Welcome to the SouthWings News Room!

Many of our passengers take amazing photographs to illustrate the environmental situation in the Southeast, but it is the lasting impact that a SouthWings flight has on the passengers that really makes the difference. The following articles illustrate some of the tangible results of SouthWings services.

Recent News

West Virginia Gazette 7.22.07 Great journalism on Mountain Top Removal with SouthWings photos. This article is dispassionate, factual and contextual; like news used to be.

Tuskeegee News 7.03.07  Wildlaw's rescheduled Earth day flight.

Blue Ridge Outdoors 7.07  They forgot to credit Southwings for the aerial MTR photo.

Asheville Citizen Times 5.04.07   The American Hiking Society held the Great American Hiking Festival in Montreat, NC. SouthWings provided a flight over the Pisgah Ranger District of the Pisgah National forest and the Great Smokies National Park. Read the article from the above link and watch the two-minute video from the plane.

Hendersonville Times 5.01.07 Ned Ryan Doyle, local activist and concerned neighbor of the proposed Biltmore Farms development, flew over the tract with local reporters.

Auto Pilot Magazine 4.07  Veteran SouthWings pilot, Susan Lapis, is featured again.

Asheville Citizen Times 2.18.07   "Grey Rock" a discussion of the           delayed Lake Lure Development

The Union Recorder 2.16.07

Mountain Xpress 2.14.07  "Green Scene" looks at local steep slope development issues

TheBirmingham News 12.03.06 "Abandoned Mine Sites Rcovering, but Slowly"

Discover Magazine 12.06 "Can Coal Come Clean?" includes aerial photos from a SouthWings flight.

Savannah Morning News 11.14.06 "Black water in the Balance" Cypress logging in Georgia

Asheville Citizen Times 6.29.06

Metro Pulse June 2006 As a result of SouthWings' flight with United Mountain Defense, this article in was published detailing mountaintop removal coal mining in east Tennessee . The article emphasizes the experiences of communities living with this extraction practice day-to-day and the organizations like United Mountain Defense who are working to stop the destruction in favor of sustainable options.

Ohio Sierran newsletter: May/June 2006
This newsletter features an article by SouthWings' Flight participant Elisa Young who is the Energy Co-Chair of the Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club. Entitled, "True Cost of Coal Tour" Shows Harsh Realities of Coal on pages 4-5 she shares experiences from a Sierra Club outing to get a first-hand look at mining atrocities and devastated communities.

Business & Economic Review: Spring, 2006 2.2MB
Protecting the Environment from 1000 Feet Up: SouthWings uses volunteer pilots and small planes to affect public policy.
When you' re seated in a small plane skimming just 1,000 feet above the ground, you have an incredible bird' s-eye view of the land and water below.

Clamor: Spring, 2006 1.4MB
Mountaintop Removal in West Virginia. From the sky, the coalfields of West Virginia' s Cumberland Plateau looks like a land under siege.

National Geographic 3.06 4MB
The High Cost of Cheap Coal: When Mountains Move
A landscape that I didn' t know existed is portrayed in Melissa Farlow' s photographs in month - and it' s within 150 miles of my home. Surface mining, including mountaintop removal, a new method of coal mining, has affected more that 400,000 acres in Appalachia.

Orion 01-02. 2006 3.2 MB
Moving Mountains: The struggle for justice in the coal fields of Appalachia.
" You know I used to not think much of bail bondsmen," said activist Matt Noerpel as we leaned against a chainlink fence outside the Campbell County Jail on a sticky August night in eastern Tennessee.

1. BBC Panorama, 6/01/06 Climate Chaos: Bush's Climate of Fear.
This is a powerful documentary on the effects of climate change and the links to energy and fossil fuel use. From 24.22 minutes to 28.33 minutes is information about mountaintop removal coal mining featuring SouthWings' board member Maria Gunnoe and footage from a SouthWings flight.

2. WKRN 5/23/06 Surface Mining Erodes Mountains, Pollutes Water: Cross-ridge mining, another term for mountaintop removal coal mining, is happening along the eastern part of the plateau in east Tennessee all the way to the Kentucky Mountains. This evening news piece interviews Vanessa Morel of the National Parks Conservation Association during a SouthWings flight to examine some of the impacts of this type of mining.