon for a half-day in 2011. He was a great instructor and very reasonably priced. Unfortunately we had weather moving in that day so our planned trip to Glenwood Springs and Leadville was shortened considerably, to just Steamboat Springs, but I learned a lot.  One of my key learnings was to get a refresher on airport altitude prior to landing back at Longmont after being in the mountains. For some reason I had 6000' as the airport elevation in my head, when in fact it's 5000'. So I'm 2000' AGL on downwind and announcing my intention to land. He asked me why I was 1000' high, to which I said "whoops". He suggested going around but for some reason I decided just to make do with what I had, so I showed him my prowess at slipping the J an extra thousand feet into the runway and we landed pretty darned okay, if I do say so myself.

 

Not sure if he was impressed or just scared shitless...he didn't say too much after that!