Backcountry pilots can rejoice after an agreement was reached this week allowing general aviation airplanes on national forest lands. For more than a decade, the Recreational Aviation Foundation has been working with the United States Forest Service and policy makers in Washington, D.C., to preserve legal access to backcountry strips and to reopen airstrips that have been closed.
Now the RAF has succeeded in adding language to the USFS Final Planning Directive that recognizes recreational aviation as a “legitimate mode of access, and one of the three legs of the National Forest Transportation System,” a press release from the RAF says.
