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Old 18th Feb 2018, 15:10
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India Four Two
 
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Saigon SGN/VVTS
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I took a Papillon EC-130 tourist flight from the Grand Canyon Airport a couple of years ago. The whole flight was within the National Park, was above the canyon rim and followed a predefined GPS-waypoint flightpath.

I had no idea that there was another operation downstream of the National Park in the Hualapai reservation, which included flights and landings within the canyon. While looking for information on this, I stumbled on a very interesting National Geographic article about the impact of tourism on the canyon:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/m...ational-parks/

In the article is this amazing time-lapse photo of the helicopter and boat traffic in the Hualapai reservation:



At the Grand Canyon, summer brings heavy traffic. This sequence of images—a time-lapse composite of 160 choppers on two different flight paths—covers an eight-hour period on July 9, 2016. Besides numerous boats, 363 helicopters were counted. On peak days, that number can exceed 450.
160 helicopters in eight hours - one every three minutes. It's a very busy place!
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