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PROFILES
Fred Mooney
January 22, 1998
Before satellites tracked both animals and airplanes Fred Mooney flew
small, slow airplanes close to the ground with biologists on board.
He followed birds and mountain lions, deer and collared bears deep
into the wilderness of night and snow.
Now Fred lives in Dallas and travels the world for the FAA, flight
testing the sophisticated simulators that keep airline pilots safe
and current. But, in the mid-70s he left Texas and his Learjet flying
to buy a fixed base operation in Sheridan, Wyoming. It was boom times
there for oil, gas and coal mining companies.
Managing 18 employees and a fleet of airplanes kept him on the ground
much of the day, but he found a special niche and time to fill it
after hours. “The Wyoming Game and Fish Department, U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service and the coal companies themselves had to do surveys
to find out how they were impacting wildlife,” he says. “Before
they mined it we would basically fly back and forth 100 feet off the
ground and write down everything we saw.”
Counting antelope, elk and eagle eggs led him to one of his most
memorable adventures. With a biologist in the backseat of a Citabria,
two cans of gas in the baggage compartment, an old Narco radio with
a 20-mile range he took off with no idea of his final destination.
His guidance system was the beep of a tiny transmitter clipped to
a tail feather of a bald eagle as she migrated north in the spring.
“At that time we didn’t know when they flew, how long,
how they navigated or how often they would eat,” he says. “I
tried to stay within five miles of her and only left for gas and supplies.
I landed on roads in southern Saskatchewan, then further north on
frozen lake beds.”
It was early April, 1981. “The hard part was landing without
finding rotten ice or ice ridges,” he says.
Also, in Canada they require a flight plan, which was a problem,
since they never knew where they were going to go. “We discovered
something called Flight Notification—‘If I don’t
show up at Buffalo Narrows in three days, this is where I think I
was going to go,’” he says.
“Different birds navigate by different ways,” he says,
“some navigate by the stars. By the time we got north of Buffalo
Narrows we had figured out she navigated by rivers, roads and lakes.”
They also discovered she was very particular about the flying conditions.
One day she landed in a tree in the middle of a field and sat there
for three days. They landed on a muddy road and watched her. It was
beautiful sunshine, but there was a north wind. “We thought
she might fly in hard weather, but it turns out their metabolism is
so high they can’t use too much energy by flapping their wings
a lot. So, what they do is soar and glide.
“She would go down to about 3 or 400 feet and would soar up
to 3 or 4,000 feet, slant her wings back and go 45, 50-miles an hour
for about four or five hours a day.” But, she would only go
when she had at least a five thousand-foot ceiling, five miles visibility,
a quartering tailwind and decent soaring conditions.
They followed her into the Northwest Territories. At night it was
so cold they took the oil and battery out of the airplane to keep
them warm. The snow was ten feet deep and the ice on the rivers was
breaking up. They were right at the limit of what they could do in
a Citabria on wheels.
When they left her she was soaring above timber wolves eating a moose.
She was waiting her turn to eat.
This wasn’t his only tough assignment with the Wyoming biologists.
Tracking the black-footed ferrets, while flying 100 feet off the ground
at night among hills and mountains, required incredible flying skill
and meticulous attention to detail. He flew the area in the day, noting
all the hills and ridges. Then he positioned four biologists in pickup
trucks on the ridges. Any time he lost sight of their lights he knew
there was something between him and the lights, so he would climb.
That same love of precision serves him in his present job as an Aviation
Safety Inspector in the National Simulator Program. He spends eight
to twelve hours a week flight testing big simulators all over the
world.
He flies them to their limits, testing safety and accuracy. Recently,
on a hunch, he paused a big jet simulator at an altitude of 30 feet
and cranked in full left aileron. Around it rolled, without dinging
its 100-foot long wings! Someone forgot to include wings in the software.
Fred has loved flying since he was seven years old. He has 11,000
hours flying time in 83 different kinds of airplanes from Pitts Specials
to DC-10s, with type ratings in seven different big airplanes. It
doesn’t matter whether he is counting eagles’ eggs out
the window of a Super Cub fifty feet off the ground or shooting a
simulator approach into Singapore in a 707 with two engines on fire
he brings the same enthusiasm and sense of purpose to the job.
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