hazek wrote:
One thing that really struck me is that even for him, flying in the Alps 8 days out of 10 is not easy and he has to work to get through safely.
That is pretty much what we did find when we did a statistic for weather forecasts for the GAFOR routes in Switzerland. Over the year I found that you have a despatch rate of about 30%, which means 3 in 10 days the Alps are either Open or Difficult. Clearly, this has seasonal variations, but it’s good to see that some every experienced people reach similar conclusions.
Even though the picture out of stats may look bleaker than it is in reality. With the proper training and proper preparation, quite a lot is possible, also flying in valleys. It depends strongly what you are doing and where. Also the alpine crossing routes are hugely different in terms of difficulty and altitude. And conditions do change quite a lot during the day, also in winter in particular, the valleys often are in cloud while above 1800m or so everything is in bright sunshine. Still, this will show as X in the GAFOR. Of course this does not even take into account wind and associated turbulence. The massive Föhn we had in the last 2 weeks was a real problem operating in the mountains as quite a few accidents show.
maxbc wrote:
Flying from France to e.g. Annecy takes you over ~3000ft mountains, does this still count as “crossing the alps” and (preferably) require such training ?
Not really as long as you can fly high, at least a couple of thousands of feet higher than the highest peak in the area (depends on the amount of wind, if too much wind, don’t fly there) and descend only to get to Annecy, of course on a good weather day with little to no winds.
Learning to fly in the mountains by yourself is not a good idea, even if you manage for a while you might pickup some habits assuming they are safe just because you didn’t get into trouble so far that could actually be deadly in some conditions. Better to learn from someone who knows what he is doing…
So it does count as mountains 
(and I have my answer – not to do it by myself without extra training first)
The typical guideline is 1000 ft over the terrain for every 10 kts of wind. Given that 20 kts of wind on the surface is fairly high, this gives rise to the 2000 ft blanket recommendation.
I climb from 500 ft airport elevation to 6500 or 7500 ft to clear (up to) 5500 ft local terrain on almost every flight in which I’m going somewhere. The highest peaks are at 6500 ft but one typically goes around them. For 3000 ft terrain you’d climb to 5000 ft to cross it if there was any kind of wind. This is not ‘mountain flying’ and doesn’t require special training, only adherence to some basic rules that are often taught when getting a private certificate. Additional training becomes more appropriate when you don’t comply with the basic principle of staying high enough, and go down close to the terrain, or below it through valleys or to airports in the valleys.
Sparky Imeson’s Mountain Flying Bible is an excellent resource as a complement, not substitute, for the training recommended above
