AOPA Pilot Magazine - June 2021 - 112

PILOTS WHITEWATER KAYAKER TURNED PILOT

Peter Heller

This writer prefers rugged terrain over runways
S Y LV I A H O R N E

LOGBOOK

WHO | Peter Heller
HOURS | 248.5
CERTIFICATES AND RATINGS | Private pilot;

tailwheel; high performance.

FAVORITE AIRCRAFT | The Beast, his 1956

Cessna 182, " Triple Three Alpha. " (Hig, the
main character in The Dog Stars, flies that
same aircraft with the same tail number.)
EXTRA | " When I bought my airplane in
Helena, Montana, it came with a big antenna
bolted to each strut and a radio receiver
in the stack for listening to the beeps from
radio-collared wolves. The man I bought
it from, Bob Ream, was a biologist and
Montana state legislator who was instrumental in reintroducing wolves to the Rocky
Mountains, in Yellowstone, Northwestern
Montana, and Idaho. He used The Beast to
track his packs for years. "

112 | AOPA PILOT June 2021

to really pay attention, do some rigorous
flight planning. As a kayaker, you're making
fast decisions, and taking stuff as it comes.
Flying isn't really like that. "
Heller owns a 1956 Cessna 182, called
The Beast, which is hangared at the Erie,
Colorado, airport. " Pilots are such a league of
honorary gentlemen and-women, " he said.
" There's a true sense of community. You can
land in the middle of nowhere and someone
throws you the keys to the courtesy car and
tells you just to fill it up when you're done
with it, if you can, no questions asked. "
After The Dog Stars, Heller turned writing novels into a full-time job. He's since
published three more. His passion for flying
is undiminished, even though " I haven't been
flying that much in the past couple of years.

I'm really still a low-time pilot. " But that's
going to change. He'll put some big tires
on The Beast and is planning a big, weekslong flying trip to Alaska with his erstwhile
instructor, renowned mountain pilot Dave
Hoerner. " We're going to fly and land in farflung places and all kinds of terrain. There'll
be some fishing. A real adventure. "
Heller is thinking about upgrading to a
Van's RV-7. He loves that it offers so much
visibility and especially how one can do barrel rolls in it. " But I don't think I can sell The
Beast. It's the plane that inspired The Dog
Stars. And it's such a pretty plane. "
Heller's fourth novel is The Guide and is
to be released in August.
EMAIL sylvia.horne@aopa.org

MIKE FIZER

PETER HELLER INITIALLY CAME to the attention of the aviation community in 2012
when he published The Dog Stars, a dystopian novel featuring a pilot and a Cessna
182. By that time, Heller was already well
known in the outdoors world as a whitewater and expedition kayaker and extreme
surfer. With that kind of a background,
simply learning to fly wasn't for him; he
wanted to learn to fly bush planes into
backcountry strips-and that's what he did
in 20 days and 40 hours of private instruction in Montana.
" I write about what I'm excited about
at the time, so when I learned to fly, I wrote
The Dog Stars, " he said. However, after he
had his certificate he believed there was
still a lot of growing to do. " I had to learn

AOPA Pilot Magazine - June 2021

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