Denverites on this board always like to scare us up with the crash stories, but 90% of the time it's the same thing, over and over again: suicide. Flew into a narrow canyon under cloud cover, in howling winds, made a wrong turn, *splat*. Whyyyyyyy!
The NTSB record nor the searches I've been on back that statement up.
(Far, far less in recent years, thankfully -- but that's probably because far fewer pilots are flying in general and we see less and less out of state pilots showing up in non-high-performance light aircraft these days, due to the waning pilot population, the economy, and generally high prices for long cross-countries.)
Citation needed, as they say on Wikipedia. If you've got data that shows a majority of mountain crashes here are suicides, I'd love to see it.
Here's a nice sunny day in the Colorado mountains mixed with a couple of bad decisions:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=316_1249535759
The video will take you all the way to the stall/spin and crash and death of both people on board.
Aircraft and what was left of the people wasn't found for years. Video was on old-fashioned videotape that was spliced together to see if it'd play. It did.
There's nothing truly difficult about Mountain Flying, it's about reading/knowing the weather, and knowing the performance of your aircraft right up against the maximum performance lines on the charts and graphs in the POH.
Fly around all day at 65% power at sea-level even for takeoff, and it's a weak but interesting simulation.
As other's have said, a good mountain instructor can show you the ropes, check to make sure you're not making any egregious mental mistakes from habits developed at sea-level (lean for takeoff, for example... never full rich... just as one small example) and then you'll know you're thinking about the right things.
If you're lucky, and there's a little bit of wind on your training flight day, and you'll get to see the up/downdrafts visualize the wind flowing over the ridge lines and where the lift will be and where the sink will be, etc... and see just how fast they can overpower a light aircraft.
You also learn and have a bit of drill by the instructor in "always leave yourself an out"... when climb performance is marginal, you always need lower terrain to turn towards. If you're aimed at the high terrain, that's a 180... if you point at an oblique angle (the 45 degree ridge-crossing "rule") you have less turn to go away from the high rocks.
I don't know if I'd call this "lucky" or just say "whoa" but a really lucky pilot would have just enough wind and bumps to have to actually *execute* their "out" plan at at least one ridge line and go back into a valley and do more climbing.
Groundspeeds are faster. You get a chance with someone else aboard to see what a 20% or more increase in landing groundspeed looks like. Your eyes will tell your brain "too fast!" but your airspeed indicator won't lie.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Many pilots just don't have a lot of experience operating their aircraft at the edges of their performance envelope. Every time they've pushed the throttle up, they've been able to climb.
Until you've seen the throttle full forward, and you can't go up anymore, and there's terrain out climbing you ahead, you kinda just think it's all safe and happy. Sadly, some people "scare" themselves to death. Other's just scare themselves, and live to fly another day, and learn to read the POH and calculate Density Altitude.
Is everything you *should* need to know about mountain flying covered in a Private Pilot's license? Perhaps... other than maybe learning about local weather phenomena and how to read the winds.
How many Private Pilots remember katabatic and adiabatic winds from your Private Pilot Meteorology study, for example? They're a very real phenomenon at mountain airports, and sometimes very strong! Other examples abound.
People who spend a lot of time in the mountains on the ground probably are aware of those very acutely... someone coming from the flat-land read that part of their meteorology book 10 years ago, and promptly forgot it.
I've searched for enough missing airplanes, and while we SAR folks always appreciate a little government-funded flight time, we really would prefer not to go looking in the first place.
Here's this year's crash... no suicide here. Father and daughter. They survived.
Here's some inside-baseball on this one. There was no reason to risk ground assets in the rugged backcountry overnight after dark on this search, right up until the guy in the right-seat of the CAP aircraft's photo of the area was analyzed -- and SAR experts realized the fire was a CAMP fire and not a fire caused as a result of the crash.
It would have been a very long, cold, night and part of the next day.. but at least they had a fire going.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_15481874
They were pulled out just before dawn instead of hours and hours later.
"There have been seven aircraft crashes, with 11 fatalities, in the park since 1948. The last fatal crash was in 2000 near Comanche Peak, with two deaths, Patterson said." That's JUST Rocky Mountain National Park.
:wink2:...