Denver from the bird's eye

Did you even fly in your dream? Just like a bird, circling around some familiar place and looking at it from an unusual angle... and waking up with a faded feeling of the fly and disappointment with the dream. Because it was only a dream...

I don't know about you, but I always wanted to fly... Not on a big airplane (I did it and that's not that exciting), but a small one. The one where you can open a window and feel the wind, and where you can see the shadow of the screw in front of you...

 

One day my dream came true. We had a nice opportunity to fly around Denver and early Sunday morning we drove to Centennial Airport and found our pilot. The weather was great - not windy and sunny - what can be better than that? We stepped through the gate to the airfield and walked in front of the line of the small planes. Here was ours... Cessna Skyhawk 172R. Small. I mean it - the cabin is smaller than the regular SUV salon... It can take 4 people, but... not more than 150 pounds each. But this is not an intercontinental plane by any means. It's just enough to bring the passengers from here to there. Roughly five hours of flight before it runs out or fuel...

Actually this plane is the most selling Cessna ever. 43,000 airplanes have been sold since 1956 when they started manufacturing this model. It has many different versions (ours had a 160 horsepower engine - about the same my small SUV has). But once we untied it and the dispatcher did his permission the small bird took off and in a few minutes we were up to the sky and making a turn to fly towards downtown.

Downtown doesn't look the same when you see it from the bird's view. The skyscrapers are not that tall anymore and everything looks differently...

 

Here is a short video, it's not the same as still pictures...

We made a couple of circles just above downtown and made another turn moving closer to the mountains.

We flew along the foothills looking at the suburban areas and nice lakes.

 

Later we crossed the ridge and flew above Red Rocks Amphitheater. It looks completely different from the view we used to.

 

And here is another video to show the ridges of the red rocks and Red Rocks too ;)

Another turn and we soared above different areas before returning back to the airport. But... it was fine... no one can stay in the sky forever. At some point we descended, made a couple of sharp turns and found ourselves slowing down when running on the airfield of the Centennial Airport.

We cannot believe we were flying for an hour! It felt like we took off just a few minutes ago... But we also felt really good after the flight. I guess this is the feeling you have when your dream turned true and you finally got something you wanted for a long time...

Once back on land, we found out we need to pay for the pleasure of being birds (even for a very short while). Yep, everything comes with the price and now we needed to park our plane. And... this is not a car so you need to do it completely manually. The good part was, you don't need a lot of help, two men is just enough to do it. Watch this video, and have some fun ;)

Pictures were taken on August 03, 2013.