Walking on the Moon

Jeremy Elson managed to get assigned a 6606 squawk on Tuesday, without trying. A pretty cool piece of luck on a doomsday-hyped day. His flight was safe.

Well this story is a little close to home. Link courtesy of Jeffrey Rowland’s Overcompensating. But you’re already reading Overcompensating, I’m sure.

At the Planes of Fame Airshow, Kevin and I ran into a guy who assures us that an RC enthusiast built a flying Spruce Goose. Sure enough, it’s out there.

For a post about a really great event, this is going to be kinda boring. Almost 2 weeks ago, Kevin Lahey and I flew over to Chino for the Planes of Fame Air Museum‘s annual airshow.

If I haven’t said it before, the collection of WWII aircraft at Planes of Fame is really phenomenal, and you can get right up close and personal with them. They have several one-of-a-kind aircraft and many, many rarities. Many are flyable, and on the first saturday of each month they have a special event and fly something cool.

As wonderful as all that is, it really pales before their airshow. Now, I haven’t been to an airshow in a long time. I love to fly, but I just don’t get to a lot of them. This was huge fun. There were tactical displays from the Navy and Air Force flying modern jet fighters and a few aerobatic and wing walking displays, which were all fine. For me, the really impressive stuff was the incredible array of WWII (and even WWI) aircraft that they put in the air. Most, if not all, of them from the Planes of Fame collection.

At one point they had probably 25 flying classic warbirds in flight simultaneously, including 2 B-25s and a B-17. There was also a Spitfire and a P-38. And I know for a fact that wasn’t the whole collection. They didn’t fly the Zero in that formation (though it flew in the show), nor the Northrop Flying Wing.

Of course, I took no pictures. Because, well, I wouldn’t have been able to capture things very well at all. If I get a chance, I’m going to try to get my brilliant photographer buddy Tom Beecher out to one of these.

If you like old airplanes at all, you should check it out.

Brenda and I made a return trip to the Bay Area this week to attend the nuptials of our friends Hal Pearlman and Andrea Leonard. This was basically a party celebrating their marriage, and like most things they do was focussed on the fun stuff.
Having just made the trip last week, the route was fresh in my mind. However, it’s a trip one can make with much more piece of mind when one has full tanks. I like having more gas than I need. The flight out was IFR, but over the top in clear blue skies. We passed through a thin layer going out and maybe penetrated one thin cloud coming into SQL. Brenda was knitting, I was picking out airports and it was a nice trip. We did get asked to confirm and ELT, which we unfortunately did. I’ll have to check the NTSB reports now for someone down near PRB that day.

We stayed up in Pacifica, where Andrea and Hal have a place. Pacifica’s a strange and wonderful place. It’s a really small town that’s right next door to San Francisco, but they’ve managed to keep development all but absent from the area. We didn’t see a house more than 3 stories, and the streets were quiet and pedestrian friendly. We did some shopping, mostly nosing around antique stores and thrift shops, walked the pier and hung out at Nick’s Sea Breeze Motel until the reception. I was delighted to have the room in the plane to bring home furniture for Brenda. (OK, a small knitting cubby…)

The reception was fun with good food, good friends and a goofy and fun band. It was great to hang out and enjoy the evening.

The next day we had time to stop by the Hiller Aviation Museum and check out the displays. It was a well run interesting museum, but didn’t have the more rough and ready charm of, say, Chino’s Planes of Fame. There was much to see and enjoy, though. I found the flying platform displays especially interesting. They also have a great collection of restored very early (even pre-Wright Bros.) aircraft. Great to see that old stuff.

The flight back looked like it would be VFR, and the pre-flight briefing sounded that way, too. We squeezed out of the SQL airspace, and south out of the Bay Area, enjoying a beautiful view of Monterey Bay. However, I heard another aircraft looking for a pop-up IFR into Van Nuys (VNY), which prompted me to check the weather. Sure enough, SMO was IFR. I got a clearance still northwest of Santa Barbara and we settled in for an instrument landing at SMO. It wasn’t an approach to minimums, but was one of the lower ones Brenda’s done with me, so it was interesting for her and fun for me.

All in all a good weekend of flying.

It’s always nice when you confirm another fact from your POH. This weekend I confirmed that you can safely fly an Archer with people in all four seats. It helps a great deal if one is a kid and you don’t take a lot of gas or luggage. We were at about gross weight and I could tell, but overall 32169 performed like a champ. The pilot seemed to do OK, too, but I’ll admit a strong desire to just jerk the little bugger off that 2600 foot runway at San Carlos (SQL).

The occasion was the Make magazine-sponsored Maker Faire in San Mateo. Aaron Falk talked me into taking him and his daughter up (fly to the Bay Area? not a hard sell), and when she saw the program Brenda was interested, too.

We got a good early start out of SMO (well, as early as the weekend curfew allows – 8:00 AM) and stopped in San Luis Obispo (SBP) for gas. There was a solid undercast most of the trip, but we spent most of the trip on top at 8000. It was cold enough for ice, but no clouds. We got to shoot an approach into SPB, but broke out at the FAF, so not so exciting. I did get an automated altitude check alert from the tower, but wasn’t ever below a charted altitude. I think it was one of those trend-based alarms that didn’t like my steep decent to each step down. At any rate a nice flight.

From there IFR to SQL. Another fun, mostly on-top flight. Only really in IMC while getting vectored for the approach. The controller pretty much put me into the clouds just in time to get busy, vector me around, and then I popped out at the FAF again. SQL is in a busy corner of the woods.

Coming out of SQL on Sunday, I got a fairly complex VFR/IFR departure clearance but the rest of the flight was pretty straightforward. Aaron would make a fine flight instructor with the number of questions he asks during departure, but that was actually good practice dealing with the distraction. And he was happy to take “I’ll tell you in a minute” as an answer. I actually got some IMC this flight as the cloud deck slowly rose up to meet us outside SBP (another gas stop). Overall a pretty smooth flight.

The last leg was equally pleasant. Departing full from a 5300′ runway is much easier on the nerves than a 2600 footer. We flew through one cloud on departure and descended through a layer over the LA basin and were in at SMO. Between there we cruised above layers and Brenda taught Aaron’s daughter to knit.

We did get to see a one of a kind phenomenon. Up above the clouds in an airplane you often get a circular rainbow centered around the shadow of the plane, called a glory. As we turned east from San Marcos, we were flying right out of the sun, and as it set it arranged itself directly behind us both laterally and vertically. Everything was perfectly aligned so that as we entered a cloud bank on descent we met a very clear glory-haloed silhouette of the Archer perfectly nose to nose. It was a 120 knot collision with the fantastic that you can only see from the front seat, and well worth the trip.
The faire deserves a post to itself, and it’ll get one.

Andy Hoover points out this radio-controlled Airbus 380.  I haven’t been able to see the video yet, but the pics are very cool.

A beautiful radio exchange from AVWEB‘s Short Final.

I’ve been able to get up in the air twice this week, once purely for training and once for a little training and a little fun.

Training first: my primary CFI, Andy Hoover, took me up Thursday (30 Mar) and beat up my IFR skills. One of the sad facts of life of flying in SoCal is that we really don’t get a lot of hard IFR days to keep current and safe without going up and getting under the hood. Even though Andy’s spending most of his time flying for American Eagle, he’s good enough to come round every couple months and work me out as well. He really had a sadistic streak going this time; we did an ILS at the top of the green arc to a hold, then a partial panel ILS into Bob Hope – featuring some patented SoCal vectors in lieu of a hold, so it was basically a partial panel hold. We finished off with a different failed instrument instrument for the VOR-A into SMO. Nothing the way it usually works, and all of it went pretty well. After a couple years of this I seem to have a little of it down.

Today, I worked off my PDT disorientation by taking an early afternoon jaunt out to the inland empire. First stop was San Bernardino (SBD) to work some engine out landings. It’s an old military base with a 10000 ft runway, which makes it a great spot to practice things you need a big margin for. Unfortunately, SBD was pretty crowded. There were 3 or 4 of us in the pattern most of the time I was there, with a few more at the peaks. I hung around for a while shooting touch-and-goes and practicing uncontrolled field radio technique, and working landings in up and downdrafts. Good fun. Spotting someone out in their warbird doing a quick aileron roll for the fun of it en route only improved my mood.
After I got tired of that, I went next door to Flabob AIrport (RIR) for some lunch. Flabob is a great little GA airport. It’s a cool little field, but it’s really odd going from the 10000’x200′ runway at SBD to RIR’s 3200’x50′ strip. From wide, long strip illusions right to short, narrow strip ones. Whee!

There are many, many interesting little planes tied down at Flabob and an active pilot community that seems to have good relations with the surrounding community. It’s the site of EAA chapter 1 – where that very cool organization was founded. It’s always an interesting place to drop in to. I walked around, took some pictures and had a practically free chicken-fried steak sandwich. Hard to imagine better.

The trip back to SMO was uneventful – well as uneventful as getting into SMO ever is.

I found some time to cruise out to California City Airport this weekend. California City is in the high desert, north of the LA basin near Mojave. I took one of my student solo cross-country flights there and I like to go out and check in every once in a while. On weekends the field is usually bustling with gliders and skydivers and others having a good time. There’s been a restaurant there on and off, but when it’s there it’s always very hospitable.

I headed off at a reasonable 10:00 AM hour, planning to head up north of the airport and do some air work. Work has kept me on the ground lately and I wanted to shake some rust off. The weather was nice and I was able to cruise out pretty easily.

On the way out, talking to Joshua Approach, I heard the worst radio discipline I’ve ever heard on an approach frequency. Now, admittedly the frequency didn’t sound busy while it was going on, but protracted air-to-air communications between pilots discussing the flatulance of one pilot’s dog is really out of line. Don Brown would have had a heart attack.

As I say, I went up north of the airport to get some air work in and did some credible slow flight, a couple pretty good steeps (if I do say so myself), and some decent stall recoveries. I was pretty happy with all of the work. While I was doing it I got to hear Joshua Approach deal with some confusion from one pilot squawking the code assigned to a different aircraft while in a restricted area. The plane that was supposed to be squawking that code didn’t clearly state its position and it took a while to work it all out. Nice debugging on the fly by the controller, though.

I settled in to the airport and had lunch. The restaurant has been taken over by the folks who run Foxy’s Landing at William J. Fox Field in Lancaster. The food’s good here and the people friendly. There was a car club and some other folks hanging around that day, so the place was pretty busy. I think under the Foxy’s folks it’ll stay open for a while, which is great news. I also learned that Foxy’s is running a restaurant at Mojave, which means I have an incentive to stop by there now, too.

On the way out I took some pictures, including a beautiful restored Culver Cadet and some sky divers.

The flight back was pretty routine, but clear and beautiful. I got to pull a pretty nice “plan minimal time on the runway” landing at SMO, too. Fun day.