If you are planning a trip to Alaska it’s important to understand the current environment . The last few times I flew north I noticed a trend toward big tires on planes – really big tires (made by Alaska Bushwheels). Now on this last trip, I noticed the trend is reaching a peak. Big wheels are everywhere.
If you are a real man, and apparently I’m not, you fly a tail-wheel bush plane like a Super Cub with big wheels. Like 34” or even 35” wheels. These wheels are heavy, they slow you down and they hurt high altitude performance. But they look really F*ing good! And yes, you can see on YouTube they do allow you to land on some pretty rocky terrain.
You don’t actually need 35” wheels to have a big D*. Anything bigger than 30” will impress the three ladies I saw in Alaska that would be impressed with this type of thing.
Next in the whose-a-man pecking order is a Cessna 206 or Cessna 182 with larger tires. My Cessna 182 doesn’t have large tires. In the last six months I’ve been stuck twice in sand and wet grass and larger tires would have helped. So reason number 1 for wanting bigger wheels is that it looks cool. And as a bonus it would help in rough terrain.
A Cessna 182 with factory wheels definately doesn’t cut it. I’m embarrassed to even write these numbers down after talking about 30+ inch wheels. My plane has a 5 inch front tire with 6 inch (600s) on the mains. Pathetic, I know. I called ahead to a lodge to see if I could land on his strip. “Yes, definitely. he said. “You have at least 600s on the front, right?” OK, well I’m not landing there.
The problem is that you need a heavy-duty front fork to fit the larger tire and they now cost $4,000. So I continue to pretend the airplane isn’t mine when visiting gravel strips in Alaska.
At least I have a high-wing plane. A low wing Piper or Mooney are not seen often in Alaska. I think they get tired of the laughter and snickering behind their back and they soon fly south to their home fields that have paved, 3,200 foot runways. I saw a high-end fly-in residential area near Wasilla where every home has a hangar and the roads and driveways double as taxi-ways. The mailbox posts and road signs are about 3 feet tall, too tall for low wing airplanes. The message for low wing pilots? You can’t live here.
Truly, about 30% off all Super Cubs in the nation are in Alaska, which has about 1/2 percent of the US population. Low wing planes? About 1% are in Alaska. Now I’m going to get some low wing pilots telling me they perform just fine but that’s missing the point. I know they can perform well, I’ve seen it. The point is that they don’t look like they could perform well.
I already have a list of some places in Alaska that I haven’t been to and would like to visit. So I know I’ll be back. It remains to be seen if I break down and buy some large tires, or continue to be embarrased by my dinky tires.
West Coast Flying Adventures 