Here was Palmer, 34, his handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw, moving through his preflight checklist, which included ditching his flip-flops in favor of bare feet, both of which were hovering over the rudder pedals. He jiggled the center control stick, rising up from the floor between his legs, which he used to tame the Freedom Fox’s direction and pitch. He said “Clear” and pushed the starter button, and the propeller coughed and revved, eventually producing a throaty thrum. The plane’s wings and fuselage were the color of Old Glory; several dozen stars spanned the cockpit’s exterior. An observer would be forgiven for mistaking Palmer’s craft for an Air National Guard stunt plane.
Palmer tweaked the throttle and steered toward the runway. He spoke into his headset: “Stead traffic, Freedom Fox, taking runway two-six at alpha two. It’ll be a westbound departure.”
I sat to Palmer’s right, a motion-sickness bracelet on my left wrist, anti-nausea gum in my mouth, and a gallon-size ziplock at my feet. The copilot’s control stick started bobbing around between my legs in sync with Palmer’s. The Freedom Fox, an immaculately maintained, high-wing, single-engine tail-wheel plane with burly 29-inch bush tires, monster shocks, extended wings, and a 140-horsepower fuel-injected turbocharged engine, climbed from Reno-Stead Regional Airport at 1,500 feet a minute. The stamped alkaline flats of the Great Basin gave way to the dense pine forests of California’s Lost Sierra, a huge swath of mountainous backcountry about an hour north of Reno. On the horizon, the jagged crest of the Sierra Buttes came into view. Palmer, who was piping a Shakey Graves tune through the headsets, exuded competence, bonhomie, and (in the confines, I couldn’t help but notice) a pleasant, soapy smell.
He had agreed to take me along as he executed a series of “short takeoffs and landings”—STOL, for short—which epitomize bush flying, whether the assignment is depositing researchers onto a remote airstrip in Alaska’s Brooks Range, competing in STOL competitions, or landing “off-airport”—on ungroomed terrain, nowhere near a runway—as we were about to do next to California’s Stampede Reservoir.
In one 2018 video, Palmer and two other young pilots fly to a northern Nevada mountaintop and set up base camp. One pilot paraglides off the summit. In a voiceover keyed to uplifting synths and soaring drone shots, Palmer says, “More often than not, we work away all the golden years of our lives, years we’ll never get back, all in an attempt to enjoy the remaining few.”
“I say it doesn’t have to be that way,” he continues. “What I’m saying is to stop waiting, stop dreaming, and start living. Life is too short to eat dessert last.”
“You know the drill,” he concludes. “Like this video if you do, subscribe if you haven’t, [and] come be my wingman.” Then he whispers “Peace,” flashes the V, and slaps his hand over the lens.
The result? Followers. Half a million of them. Palmer grosses about $150,000 a year from various income streams, including YouTube.
Palmer’s reach transcends his channel. Delve into chat forums—conversation hubs with names like BackcountryPilot.org, SuperCub.org, and, on Facebook, Big Tire Pilots – STOL Pilots – Backcountry Pilots – Mountain Pilots—and you’ll inevitably encounter mentions of Palmer and occasional references to “the Trent Palmer Effect,” which refers to his ability to bring new participants into the recreational bush-flying game, whose presence gooses both demand for planes and their prices.
One of Palmer’s closest friends refers to him as the “Convincer in Chief.” Partly because of Palmer’s charms, the plane he purchased for $39,000 in 2015 is now worth five times that, and people hoping to buy one like it face more than a three-year backlog for a factory-built plane and two years for a DIY kit. “I’m basically flying a plane I can’t afford,” Palmer told me.
We returned to the Freedom Fox, which when empty weighs a bit more than a golf cart. Palmer throttled up and lifted off within 150 feet or so, and soon we were circumnavigating the Sierra Buttes, streaming east across Plumas County, and finally swinging south, following the Highway 395 corridor. (...)
What happens to the complexion of the lower 48’s commons when this new breed of bush pilot can legally land their planes deep in the backcountry? (I would learn later that flyboys were landing just downrange from my own home, along the Tahoe Rim Trail.) Most of them profess an understanding of the basics: stay away from designated wilderness, national parks, national seashores, wilderness study areas, national wildlife refuges, tribal land, and Area 51, which are all strictly off-limits… unless they aren’t.
I asked Palmer about the legality of landing on the shores of Stampede. He told me that he’d heard from his friend and bush-flying mentor, Kevin Quinn, that doing so was legit. But Palmer didn’t want to contact the relevant land managers to fact-check Quinn’s claims, for fear of poking the bear.
Don’t poke the bear” is a common refrain on backcountry-flying message boards, the posters referring either to the big land-management agencies—the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—or the Federal Aviation Administration, for which the piloting community seems to harbor a reflexive antipathy. “Asking what a pilot thinks about the FAA is like asking a fire hydrant what it thinks about dogs,” is an old saying. Another goes, “We are from the FAA and we are here to help—and everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” (...)
South of the 49th parallel, big-tired bush planes with a wheel at the tail rather than the nose—taildraggers—are suddenly all the rage among aviation enthusiasts in the noncommercial, nonmilitary wing of American flying known as general aviation, or GA for short. Workaday pilots have acquired a wild hair. In a throwback trend reminiscent of the telemark-skiing revival of the late 20th century, they’ve been ditching their nose-wheel-equipped airplanes—the forgiving design preferred for smooth landings on asphalt—in favor of retrograde tailwheel bush planes flown by generations of Alaskans.
Taildraggers are trickier to handle, can be as pricey as a Ferrari (anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 for a used Cessna or Piper Super Cub or a new Carbon Cub), and, given the inexperienced tailwheel pilot’s predilection for throwing the craft into a violent loop when taking off and landing, costlier to insure. And yet, within the past 20 years, but especially in the past ten, with a post-pandemic surge of all things plein air, the new breed of lower 48 bush pilots have been enthusiastically STOLing their planes onto and off of backcountry locales that had never before seen the likes of bush wheels, floats, or skis.
Taildraggers are trickier to handle, can be as pricey as a Ferrari (anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 for a used Cessna or Piper Super Cub or a new Carbon Cub), and, given the inexperienced tailwheel pilot’s predilection for throwing the craft into a violent loop when taking off and landing, costlier to insure. And yet, within the past 20 years, but especially in the past ten, with a post-pandemic surge of all things plein air, the new breed of lower 48 bush pilots have been enthusiastically STOLing their planes onto and off of backcountry locales that had never before seen the likes of bush wheels, floats, or skis.
by Brad Rassler, Outside | Read more:
Images: Brad Rassler; markk
[ed. I used to fly in Alaska, everybody does (or did). It was the only way to get around - to prized fishing spots, hunting areas, cabins and just beautiful backcountry. I didn't have a burning desire to fly at first, but with my job (habitat biologist) and the number of hours spent in small planes and helicopters it seemed like a good idea to know what to do in an emergency. For example, one time my partner and I got picked up late in the day - last flight from one small village to another - Alukanuk (Yukon Delta) to Unalakleet in Norton Sound. Couple hours. The pilot had been working all day and was exhausted. Not long after we took off I noticed our plane would occasionally drop several hundred feet for no apparent reason. I was in the backseat but my partner looked over and saw that our pilot was falling asleep. She gently nudged him and he woke with a start and made a few jokes - "just checking out some muskrats", or "that's why they call us bush pilots, we fly from bush to bush...haha". Not so funny. This kept happening over and over again. Anyway, he finally opened the side window and asked for a cigarette. After that my partner kept feeding him one after another. It kept him occupied enough to finally make it - barely, we were all sweating final approach in the early evening twilight. After that I just said to myself, I've got to learn how to fly these things. And... always try to sit in the front seat.]
