Eco-Air Force Takes to the Skies With Volunteer Pilots

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

May 19, 2006

Soaring above the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California, Steve
Parker dipped the wing of his Cessna so his passenger could snap a few
unobstructed pictures of the rugged terrain below.

"Steel towers would transform this landscape," said the rider, Carl Zichella of the Sierra Club, over the crackling intercom of the small airplane (watch video from the aerial desert survey).

Zichella was referring to a controversial proposal by a power company in nearby San Diego (California map) to build a new transmission line through California's largest state park.

An hour later, back on the ground at the French Valley Airport near Murrieta Hot Springs, Parker said the aerial survey of the park showed the importance of getting a bird's-eye view of environmental issues.

"A lot of things you can't see until you're up there," the veteran pilot said.

"But from the air it's easy to see the interconnectedness of the landscape, the flow of water down the hill, how something that affects one part of the land will eventually affect another part."

Parker is one of 140 volunteer pilots who fly for Lighthawk, or what some people have dubbed America's environmental air force.

Pilots donate their planes and time to the organization, which allows interested groups to study environmental situations from the air for free.

Staying Neutral

Pilot Michael Stewart founded the Lander, Wyoming-based Lighthawk in 1979 because of his concern about the environmental impact of rapid growth in the U.S. Southwest at the time.

Today the nonprofit is the largest and oldest volunteer-based environmental aviation organization in North America, flying some 700 missions each year. About half of the missions are flown over Central America and Mexico.

Participating pilots must have at least a thousand hours of flying experience, must maintain medical certificates and insurance coverage, and must stay current with Federal Aviation Administration regulations.

The volunteers fly to help investigate a variety of issues, such as deforestation, threats to watersheds, and energy and pollution problems. Also, urban sprawl is becoming an increasingly common issue (related photos: urban sprawl).

"You name it, we've probably flown for it," said Sama Blackwell, the program manager for Lighthawk, who is based in Boulder, Colorado.

Most of the organizations that use Lighthawk are conservation groups and other environmental activists. But Blackwell stresses that Lighthawk does not take sides when it comes to a particular environmental issue.

"We want to make sure that our partners are interested in solutions," she said.

"We don't want to come into an area and say, Here's what you should do. What we try to do is provide the information so people locally can make the decisions."

Dumping Trash

As staff director for the Sierra Club's California-Nevada-Hawaii office, Zichella plans to use the photographs he took over Anza-Borrego for testimony and presentations and to recommend alternative routes for the controversial power line.

"This kind of [aerial] documentation has helped us save so many of these places," he said. "It's had a powerful effect on public opinion and helped decision-makers better understand what's at stake."

Rick Durden, Lighthawk's executive director, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been a volunteer pilot with the organization for nearly 20 years.

He says aerial surveys can be far more time-efficient than surveys on the ground.

"With an aircraft and some preparation you can do a great deal very quickly," he said.

One of Durden's missions helped expose a Chicago, Illinois-area politician who was violating a recycling contract by dumping trash he was supposed to have recycled on a private farm.

The dump site was screened by trees. Because it was private property, environmentalists couldn't access the area on foot.

"We flew over and videotaped trucks dumping the trash into the ground," Durden said.

Global Coverage

Lighthawk's success has inspired a group of pilots to form a similar organization in South Africa called Bateleurs.

The group, based in Johannesburg, now has more than a hundred volunteer pilots and flies about 30 to 40 missions a year (related photos: Africa from the air).

"At the grassroots level it is often impossible to see what lies on the far side of the hill, either by topographical or access exclusion," co-founder Nora Kreher said.

Bateleurs not only conducts environmental surveys but also relocates animals in peril, such as cheetahs and baby elephants.

Back in the United States, Parker, the Lighthawk pilot, says the destruction of natural resources he witnesses on his missions sometimes shocks him.

"Certainly there are a lot of alarming signs," he said. "If we're going to have anything worth saving, we're going to have to be fairly aggressive about saving as much public land as we can.

"We're running out of time. I think that's obvious."

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