LightHawk Provides a Plane View of the Environment : Activism: Conservation group’s four aircraft furnish big-picture views of damaged or threatened areas. It flies about 500 missions annually.

It’s an unlikely home base for an international air force: a drab, second-floor former dental office on a less than fashionable capital city street.

Only wall maps marked by colored push pins give clues to the scope of LightHawk’s operations.

The pins represent LightHawk pilots who together fly about 500 conservation missions each year in any of nine countries from Canada to Chile.

It could be mapping vast wildlands in Central America or monitoring wetlands development in Florida or carrying black-footed ferrets into the Montana wilderness.

More typically, the pilots provide eye-opening views of environmental damage--or untouched areas threatened by it--to activists, scientists, journalists and government decision-makers.

“The aircraft is an excellent way to get a big picture,” said Margaret Puckette of Corvallis, Ore., a pilot who flies over clear-cut forests in the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s better than a map. It’s better than a satellite photo,” Puckette said. “The land pretty much speaks for itself.”

LightHawk, which bills itself as the “environmental air force,” was founded 17 years ago in Santa Fe by a lone pilot with a borrowed airplane.

Today, it has four aircraft, 12 full-time and four part-time employees, and field offices in Seattle and Aspen, Colo. Four staff pilots fly about one-third of the 1,550 flying hours logged. The rest are flown by 125 volunteer pilots.

“I guess I see this as some way I can participate in the let’s-save-this-planet process,” said volunteer J. Mark Roberts.

A pilot for 22 years, Roberts said his orthopedic surgery practice in Salem, Ore., keeps him too busy to be regularly active in environmental issues. Flying for LightHawk half a dozen times a year allows him to contribute.

Conservation groups use LightHawk for “low and slow” flights for inspecting, monitoring or picture-taking.

Such groups generally are asked to contribute the cost of fuel--about $35 an hour--but are not charged for the plane or pilot.

That provides environmentalists with an aerial view for only a fraction of what it would cost otherwise, said G.L. Scarborough Jr., LightHawk’s flight director.

And there’s the bonus of having a pilot who not only knows the terrain but also the issues, Scarborough said.

“If you’re out walking on the ground, you can’t get a feeling for the magnitude of a problem. That’s the beauty of the airplane,” he said.

The Wilderness Society has called on LightHawk numerous times to help in an effort to have huge tracts of public land in Colorado and Utah designated as wilderness areas.

“It’s just been a tremendous service,” said Darrell Knuffke, the society’s western outreach director in Denver.

“To call them the ‘wings of conservation’ is not at all hyperbolic. . . . I know of nothing like this,” he said.

In addition to responding to requests for help, LightHawk initiates and runs its own programs.

At the Seattle office, staffer Cyndi Lewis specializes in filling a seven-person aircraft with people who have conflicting views on an issue.

For example, commercial and sports fishermen--who are battling over the size of fish harvests--recently flew over a watershed to view the logging, farming, dams and other development that could be affecting a habitat and causing a decline in fish populations, Lewis said.

“We give people this aerial perspective of an entire watershed, so that they can think about it as a whole ecosystem,” she said.

As a follow-up, participants were encouraged to stay in touch with one another and become involved with habitat restoration or advocacy groups.

The only federal funding that LightHawk received was a $140,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development for work it did in La Mosquitia, Central America’s largest wilderness, Scarborough said.

The project, which began in 1993 and is wrapping up now, flew local and national leaders from Honduras and Nicaragua around, did an inventory of natural resources, and sponsored workshops on a conservation plan for the area.

With a $1.3-million budget--about half from private foundations and the rest from individual donors--LightHawk can’t keep up with the demand for its services.

It had to turn down a request from a Russian group to count tigers in Siberia, for example, because there wasn’t enough money.

“I think all groups that are involved in environmental activism right now are suffering from a decrease in charitable giving,” Scarborough said.

LightHawk has started an “adopt-a-plane” program to encourage donors to underwrite the cost of a specific LightHawk aircraft.

“We’re not short of ideas and programs--we’re short of funds,” he said.