<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Last week, Davin Coburn headed to the Pacific Northwest to learn about one company&amp;#039;s revolutionary new build process for their high-performance kitplane\u2014and then to go for a test drive, to figure out what it was like 180 degrees from a midtown Manhattan office. Catch up with his journey by clicking here, then take to the skies below...  The Sportsmen are loaded.  Inside Glasair&amp;#039;s hangar, Ted Setzer is packing two planes with what appears to be the entire &amp;quot;Camping&amp;quot; aisle from a local Wal-Mart. Tents; sleeping bags; pads; chairs; a giant stove; food for four men, for six days; clothes, emergency gear, cases of camera equipment for the photographer \u2014 including fuel and men, each plane is right at its 1000-pound useful load.  By far the most important thing, however, isn&amp;#039;t stashed in back. Exploring the mountains and valleys of British Columbia and the Yukon, we may well visit places that few people, if any, have ever stood. So at all times, someone in cockpit wears a survival vest. A simple Cabela&amp;#039;s fishing rig, it holds a poncho, a foil blanket, a first-aid kit \u2014 with a needle, fire starter, compass and mirror \u2014 a headlamp, a handheld radio, and an ACR personal locator beacon.  &amp;quot;When you read NTSB crash reports from the back country, you see that the plane exploded \u2014 or it slid off a cliff, or it sank, but the pilot got out before it did,&amp;quot; says Glasair president Mikael Via. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re watching your plane go glug, glug, you realize that what you&amp;#039;re wearing is for survival. Everything else is just camping gear. &amp;quot;Setzer and I are flying a tail-dragger Sportsman; Lyn Freeman, a certified flight instructor, and photographer Grant Delin are in a nose-dragger trike configuration. And after one last stop for fuel, we&amp;#039;re in the air, crossing Puget Sound and the mouth of the Juan de Fuca at 2500 ft., with patches of sunlight raining down on blue-green waters and pine-covered islands. Up the east coast of Vancouver Island, we touch down in Nanaimo, B.C., to clear customs.   From there we carve west through the island ranges to the rugged Pacific coast. Hesquiat Harbor is a great place to dig for clams \u2014 but we quickly find that the year&amp;#039;s highest tide left these beaches riddled with old timber and wads of kelp. &amp;quot;At our weights, a typical short-field takeoff will be in 400 or 500 feet,&amp;quot; Setzer says. &amp;quot;My shortest landing in a Sportsman was about 175 ft. \u2014 but a 175-ft. landing doesn&amp;#039;t do you any good if it takes you 400 ft. to get off the ground again.&amp;quot; We find room in Nootka Sound, and land in front of a waterfall for lunch.  We finish the afternoon by following the fish farms east through Gold River, past 7500-ft. Elkhorn Mountain, which stabs at the sky. We clear Discovery Pass and head for mainland B.C., up Bute Inlet to the heart of bear country, to an abandoned logging strip called Moh Creek. Our landing may actually be easier on rougher terrain: Tailwheels have the steering mechanism in the back, so they try to swap ends on takeoffs and landings \u2014 especially on grippy blacktop. That&amp;#039;s a good way to bend an airplane, and this sort of strip lets the plane shift and slide just a little, making the alignment a bit less fussy.  We pitch our tents and grill dinner right at the end of the strip. \u2014Davin Coburn "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/a1819/4218590/>