Terrain Departures

Departing airports in mountainous areas can mean maximizing your rate of climb into the teens. Know before you go.

Thursday, February 01, 2024 at 08:00 AM ET

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Key Takeaways:

Pilots face significant performance challenges departing high-altitude, mountainous airports, necessitating meticulous pre-flight calculations of climb gradients, true airspeed, and ground speed to meet demanding charted minimums.
Aircraft performance is severely degraded by factors like high density altitude, aircraft weight, engine failures, and icing, often rendering standard departure procedures impossible, even for multi-engine aircraft.
Effective risk management for such challenging conditions involves careful flight planning using performance data, considering strategies like weight reduction or waiting for optimal weather, and understanding regulatory requirements for takeoff minimums and alternates.

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A friend told me about his airline’s final takeoff briefing, the acronym for which is WARTS: Wind and Weather, Aborts and Abnormals, Runway and Route, Terrain and Specials. It’s a useful guide to making sure everything is ready for departure, and I use it regularly, even in the Cessna 150 I sometimes fly. (It’s cheap and fun!)

In the 150, there isn’t too much to say about terrain. I only fly it VFR, and the airport I fly it from is surrounded by farmland. Given some of the terrain I’ve flown over in the past, that seems like a luxury. But it’s probably a good thing in the 150.