The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

I could go on and on about how the late-Autumn crop burnoff left a surreal smoke layer over the Valley, or how when we returned to Hayward someone had stolen our plane's parking spot and we had to do this creative little game of musical chairs to park it somewhere inconspicuous in the darkness near the NBC11 truck (I'm still waiting for the airport police to call… :-)), or how rugged the Tuolumne River canyons around our destination were, but I talk too much, so instead of letting me yammer on about today's flight out to Pine Mountain Lake (E45 / Groveland), just click on the image above and go to the flash snapshot / slides gallery instead. A thousand words and all that… (but you'll need a Flash plugin, which you probably already have anyway).

Artist 1

The tops of the Fremont and Oakland hills to my right are shrouded in dark grey stratus, while to my left the late afternoon sunshine's still lighting up the Bay and the Coast Range along the Peninsula. The weather ahead is deeply confusing — it looks like classic scud-running stuff up beyond Oakland, but looks are really deceiving today, and Napa — many miles further up the Bay beyond Oakland — is reporting good VFR conditions. In any case, the ceiling's still pretty high over Hayward (KHWD, my destination and home base). I'm with NorCal for flight following back to Hayward, and things seem quiet. Artist 1 in the right seat snaps a few photos of the Garage Mahals below us.

Suddenly, an RV of some sort appears off my right, a little above us, about a mile off towards the hills, and doing maybe fifty knots faster than us. Simultaneously, NorCal calls it for us, then says there appears to be another aircraft a mile or so behind it, same altitude, same speed, same track. Neither plane is talking to NorCal (but they're not required to at that point — I guess I'm just the sort of wimp that always talks to ATC if it's there). Both of them have just apparently scud-run in from over the hills, but that's not certain either — they may have just followed us up from San Jose. We check in with Hayward tower, get the straight-in for the left, and a few seconds later the RV's check in. And then a few seconds later two C172's check in; we can also hear another 172 approaching from the northwest. Everyone's converging at once on Hayward. There are also several planes in the pattern. Cool! I think… who's on first? This is the sort of beehive I like joining, that makes me nostalgic for the organized chaos of Oakland sometimes. I'm told to keep forward speed up and get slotted in behind the second RV. It's moving. And it's very low, a real problem with the noise-sensitive areas under the approaches. And it's way off the extended centreline.

The Cessna off to our left is told to climb a little and pass over the RV's for the right; we get cleared number three for the left. Several downwinds are lengthened for our arrivals. The arrival from the northwest is given a short approach, with the other other Cessna being slotted in behind the Cessna-that's-going-over-the-RV's for the right. Cool! I watch in amusement from the back of the line as Tower smoothly juggles the lot of us with minimal confusion and just a slight hint of impatience in his voice for the Cessna that didn't quite understand the urgency of the short approach, and a minute or two later we're all on the ground, where there's now a similar mess contending for taxiway alpha. All of the arriving Cessnas turn out to be from the club, and the resulting pirouetting little dance to get us all into the very tight parking spaces on the ramp in front of the club's worth the price of admission.

A few minutes later after tying down at the CalAir ramp there's not a plane in the sky, it's dead quiet except for the noise from the fueling truck. I ask Artist 1 whether she enjoyed the flight. Yeah, she says, I especially liked that beehive thing at the end. Well, me too, except it probably looked worse to me than to her.


* * *

This is yet another one of those Plan A / Plan B flights, but I won't bore you with the details of why we flew Plan C instead (let's just say the "INOP" sticker on the main glideslope / OBS steam gauge made me pine for the G1000 glass in the other planes…). Artist 1 has flown with me before, and claims to really enjoy flying, so I drag her along for a VFR trip to Salinas (KSNS) down in the Salinas Valley (recently in the US news due to the poisoned spinach episode — I always knew spinach was evil).

I bring along one of my older Nikon DSLRs to take some photos of the Altamont wind farm and just generally document the land from the air. Artist 1 somewhat shares my obsession with the abstract patterns, and she ends up taking about half the images from the trip, especially over the Salinas Valley. The one on the left here's a classic shot from about 3,500' above the windfarm; that menorah-shaped road / windmill plantation on the centre right's been a landmark for me for a while. Experiencing these from above is always a sight for sore eyes, but from ground level the windfarm's astonishing, all smooth movement and the whooshing, clanking, clicking noise of huge blades being pushed through the air (the windfarm stretches for miles in each direction). As an engineer I'm always fascinated by the progression of different technologies visible from the ground — the older, louder, less efficient blades progressing through the new, much wierder-looking things that have sprouted up in the last decade.

The problem with this sort of photography is the really annoying reflections and colour issues you get when shooting through the typical crap dirty glass on small GA planes; today's images show the problems in abundance, unfortunately. When I have the time to prepare, the results can be a lot better, but just throwing the old camera into my backpack and pointing it out the window is a lot more fun, I guess.

In any case, the results this time were very mixed, but it's definitely the time of the year to be doing this: late harvest / planting season, lots of varieties of brown and gold, a slight tinge of green starting to appear, workers and equipment in the fields….






* * *

At Salinas we watch a T28C fire up and taxi noisily past us on the ramp; it spends the next thirty minutes or so in the pattern doing touch and goes, mixing it with the 152's and such. You still see a lot of these planes at places like Salinas, Oakland, Hayward, Livermore, etc. — it's gratifying to see so many still flying, given the gallons of money they must burn in those radials every hour….

One of the guys from what's now Acme Aviation / Light Sport Airplanes West in the terminal building wanders over to us as we're poking about looking at the two really small interesting-looking planes next to us on the ramp. I have no idea what they are, but he explains they're new Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) that Acme's now selling and using to train people for the Sport Pilot Certificate. He patiently answers all my questions about the engines (Rotax, of course), the panel (very basic -- see image below, click on it for much larger version), the cost, etc., and lets us clamber about over the planes even though I tell him we're not ever going to be in the market for something like this. I have to admit, though, the planes looked slick and not the sort of modified old Piper J3 you might expect an LSA to be — I can actually imagine someone who knew nothing about flying looking at one of these things and thinking "Cool! I could fly one of those…" in a way he or she wouldn't when faced with a typically crappy old 172 or 152 that's been around the block a few times too many. And Cessna's apparently developing its own LSA variant, which looks just as slick and nice. You could certainly entice me up in one of them; given the 4.2 GPH fuel consumption and a decent airspeed, it'd be just the thing for solo or dual Bay Tours, etc. Not sure I'd want to take it much further afield, though, especially with a panel as bare as that (but apparently you can get typical Garmin GPS 530 (etc.) installations — which would kinda turn it into a light GA plane rather than an LSA, I guess). On the other hand, it's a good plane for something like a Garmin 396 or 496 (neither of which I own — my old Garmin 195's still going strong).

Aviatrix Does Berkeley

Surprise! Aviatrix not only really exists, but she has a strong Canadian accent (I'm not sure why that surprised me, but it did. I guess I'm not exactly the sharpest tool in the toolshed with things like this). And that's all I'll say about her real-life existence :-).

We'd arranged to meet in Downtown Berkeley, at one of my regular haunts, but after 30 minutes of standing on the corner waiting at the appointed time, it dawned on me that maybe Ms Aviatrix's urban traffic survival and navigation skills weren't quite as well-honed by driving weedwhackers around the Frozen North as you might expect (I'm being polite :-)). Sure enough, when we finally met (after a couple of hurried cell phone calls as she drove around claiming to be not-quite-lost), she had some, erm, deeply-resonant things to say about Bay Area traffic and California driving in general, subjects close to my heart. And she turned up driving a rented PT Cruiser, about which I've promised not to make cheap jokes or snide remarks (I'll let her do that). And yes, she was wearing that shirt (hey, it's mid autumn in Northern California, which means it's t-shirt time).

We took a pleasant evening stroll around Telegraph Avenue, the University, and Downtown, with a long break for coffee and bad pastries at the Mediteraneum (a classic Berkeley coffee shop on Telegraph a block from People's Park), where she spent some time very patiently trying to explain to me where the various companies-posing-as-mammals and animal-named places really were. But since she was talking to someone who thinks Seattle is the Deep North, and who knows about (aboot?) as much about Canada as he knows about Kansas (read: "very little" — it's sort of Baja Greenland, isn't it?), some of it went right over my head. But hell, it sounded exotic, and some of the names stuck enough that I was able to find them in my atlas later. I was entranced by stories of a part of the world where you can fly literally hundreds of miles in any direction at 2500' MSL and not hit anything (try that in California…) and where they have snow that's not on the sides of high mountains and not primarily for skiing on.

I got to hear some very funny (but sadly unrepeatable) stories about her experiences in the industry, and we did a lot of the typical pilot talk about approaches, weedwhacker flying (there's a bunch of weedwhackers based at Oakland that I see a lot), general life, etc. I was surprised to discover that she'd flown GA out of Oakland (which was where I did my original training at roughly the same time as she was learning to fly). It's funny (but, I guess, predictable) that even though she typically flies steam-gauged piston twins out in the Middle Of Nowhere for a living (where NDB's rule, VORs are rare, ILS's almost non-existent, and towers a luxury), and I fly little glass-cockpit 172's for fun in a chaotically-busy airspace with a huge choice of approaches and airport types, there was a lot of stuff in common. This extended to a fascination for old navigation techniques like A-N ranges and celestial navigation, oddball airplanes, and weird gear (she'd just been down at the fascinating Hiller Aviation Museum, where's there's plenty of that).

All in all, as Sam also discovered, it was a lot of fun meeting The Person Behind The Blog. I think next time she's down this way we'll organise a fly-in lunch or dinner or something at Napa or Livermore. We shall see…

The Short Approach

No GA in CA for me, again, for a while — I'm in New York, on assignment in our Chelsea office (hip digs, to be sure — see left…), surrounded by the media types I secretly want to be when I grow up (ah, Fashion. Life's tough, eh?!). But while there's no GA, the Expressway Visual 31 approach into La Guardia — while listening in to ATC on United's channel 9 from a window seat in the first class cabin — now that's flying: after having been asked to keep up our speed all the way from SWEET (?) intersection through reporting the tanks in sight to the sharp right over the expressway, the resulting short swooping approach over Shea Stadium and tight full reverser sound-and-fury landing in the 757 from Denver's quite the experience. No, that's what I want to do when I grow up.

Get In And Go!

One of those "Just get in and go..." flights: a brilliant warm sharp utterly cloudless autumn evening, a somewhat impromptu VFR flight in one of Cal Air's older 172SP's to… who cares?! In the end it's a quick hop over the hills from Hayward (KHWD) to Livermore (KLVK) for some night pattern work ('round and 'round…), then a leisurely slightly-longer hop out to Sacramento Executive (KSAC) for no reason at all except that I enjoy the sights of the Delta at night from 3000' (the lights of the various cities and towns, the roads traced in red and white, the reflections on the dark sloughs and canals, the 2,000' towers near Locke), and because it's a lot of fun just … arriving … without a flight plan and without obsessing about altitude, heading, final approach fixes, missed approach points, etc. Light relief, I guess. At Sacramento we swap seats and Boyan (my usual flight share partner) flies us back to Hayward VFR with flight following, and I get an even better view of the view. Mesmerising.

OK, so my landings weren't as good as they should have been, and I was a bit rusty on the VFR side of the radio work, but I didn't break anything or kill anyone. A lot of fun.

Woohoo!!

It's Fleet Week, and the Blue Angels are in town. Not only that, but this year Fleet Week coincides with the Red Bull Air Race here in San Francisco. Lots of TFRs, but who cares? It's aerobatics paradise, and the sight of the Blue Angels practicing twice a day over Downtown and Fishermens Wharf (and I mean over — a lot of the maneuvers are done above the City rather than over the Bay), and passing the building I work in a few hundred metres away, a few hundred feet AGL… well, what a sight. And the sound's astonishing, it's loud enough to regularly set off car alarms in the streets around us, it reverberates around the canyons between the buildings, it creeps up on you suddenly in the back alleys 'round here. And it's all free!

I Hate Flying!

Yeah, well, I guess it's not really flying, but sitting there at FL370 heading for Boston in seat 19A without being able to see outside because they want you to pull the shades down so other people can watch the movies… well, that's definitely not flying. Urgh. Not my fave pastime. So no GA in CA for me for a while, but I'm tempted to say that if I get the time I'd like to try the GA in MA, but since The People Who Pay The Bills keep changing their minds about how long I'm out here (a week? ten days? three weeks?), that seems unlikely. But it would give me a new meaning to the term "Bay Tour", no?

Command And Control

Grace under pressure, finally? I'm under the Cone Of Stupidity trying to set up the VOR/DME GPS-A practice approach into Tracy (KTCY) in the darkness over the Central Valley. I've just been vectored from the previous KSCK ILS-RWY 29R missed approach hold at ORANG intersection towards the extended final approach course for the new approach, and I confidently reach over to the G1000, press direct for Tracy airport, then hit the "proc" button, then the "select approach" option. Instead of the usual menu of approaches, I get an unfamiliar menu that stops me dead. Now what? I do the usual Garmin thing to try to get to the field in the menu that looks like it should give me a menu of approaches, but that doesn't work. Nothing works — I'm having one of those GPS Moments where nothing I do gets the expected results, and since I'm flying by hand, I start worrying. What the hell is going on? How the hell do I fix it? But that little voice in the back of my head kicks in (the result of long years of teaching by John, mostly, I suspect), and I suddenly think: who cares? I'll just do it with the VORs. Hell, it's the VOR GPS A approach, isn't it?! And so I do, and in a few seconds I've got the course on the CDI VOR 1 display from Manteca (ECA) VOR, and the cross radials dialed in from Modesto VOR on the VOR 2 overlay (something I would have done once the GPS version had been set up in any case). This gives me the luxury of debugging on-the-fly, which gets me nowhere, and so I finally just set the GPS into OBS mode based on ECA VOR and the course interception and final approach go just fine. As does going missed, using the newly-NOTAMED missed approach procedures with the GPS still in OBS mode (yes, it was far easier the new way). Boyan B., my safety pilot in the right seat, doesn't seem too fussed by the rocky start to the approach, so I count this as a real success. If this had been IMC I would have acted a little differently (in particular, I'd have used the autopilot rather than hand-fly it through the confusion), but the underlying principle's the same: don't panic, and concentrate on what's important.

The whole flight's been a bit like this so far: lots of small things going wrong, but I seem to have developed an ability to not panic but step back and work around the issue. For example, I was unable to get the autopilot to couple with the glideslope on the only coupled approach I did, the second ILS-29R into Stockton; in that case I gave up in disgust and set the AP's vertical speed to 500fpm down, which (with appropriate attention to the throttle) tracked the glideslope nicely. So far, in every case I manage to keep my cool and work around the problem, and I end up feeling pretty good about it all.

We go back to NorCal on the missed and ask for the practice localiser approach back into Hayward (KHWD), our home base. A short while later we're back on the ground, 2.5 hours logged, 2.3 continuous hours under the hood, five approaches (GPS, VOR, LOC, and 2 x ILS), a couple of holds, a bunch of enroute flying — it all adds up….

* * *

One of the aims of this evening's flight is to take heed of John's observations about the difference between flying glass and flying the old way. As one of his students, I learned both the traditional instrument flying techniques and the glass cockpit techniques with him, and I'm curious just how much the old ways have contaminated my glass flying. And of course, it turns out he's right — I really am treating the glass instruments as just glorified versions of the older gauges, when I really should be adopting a more "command and control" approach to things. It's not hard, and in many cases it's really just "obvious", and by the end of the flight I'm having no trouble using the AI as more of a flight director thing than as something to react to. The difference in things like heading and altitude stability is obvious — I really am finding the G1000 easier to fly than the old steam gauges. It's an attitude thing, really, in every sense of the word.

The other reason for this flight (apart from the fun of actually flying, of course…) is to maintain currency. No, I'm nowhere near losing instrument currency legally, but I like to keep my hand in, and as long as someone like Boyan's up for it, a decent workout like this evening's keeps me sharp. Or sharper than if I just did the minimums, I hope.

Yet Another JABBAS

It never gets old: the sunset from 2,500' over San Francisco Bay, the beautifully-textured and shaped marine layer pouring through the Golden Gate with the two red towers sticking out, the reds, purples, golds, and browns of the Marin headlands and Mt Tamalpais, the lights and reflections of The City itself from the shoreline, the ships and boats on the Bay, the bridges, the distant brooding darkness of Mt Diablo, the busy-but-friendly flight following from NorCal Approach…. Just Another Boring Bay Area Sunset, I guess, this time with Sheena C., another colleague from my day job, who's consented to potter about in the little 172 with me for an hour or two's meandering around the Bay, entirely VFR for once. A nice leisurely trip from Hayward up over the Diablo Valley, a short landing at Napa (KAPC), then a long slow lazy go-where-we-want thing over Angel Island, Alcatraz, Fisherman's Wharf, Marin, the Bridge, etc. Not a bad diversion from the strains of the day.

Back at Hayward we sit on a bench in the late evening calm and eat a snack in the darkness beside the club. We watch a few late stragglers arriving or departing on 28L long after the tower's closed for the night, and talk about the flight. Sheena's been in small planes before, but as she says, flying in California is so different from flying in most of Texas or over the fly-over states where she flew — here's there's always the landscape: mountains, oceans, canyons, rivers… and it's hypnotically-beautiful rather than just hypnotic.

The idyl's spoiled completely by Sheena getting stung by a bee as we sit there eating. I'm never going to hear the end of this one — she survives what everyone's telling her is a dangerous thing to do ("those small planes are always falling out of the sky!!") only to be bitten by a bee. I drive her back to her place wondering whether she's going to die from anaphylactic shock or whatever, but she makes it back to her place without any obvious problems.

[Two day later: Sheena's entire arm managed to get incredibly itchy and there's still an angry red patch around the sting, but otherwise there's no obvious harm. I guess I survived that one…].

By Any Means Necessary, Redux

During my instrument training I had an irritating time one night on the VOR A approach into Tracy (KTCY). The published missed approach procedure for that approach struck me as particularly difficult to fly, and I wrote that in hindsight it would have been easier (and safer, I guess) to ignore the written missed instructions (which included getting onto the SAC 157 radial inbound) and just fly the "wrong" radial (ECA 229) with DME to the missed approach holding point (TRACY intersection). The hold is so close to the airport itself that there's little chance of intersecting and tracking the SAC-157 radial before getting past TRACY intersection.

Well, lo and behold, here's a NOTAM I just noticed:

!FDC 6/0993 TCY FI/T TRACY MUNI, TRACY, CA.
VOR OR GPS A, AMDT 5...
MISSED APPROACH: IMMEDIATE CLIMBING RIGHT TURN TO 2000 VIA
HEADING 320 AND ECA R-229 TO TRACY INT AND HOLD.
DME REQUIRED.

Someone's listening, I guess :-). Or someone complained loud enough… (not me).

Follow The Turkey

I plan a short trip with Ben, a friend visiting from New Zealand, down to Monterey (KMRY) and back to Hayward (KHWD). At least parts of it are going to have to be IFR — Monterey's reporting the usual summer coastal stratus — but I need the IFR exercise, so that's OK. And Ben's flown with me before (he used to live just down the road from me in Berkeley), so he's not worried by the idea of disappearing into the clouds, and the view's always great along almost any route to and from Monterey. So I decide to do it as a full IFR in (mostly) VMC thing.

But Woodside VOR (OSI) has been NOTAM'd out of service for a while, and my interpretation of the FARs indicates that even with the spiffy new G1000 and GPS I can't use OSI for en-route navigation with the usual Victor airways route to Monterey. So I file direct, mostly just to see what happens when I call Deliverance at Hayward a few hours later. Sure enough, I get the usual clearance — basically vectors, OSI, SNS (Salinas VOR), direct — and, for the first time in my short IFR life, I get to say "unable clearance". I tell the clearance guy that OSI's NOTAM'd out and while we can navigate it easily, I don't think we can do the clearance legally. He sounds a little surprised that OSI's out and that it would make any difference, but he's friendly and rather curious about it, and says he'll talk to NorCal and see what they say while we taxi off to the runup area and sort things out over there. He comes back a minute later and basically asks us what clearance we'd want instead of the canned one. I reply something along the lines of "basically the same route but with vectors — a sort of a wink and a nod thing" (it helps to have a British(ish) accent at times like this). He says "gotcha!" and a minute or so later we have a clearance that cleverly never mentions OSI but in the end will probably have us flying pretty much exactly what we would have flown had OSI been in service. I feel really dumb doing this — it's VMC around the Bay and we could probably have navigated visually to OSI from at least 10 miles away (you can actually see OSI VOR from that distance if you know what you're looking for up there in the hills), and GPS would get us there more accurately — but I push the point with bloody-minded determination (OK, I have to admit I'm also curious about what happens in circumstances like this as well).

We spend the obligatory 15 minutes waiting next to Hayward's 28L for release, watching the steady stream of Southwest 737s passing just 1000' above us on the ILS into Oakland's 29, and then we're off. And as soon as we're handed off to NorCal we get a clearance mentioning Victor 25 And The Forbidden VOR and I have to remind them it's out of service. This time the reaction's a lot quicker, if less friendly, and I negotiate a vector routing. So vectors it is, all the way down the coast towards the approach. And, for one reason or another (mostly traffic), there are a lot of vectors this time… (and much as I end up feeling like I've caused a lot of irritation to the ATC people, I don't want to be the one picked on by the FAA just because I tried to make things easier for the controllers. I sort of resent being made to feel bad about all this, but that's life, I guess).

The ILS 10R approach into Monterey is fairly straightforward, and I've done it before in actual, but sinking into the marine layer over Monterey Bay — with the various nearby ranges poking out of the layer in several directions — never gets old. This time it's going to be to near minimums, with reports of what sounds like a darkening gloom below a 500' ceiling (that would be a good description of pretty much any summertime evening in Monterey, approach or no approach, come to think of it). And, for reasons that have always escaped me, autopilot (coupled) approaches are prohibited on the ILS here, so I'll be flying manually the entire way, or at least from somewhere before the FAF (yes, I know it's not a FAF for the ILS, but the localiser-only FAF is still a mental checkpoint for me). I may have to go missed for real. I prep carefully, internalising the missed procedure several time while Ben looks out over the cloud layer and takes a bunch of photos. I can hear that there's a Cherokee about five miles ahead of us; the controller keeps pronouncing "Cherokee" a lot like "turkey", so much so that Ben finally asks me in all seriousness what sort of plane a "turkey" is (like most people 'round here, I heard it as "Jerky", but never mind). I can hear that there's also an American Airlines regional turboprop behind us out of San Francisco bound for the same approach.

Things seem pretty quiet and I'm enjoying the view when the first little sign of trouble insinuates itself into things: the NorCal controller confuses us with the Cherokee in front of us. Just as we're recovering from that rather minor slip, a VFR flight at the very edge of the controller's radio range starts repeatedly calling for flight following, stomping on several transmissions. In the air all of us can hear the VFR flight just fine, so the controller asks whether any of us — the Turkey, the Turboprop, or our little Cessna — can either get the tail number of the other aircraft or encourage him to wait a few minutes until he's in range. This goes on too long, and while the controller's juggling the VFR request thing and getting the Turkey onto the localiser, he keeps us high too long for my comfort. We approach the extended localiser way out over the (rough, cold) Pacific on a vector at least 3,000 feet higher than I'd like. When I can get a word in edgewise I ask for lower and the controller, sounding apologetic, immediately clears me for what would be the appropriate altitude at this stage, then goes back to juggling the Turkey and Turboprop. But he's about to blow us through the localiser, and I'm having to drop out of the sky (and into the marine layer) at a deeply-uncomfortable vertical speed of above 1,000 FPM. I start feeling bad about all this, but we're still well outside the glideslope interception point so we'll have time to stabilise. I plan to use the autopilot to get initial trim and heading correct on the extended localiser centreline then disconnect it and fly manually before we hit the cloud bank. No big deal. But that extended centreline is coming right up and the controller's still trying to sort out the VFR flight. Suddenly he asks me for ten knots slower, something no one ever asks a C172 for on the approach; it's especially odd since I'm already only doing about 90 KIAS because I can hear that the Turkey in front of me is not a long way ahead of us. In response I blurt out that we're about to bust the localiser. That gets his attention, and we get an immediate heading for the localiser, and cleared for the approach. I make a sharp turn onto the localiser, blow through it a few dots, then converge on the correct track. By now I'm feeling a little stressed, and we're about to sink into the marine layer; but I set the plane up, track the localiser with the autopilot, set the AP's vertical speed appropriately, get it all into trim, then disengage the autopilot before we hit the clouds.

The decision altitude for this approach is 480' for a touchdown zone elevation of about 190', so the decision height is significantly above the usual 200' ILS decision height. ATIS is reporting a 500' ceiling, which sounds fairly doable, but personal experience with Monterey tells me that's not the full story: the marine layer over the coastline (the approach end of the runway) is often slightly lower than over the airport itself, so I have the feeling that we may not break out at 700'; we may not even break out at 480'. We descend in the gloom with a fair tailwind and droplets of water streaming across the windshield, and get switched to tower. I can hear the Turkey getting taxi instructions on tower frequency, which means he didn't go missed, which helps my optimism a little, and apart from the early little SNAFUs, things are now going fairly smoothly; I feel fully in control again. The autpilot's set things up nicely, and tracking the localiser manually goes well. We're cleared to land, and we keep going down the glideslope, a little high, but slower than usual (still at 80 KIAS). 1000' … 900' … 800' … 700' … no sign of breakout, things as gloomy and impenetrable as ever … 600' … at 550', just as I'm about to firewall the throttle and go missed, we suddenly see the approach lights ahead of us, then a few seconds later I can see the runway lights. Cool! It's like winning a video game… I land and get off the runway as quickly as possible, thinking of the regional behind us. It lands as we're turning onto the parallel taxiway; the regional back-taxis down the runway for the main terminal.

I'd told Ben not say anything from very early in the approach because this was going to be stressful, and I finally ask him what he thought of it all. He claims he enjoyed it a lot, which surprises me, but then he has to get me to fly him back up to Hayward, so he would say that, wouldn't he? He asks me whether I could have refused the approach when the controller didn't seem too on top of things (he's flown enough to follow the basics on the radio), and I explain about going missed and that I'm supposed to be in charge and could have gone missed without penalty at any time if I'd got uncomfortable enough. Like me, he really enjoys the let-down into the soft clouds, and the appearance of the approach lights through the gloom. I'm glad he enjoyed it — I'm not sure too many other friends who fly with me would have quite the same reactions to a near-minimums approach in early-evening IMC.

The flight back is pretty straightforward, the only IMC being the first few minutes of departure. Predictably, the ceiling on departure is several hundred feet higher than on the approach, and the late sunset visible from above the marine layer on breakthrough is stunning. On handoff to NorCal I ask for and get the usual shortcut via BUSHY intersection, saving nearly 80nm off the canned route, and except for the fact that several controllers seem to think we're heading for Oakland rather than Hayward, things go smoothly and nicely all the way back. It's late Saturday evening by the time we arrive on the ground at Hayward, and the place is dead.

JABBAS

Yes, Just Another Boring Bay Area Sunset from 7000': the mountains of the Coastal and Diablo Ranges in silhouette or sharp relief against a darkening orange sky, the sun setting into the slight mist over the Pacific, the same mist extending in tendrils along the canyons and valleys between the peaks, the view extending for maybe 100 miles in each direction, NorCal Approach calling 747s and smaller traffic for us we as head up over the Santa Cruz range... but I'm under the bloody Cone Of Stupidity again, so I miss most of this, sitting there ruefully (and not for the first time...) thinking "People pay hundreds — in some cases thousands — of dollars just to see this view, and I'm paying to block all this out?". Hmmmm.

* * *

I've been spoiling myself by flying the club's G1000-equipped 172s almost exclusively lately (VFR as well as IFR), so I thought since I have no life I'd spend Saturday evening flying one of our older 172s under the hood with just the steam gauges (plus a panel GPS) to see if I still have the Right Stuff without all the glass and an autopilot. "It doesn't even have an HSI!" I think in horror as I sit there in the left seat waiting for Hayward (KHWD) Deliverance to give us the usual clearance, wondering what the hell some of those thingies on the front panel are for. Boyan, my usual flight-share partner in the right seat, finds this vaguely amusing, but I'm sitting there thinking that two years ago I'd have found this attitude incomprehensible. No HSI?! I have to twiddle OBS's with a mechanical knob?! (of course where The Aviatrix currently flies, she doesn't even get to twiddle VOR OBSs — there are no VOR's up there (that's another world entirely, one that intrigues me from this distance)). But it's all very familiar after a minute or two (some things you never lose), and after the usual delay waiting next to Hayward's 28L for release, we're off into the evening.

Miraculously the entire flight down to Monterey (KMRY) is utterly routine: no altitude problems, only momentary lapses with heading (usually as I struggle to reprogram the GPS), the radio work goes just fine (you can get away with a lot when you have an Anglo-Australian accent in this part of the world), and if the initial stages of the LOC/DME RWY 28L approach into Monterey are a little, erm, agricultural, I can always blame the bad vector NorCal gives us that blows us straight through the localiser (it wasn't really her fault — she was contending with an extremely gabby VFR flight that kept stepping on both her and me, and she was really apologetic about it afterwards). As I've noted elsewhere, the Monterey LOC/DME 29L approach goes over some rather interesting terrain, and done in the latter stages of sunset, it's apparently breathtaking. Or so Boyan tells me, as he flies us home back up over the Santa Cruz range and across to Hayward.

A really enjoyable IFR flight in near-perfect VFR conditions. Wish I could afford the time and money to do this more often.

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The most interesting thing about the evening for me was that I still actually find it easier to keep a non-G1000 172 level than the G1000 version when hand-flying. Sure that G1000 glass AI is (relatively) huge, but the little turn coordinator in the older 172s is instantaneous, and easy to see out of the corner of your eye as you're looking at the other instruments, and I find myself once again using the TC more than the AI as a basic instrument. Not sure what to make of this really … probably nothing.