Walking on the Moon

I’m out in El Paso, bringing 32169 back to SoCal.

Without Brenda, my heretofore unbroken streak of showing up in El Paso and having a reasonable room available has been, well, broken.  I managed to find a room near the airport, though for more than I expected to have to pay.  Apparently there’s something up in El Paso today; several places were full, and the remaining rooms were at a premium.  There is an upside, though.  The desk clerk booked me into a suite at no premium.  It’s a pretty nice place to crash for the night.

Weather looks good, so hopefully we’ll be back tomorrow.

Well, it’s New Year’s Eve, and we’re in Little Rock, AK (LIT).  Brenda’s napping and I’m planning tomorrow’s bucking of the winds.

Hope you’re all snug and happy.

Flying airplanes is a constant learning experience. Today I learned how to jump start a Piper Archer.

Brenda and I are getting ready to fly out to see our respective families for the holidays, so I’m trying to log a little extra time in preparation. I’m looking to make sure that I’m reasonably current on my skills and that the plane’s also ready to go. Today I stopped off at Flabob field for lunch, and almost didn’t get back out.

A couple weeks ago, I had a battery go completely dead causing me to miss an afternoon of instruction. After that, I had some starting problems that my mechanic couldn’t repeat. And today I had more of the same, to the point where I ran my battery completely down. A helpful fellow who was nearby offered to jump, and after I realized that I did indeed have a 12 volt battery, we gave it a shot. It worked like a charm, and away we went. It was an interesting thing to learn how to do, and I’m happy to know it.

But I think I need a new battery.

When dropped CFI extraordinaire Andy Hoover off at El Monte (EMT) last week, I noticed a restaurant open on the field.  I love an excuse to fly anywhere, so I filed El Monte away.

Now, it’s not far to EMT, so I set out to do some stalls and steep turns before heading into El Monte for lunch.  This had mixed results.  There were Santa Ana conditions today, so it was clear and gorgeous (EMT was reporting 50 miles of visibility), but there was enough turbulence that maneuvering at low power settings was laborious.  I was hoping to do a series of stall recoveries tp work on some finer points.  Conditions were variable enough that such fine-tuning was difficult.  I did do a few stalls and some slow flight to get the feel of doing them in the turbulence and mountain waves, but didn’t get to my tinkering.

Then, off to EMT.  It was bumpy, but fortunately there weren’t a lot of folks out because of it, which was nice.  I flew a wide pattern into EMT, and actually made a nice enough landing.

Annia’s Kitchen is the restaurant on the field, and I was impressed by the  service and the food, even though I don’t think I ordered the best thing on the menu.  I had a chicken sandwich with a chile on it – the Santa Fe melt – and it was really quite good.  Offering either fires or onion rings with the sandwich is a good call.  (The onion rings were crisp and not over-breaded, just right). But from the size and looks of the various breakfast dishes that went by, that was the way to go.  The ham slices on the ham and eggs were enormous and the pancakes thick and tasty looking.  Next time I go I’ll aim for one of those; a ham and pancakes dish would be optimal.

The staff was very pleasant and attentive.  The restaurant has a large patio – a veranda almost – overlooking the runway, and a half-hour watching airplanes while munching onion rings without my iced tea running dry would be worth it even if they didn’t serve any food.  There’s nothing too fancy here, but excellent quality for an airport diner.

Thus fortified, I headed over to Brackett Field to put in a few landings, and then back to SMO.

32169 finished its annual inspection this week, which is always a good excuse to go flying and make sure everything’s working. The flight right after inspection is always a good one for keeping you on your toes. If someone accidentally left something in the wrong state while the plane was taken apart, the pilot often finds out on that first flight. The pre-flight inspection was more thorough than usual.

Just to make it interesting, I decided to take a long-ish trip up to Porterville. It’s an uncontrolled field up past Bakersfield in the central valley where I’ve had good luck with food before. It’s an hour and 15 minutes or so in the air, which is a nice part of an afternoon to spend.

The trip out was pretty straightforward. I did get a good look at Poso Kern County – an airport I once judged the wind at by watching smoke from a trash fire. Overall, though it was a nice clear flight without too much going on.

Porterville’s the kind of small town airport where you might get to wave to a father and his child out airplane watching as you pull up to the parking area. And I did.

The former Michael’s restaurant at Porterville has closed, replaced by the Airway Café. The food’s still good, though the menu seems less varied than it used to. The little bar area was also closed today, but that may be because it was Sunday.

I decided to look around a bit in the area after I took off before going back to SMO. The central valley is where I go to pretend I fly in the midwest. It’s flat and usually clear with a bunch of farmland. It’s nice to zip around a couple thousand feet off the ground checking out the little towns and knowing you’ve got choices if you need to land suddenly. To me, that’s relaxing.

There’s a little airport on the sectional near Pixley but that the airport facility directory has listed as closed indefinitely. Pixley’s not far west of Porterville, so I overflew the airport at about 2500′. It’s closed and it ain’t opening any time soon. I really don’t know why it isn’t coming off the sectional; the airport’s clearly suffered significant neglect if not outright damage. There’s certainly a story here that I’m curious about.

From Pixley I turned south to get a landing in at Delano. I’ve always had a soft spot for Delano, but it’s become sort of a joke between Brenda and me. I convinced her to come out with me flying one day and we went there for lunch. It was hot, the food wasn’t stellar, and the staff spent a lot of time watching telenovellas rather than helping us out. It’s the placeholder for an unpleasant destination for a non-pilot. She wasn’t with me today, so I stopped off to make sure the runway was still there and the restaurant was still open. I didn’t eat, but all was well.

Coming out of Delano through the Gorman pass for home, I discovered an interesting problem. I hadn’t planned to be doing any instrument flying today, but there was a thick billow of smoke from the big fire outside Santa Barbara. I expected that I’d be able to go around it, but that didn’t look feasible – I heard pilots up near 12,000′ reporting IMC. I could go under it, but the plan was to cross the Gorman pass, which is pretty high; I don’t like to go through there much below 7000′, and the thought of going through there lower with poor visibility didn’t sound attractive. I wound up requesting and receiving a pop-up IFR clearance from a very busy Bakersfield Approach controller. I was in solid IMC for 10 minutes or so, then popped out the other side and cancelled before I actually reached the pass. Perhaps the clearance was overkill, but as Ron Post says, “I like overkill.”

Perhaps only a pilot can love an unexpected opportunity to fly in actual instrument conditions, but I did enjoy it.

On the way in to Santa Monica I got to pass over a Southwest jet inbound to Burbank by a little more than 500′. We both saw each other and the controller cleared me to do so, but it’s still kind of cool to pass right over a landing jet. Well, it is for me, your mileage may vary.

It was a day of unexpected pleasures.

A couple weeks ago I posted about the bees that seemed to be setting up shop at my local airport. Last Thursday, 29 Mar, I was taking a friend up for a tour of LA and heard and saw more.

First, when we got there the formerly bee-covered Cirrus was gone. We were told that the owner had ripped the cover off – bees and all – fired up the engine and gone to another airport. This left a few perturbed bees running around SMO, but though we were around for a while, none of them bothered us. They tell me that most of the bees in LA county are africanized, so that’s pretty good luck.

Other than coming back and finding that the bees had taken my parking space that was my whole involvement. But the story I heard was that our friend with the bee-covered plane had proceeded out to his destination and only found a few intrepid bees still gripping his aircraft on arrival. On departure to return to SMO, a few more wayward bees had appeared. When he returned to the ramp, however, the remaining local bees began returning to the plane and re-establishing the clump.

After the clump began re-forming they summoned a beekeeper who, I’m told, vacuumed them up – queen and all – and there’s been peace in the valley since then.

I would have loved to see the little buggers clomp back on to the plane on return, though.

I was up shooting approaches this morning with my favorite CFI and we saw a pretty amazing thing on the ramp when we got back. A swarm of bees was attached to one of the aircraft parked on the ramp, in full on “protect the queen” mode.

That whole dark patch is bees. I hope for the owner’s sake that the bees are just moving the hive somewhere and that they haven’t decided that they’d rather have a moving base of operations. Man, what a potential nightmare.

Practical matters aside, I’d really hate to have this happen. When I was younger I had a serious phobia about stinging insects – I sat on a hive full of ground-based bees at an impressionable age. I’m pretty well over that now, but I still wouldn’t like have to deal with a hive in the Archer.

I’ll be hosing my plane down with wasp and bee killer for the forseeable future. (Image courtesy of Andy Hoover.)

I went off to French Valley for lunch today, after a long day working yesterday. It was an absolutely gorgeous day; I heard several airports reporting greater than 50 miles visibility. The trip to French Valley is about an hour of things to see over LA itself and then into the drier parts between LA and San Diego.

I don’t know what it was today, but on the way out no one, but no one heard my callsign correctly. After the first couple controllers had trouble, I was working on saying it slowly and distinctly, but still had to correct it. It’s kind of funny, because no one asked me to say it again, but no one got it right either.

The trip out was gorgeous, but there was lots of traffic. I think I saw planes at every airport I passed, including Compton, which is often a ghost airport. I got to watch a couple transport jets go through the pattern at John Wayne, but had two traffic alerts called for me nearer French Valley. I was seeing a fair number of planes, but obviously not all of them. Always nice to get help from controllers.
French Valley was about as busy as usual on a weekend, which means there was plenty going on. The restaurant seemed a little overstaffed, which is to be expected at 1:00 on Super Bowl Sunday, I suppose. Always a good airport to hang out and watch the traffic, though it was hot and dry today (most airports were in the high 20’s (Celsius) and had dewpoints below zero).

The trip back was much less eventful, though I did see a pilot land on the grass next to the runway at Corona. I would guess this was an instructor exposing a student to a real grass strip landing, but there’s no way to tell. The pilot certainly didn’t seem to be in distress.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. I did see a Super Bowl party (I assume a Super Bowl party, definitely a party) in a hangar at SMO.

After getting back from our trip to NC, I hadn’t been up in the air since. Primarily this was due to time crunches and weather, but I also had a few days where I was stuffed up enough that I didn’t want to be climbing and descending. I even missed a perfectly flyable opportunity to fly down to San Diego for the big race last week, due to a bum forecast. In fact, I didn’t log a single hour in January. Thankfully, after heading off to SMO today after work, I logged time on both 31 Jan 2006 and 1 Feb 2007.

I just sat in the pattern for probably half an hour, which is always good fun at Santa Monica. I even got a short approach in, and got a compliment from the tower on it.

Good to be back up.

I’ve finally written up a pilot’s eye view of our trip to Asheville and Frisco this year.  Enjoy.