When you’re cruising below the clouds at 3,000 feet, the Bay Area is just far away enough to still look familiar. Unlike flying commercial, says pilot Mark Dedon, a small aircraft allows you to keep the details in view—useful for counting birds, or tracking an island fox. Or, if you’re off the clock, just to look around. To our left, pink and blue salt pond tiles reflect the swirl of clouds above. Beneath us, the wakes of tiny sailboats crack and marble the Bay. To the right, thick fog covers Angel Island like icing on a cake. When I can’t see the tip of Tiburon ahead, Dedon pushes in the steering, dipping the nose of his single-engine Cessna 182. The earth rises ahead of us.
The view doesn’t get old, I hear him say in my headset. But it’s not the best part, either: “I just like meeting people and learning why they’re doing what they’re doing.” As a longtime conservation pilot, Dedon’s gotten to share his cockpit with dozens of biologists and surveyors.
Sometimes, that means helping a conservationist spot harmful algal blooms. Other times, he’ll be tasked with flying low above a lake, while the clipboard-bearing biologist next to him counts coots and buffleheads.
When ground-based radio antennae lose sight of tagged animals—mountain lions, eagles, etc.—pilots like Dedon get called in to find them. He’ll hook up telemetry receivers to wiring that runs along each of the plane’s wings. Once aloft, Dedon and a biologist might spend upward of five hours circling where the critter was last spotted, listening to sharp radio static, straining their ears to hear a chirp! from the radio tag below. Depending on which wing of the airplane “hears” the noise, Dedon tilts the aircraft: lower and to the left, then right, spiraling down, vectoring in on a location. The longer they stay in the air, the more exposed they are—to engine noises, UV rays, and difficult tests of the stomach and bladder.
The back seat, where the hull is tapered like a dragonfly’s tail, rotates out its passengers. Sometimes it has actual seats, sometimes just a cooler with a light lunch, and sometimes a rescued California condor sitting pretty in a dog crate. “It feels better to have a purpose,” he says. “To do something that’s helpful for the environment.”
Dedon came into conservation flying somewhat haphazardly. Hired in 1985 as a PG&E wildlife biologist, he started flying to get from site to site, then to do surveys, and later for aerial telemetry work. Back then, he only knew one other biologist who was doing what he was. “We were pinching ourselves, ‘This must be a dream.’” Now that he’s retired, he still flies conservation missions as a volunteer for the nonprofit LightHawk.
Sign up today!
If you want to do it intentionally, instead of waiting for serendipity, Dedon recommends starting with an environment-related degree, then shoehorning yourself into any conservation gig you can at an agency that also hires pilot biologists, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. From there, the day job will help you pay for flight school and licenses, and your position on the inside will help you make the switch once you’re ready for takeoff.
Getting started flying, these days, is the easy part—if you’re flush. Arrive at a local airport of your choice, and that very day pilots will get you on a plane—a small one, like Dedon’s, with two fully functional steering yokes—and let you learn as you go. Introductory flights can be around $150 for a spin.
But once you’re hooked, the costs go, like the planes, up and up: about $20,000 in fees for a non-commercial license, or up to $100,000 for a commercial one, a requirement for federal jobs. If you spring for your own plane, you’ll pay for fuel, maintenance, and hangar rental. Cost is the biggest downside, Dedon says. But on the upside, there’s a view like no other.
