Paramotor pilot
Thomas Bird recently completed flights over the Project Jupiter site and the Elephant Butte reservoir and showcased what he saw with some photos. KRWG multimedia reporter Noah Raess spoke with him to learn more.
Noah Raess:
My first question is, how did you get into motoring?
Thomas Bird:
Well, a friend of mine at work introduced me to it. I didn't even know it existed. It was about 13, 14 years ago, and at the time, I just recently retired. But for 33 years I worked at the National Weather Service office down here in Santa Teresa being a forecaster and a weatherman and he mentioned paragliding and paramotoring and so I started looking into it and I got very intrigued because it's the kind of flight where you're using a flexible wing and you're very, very, very, responding to whatever the weather's doing and being a weatherman, I figured, man, that's kind of a cool thing. I could really investigate the weather and how it impacts flight and stuff like that by becoming a paramotor pilot. So that piqued my interest to the point where I took it seriously enough to start training and what I explained to people is I become the leaf in the wind, so to speak, and I go where the wind tells me to go kind of thing .
Noah Raess:
Is there almost like a progression system? Like, do you start, I don't know, hang gliding or something like that before you get into it. Anything like that?
Thomas Bird:
No, this is basically the lowest and kind of flight in aviation you can get into. It's super simple. The FAA does not require you to get a license to do this. And there's Federal Aviation Regulation 103, we call it FAR 103, which regulates what we can and can't do. And these are considered ultra light crafts. And so there's certain things that we can do and certain things we can't do. There's type of air spaces that we can't be in and others that we can be in. And you can self-train if you're inclined to do so and you're brave enough, I wasn't, you can buy the equipment and start training, you know, in a field near your house until you're up off the ground without anybody giving you any instruction. I think that's kind of crazy and a lot more hazardous than having someone that knows what they're doing, training you how to do it. And so I got training myself so that I could learn to do it as safe as possible.
Noah Raess:
And where do you like to fly?
Thomas Bird:
Well, I live down here, just outside of La Union, which is north of Santa Teresa. Down by where my office is, where my house is, and there's a bunch of open fields. There's some big parks in West El Paso near Canutillo. We had some talk farms, near the border, north of the Santa Teresa border crossing. And there's a bunch of open, you know, fallow farm fields around me. My yard is big enough I can take out, take off and land in it. So I do most of my flying around West El Paso, Canutillo, Santa Teresa, Sunland Park, the desert near the Doña Ana County Airport and that area. So basically a lot of southern Doña Ana County as far as the border. I even, like, kind of bounce over into Mexico a time or two. Well, you know, not real frequently, but every now and then I go, I will cross over the border wall and just fly just a little bit into Mexico. It's perfectly legal to do so. Just can't touch down over there. So mostly down here but I do like to take excursions and fly places I haven't flown before or fly places that I don't fly frequently. And so that would be like going up to Truth or Consequences and flying around Elephant Butte, that's a really fun place to fly and I have a bucket list, you know, of other places that I want to go fly. And as I'm traveling in my car or my truck or whatever, I'll see places and say, man, I want to come back here and fly there. That looks like a fun place to fly. You know, if you fly the same place over and over and over, it's hard to believe, but it gets a little boring from time to time. It's like, you know, your sensory wants to see something new. And so I'm always looking for new places to fly.
Noah Raess:
You mentioned flying over Elephant Butte but you also flew over Project Jupiter and just kind of focusing on the Project Jupiter site. I guess can you tell us what you saw going over Project Jupiter and what was that experience like?
Thomas Bird:
Yeah, Project Jupiter, it's a convenient place for me to fly because it's very near the sod farm, near Santa Teresa, where I learned how to fly. And so that was the piece of desert that I flew for years and years and years before it became Project Jupiter. So it was just an open desert, you know, a bunch of sand dunes, mesquite bushes and stuff like that. And so now it's very different, and it's much bigger. I expected Project Jupiter to be like a Costco size or a Sam's size warehouse type building. And so the first time I flew over it I was aghast how large this area is. It's unbelievable. And I also live where their trucks pass by every day to take gravel and stuff down to it. And so we were seeing nonstop trucks and I was just curious what all they're doing at night, it just, like, lit up, like daylight down there, because they got, you know, they work 24/7, I believe. And so they have all the night lights on in the desert. So now, where it used to be a dark desert, you have this very bright glow. So I was very curious. And I said, I need to go down there, and this is. But the pictures I posted were the second time I've flown over. I'm trying to fly over about every 2 or 3 months, just to see what the differences are and take pictures and kind of catalog that mainly just for my own curiosity and interest. But when you fly over it and you see how much desert it encompasses, and you look at all the new solar panels that are basically a sea of solar panels down here, it's amazing how much the desert has changed and and how much, you know, they're pulling a lot of water out. They have a tank that they keep for all the time. And there's trucks just nonstop warm water. And because, you know, the construction requires a lot of water. You see a lot of cooling fans now being put in. And there's so much work that's being done underground. And that's really something you can't see unless you're flying above it. And so, you know, the good thing about promoters is you can go low and slow so I can fly low over the project, and I can go really slow and really get a good look at what I'm seeing down below me. And it is unbelievably amazing at how complicated the construction is on it. And, and the fact that I think most of what they're doing is underground at this point, with all the and I don't know what anything is, it just looks like a bunch of cooling stuff to me. But it is probably the biggest construction site by far that I've ever seen.
Noah Raess:
Going back to Elephant Butte, that was a place that you flew over recently. That's been the news for how low the water levels have been. What did you see flying over Elephant Butte?
Thomas Bird:
Me and my friends, there's five people in Las Cruces that fly like I do. There's two of us down here in El Paso. We've got another friend that flies out of Alamogordo. So it's about eight of us that fly. I went up there by myself because we couldn't agree on a date. And because of how low the water was, I wanted to kind of also photo catalog what was going on with Elephant Butte. I'm actually someone who takes water for my two acre property down here from Elephant Butte Irrigation District. And, you know, we have to pay to get that water. And every year my payment's been going up. But whereas I used to get 6 or 7 waterings a year, for the last several years, I've only been getting one, which is kind of disheartening when I'm paying more for it and getting less water. But anyway, that's another point. But anyway, I knew that they were closing the gates on the dam and stopping the relief at Elephant Butte. I think it was the 28th. And so I wanted to get there as close to the 20th. So I ended up finding the 29th, because I figured that might be the lowest the lake or the reservoir gets before it starts trying to recharge. And so I wanted to see the lowest that it was. And, so that's why I picked that date, and that's why I went and and I again, like with Project Jupiter, I was amazed at the difference from the last time I flew over it. My wife and I, at one time, we do a lot of hiking. We swam to the butte from the shore. We swam across the lake to get onto Elephant Butte. Now there is more land around Elephant Butte than water. I was shocked, and the whole north half of the reservoir was non-existent. It is a green pasture now. It's a beautifully green pasture. But if you go north of Kettle Top and I like to fly across the Kettle Top, it's on the east side. It's a flat little mesa over there. And me and my buddies, we used to have to fly very high to get across the lake in case our motor went out. We wouldn't land in the water. Now you can just fly across from one side to the other because there's only a little bitty stream there. And north of that there's no water, there's just a little bit of stream trickle in from the north out of the Rio Grande, but all of it's just green. And so there's all new shoreline. There's tons of new islands out in there. There's tons of gravel jetties that go out from the shoreline that you used to never see. It's pretty sad to see just how low the water is right now.
Noah Raess:
Like you've been saying before, you know, seeing these places from above, you get a whole new perspective. I guess, can you kind of go more into detail about how kind of your perspectives have been impacted by seeing stuff from above?
Thomas Bird:
Well, yeah, I mean, the whole time you're up there, you're sitting in your harness and because there's no cockpit around you, you can see between your legs to the left, to the right, you can see three, almost 360 degrees. And I can, of course, turn the craft anywhere I want to, very slow and just almost hover above a spot, almost like a helicopter, because you're going slow enough that it kind of feels like you're not hardly moving much, and you can just sit there and soak it in for a long time and get a really good mental image of what you're seeing and, really appreciate, you know, the beauty and the starkness of the lake versus the shoreline. And it's amazing the amount of sandy shoreline around the lake that used to be, you know, just a hundred yards was now a quarter mile wide, you know, kind of stuff. And, and you just sit there and you look at the dam and you can see the water marks on where and same thing on the butte. You can see the water marks, kind of like the ring in the bathtub for where the lake likes to be and where it's been over time. And you can just see how low it is and you can just since you're sitting up there looking at it from above, it's a totally different perspective. I mean, if you have a drone and you do that, it's a good way of getting the same perspective. But if you're just standing on it at the shore, sure, it's pretty stark at what you're looking at, but from above you can see a bigger picture of everything. And like, it'd be very difficult. And I could move from one end of the lake to the other just in minutes. And if you're doing it on foot or on car it's really hard to get the full picture. But up there, the picture is very, very big and you can see everything at once. And that's when it hit you that, wow, this, this reservoir doesn't look anything like it used to. And when I was there, there was hardly anybody up there on the shore. Usually when we're up there flying, there's people camping. And of course, it was a weekday and usually less people on a weekday. But I always felt three different small groups of people around the entire lake. And I have a feeling it's just because, you know, with a lot less lake, there's going to be a lot less recreation.
