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Everything about Sandy Lanham is reassuring. And now's a good time for reassurance, because during the next week and a half we'll be flying thousands of miles over ocean and wild dune in her little single-engine four-seater Cessna 182 — a plane that's 47 years old.

Surveying sea turtle nests along the Pacific coast of Mexico, from southern Baja to the Guatemala border, will take us about ten days. This is no 600-mile-an-hour airliner with drink carts in the aisles and an in-flight movie. Counting turtle tracks from the air is so visually fatiguing you can work only a few hours a day. (Not to mention, there's no toilet and you can't get out of your seat.) We are further limited because the airports are not optimally spaced and we can't fly after sundown. And we have to follow each nook and cranny in the serpentine coastline, so the mileage will really add up; that will also slow us. But Sandy sees no limitations; she would change nothing.

She's saying, "The best kind of flying is the kind I do — low and slow. People are always telling me things I could do to make my plane faster, and I'm like, why?" Sandy is informal, a little mischievous, a tall, trim woman in her mid-50s, with longish brown hair, and a love of being aloft. "I can tell you this: It's not about flying, and it's not about airplanes. It's about seeing things. Once I get comfortable, the control panel disappears, the windshield disappears, and I'm just out there, seeing."

Carl Safina, High Above the Mexican Coast

I'm not concerned about our speed, and I'm a true believer in our mission, but I'm stuck on the plane's date of birth. The plane looks, well, used, wearing parts of its original yellow and brown paint job, like a faded bumblebee — an insect that famously defies aerodynamic theory predicting it could never get airborne. Sandy says, "No Cessna 182 has ever had a mid-air structural failure — no wings snapping off, for instance."

That's reassuring, for instance.

"And when the engine fails the plane will keep gliding until I can bring it safely to rest on a road or beach."

When?

I choose to find that comforting, though. Also reassuring is that, although she flies for a living, she's flight-prepping like she first soloed last week, from the way she checked the oil to the affectionate way she's stroking the propeller blade. "Anyway, the engine is new, and, you'll be happy to know, it has just enough hours on it to trust it."

One thing about this trip that Sandy would change is the number of turtles we're expecting. Last year was the worst ever for Pacific leatherbacks, the now-critically endangered sea turtles we'll focus on. Sandy says, "The type of flying I least like is where I'm acting as historian of what was, where numbers are so low they seem hopeless, like for the vaquita and desert pronghorn, and maybe soon the leatherback."

A Leatherback on the Beach

Vaquitas are small porpoises living in the upper Gulf of California. They're having a near-death experience because of fishermen's gill nets. Pronghorns are swift and graceful antelope-like animals unique to North America, and nearly gone from the Sonoran desert. And leatherbacks. Leatherbacks are giant ocean turtles, but they seem more like dinosaurs on the way to becoming mammals. Like dinosaurs, their size is surreal; imagine an 800-pound turtle and you've envisioned merely an average female leatherback. Like mammals, because their migrations to the coldest waters sea turtles ever reach has given them a growth strategy and warm-blooded abilities that don't usually go with the word reptile.

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