Number One With A Bullet

After the excursion to Maclellan Ex-AFB last month, I just had to see what was just across Sacramento at Mather Ex-AFB, if only to see what the infamous (sorry, unfamous) Mather Jet Center looked like up close and personal. So here I am sitting in the Cirrus 5,000' above Yet Another JABBAS — a beautiful layered red / orange / yellow sky reflected in the sloughs, channels, and rivers of the Delta below me — on an IFR-in-VMC flight to Mather. NorCal asks me to confirm I'm really on a 045 heading; I check and say sure, sounding a little suspicious; he says "must be quite a wind up there… let's try 035", which prompts me to do a quick-and-dirty crosswind calculation. A few minutes later when he says "75T, descend and maintain 4,000, heading 025", I repeat the instructions and then tell him I seem to have a fifty knot quartering headwind (I started to twig earlier — my groundspeed since about Rio Vista has slowly declined to about 115 KIAS while my airspeed stayed about about 140 KIAS). Curiously, reported ground wind speeds are all well below 10 knots, and DUATS didn't forecast any interesting winds aloft here. ATC responds with something like "OK, I'll keep that in mind for the following aircraft…". It still feels unlikely — what am I doing wrong? I never really resolve it, and on the ILS I have a huge crab angle all the way down to about 1,000' AGL, where it slowly reduces to nearly nothing by ground level. Weird. I'm still sure my calculations were off, but on the return journey half an hour later at 6,000' I had a nice groundspeed….

Anyway, as I discovered, there is no Mather Jet Center — or at least not as far as I could see. Which wasn't far — I was too easily distracted by the Army Medevac Blackhawks next to the taxiway and the various larger freight planes in various stages of loading or unloading all around. But hey, it's quite an airport — two long wide runways, lots of apron space, a nice (working) tower staffed by laid-back sounding controllers, and a bunch of interesting planes hanging around on the apron. It's a shame about the state of 22L a little up the runway from the threshhold — bumpy as hell, rutted, greasy and slippery from all the heavies hitting the surface at high speed — but otherwise, not a bad little big airport.

* * *

Earlier, while strolling over to Hayward's "green ramp" to pre-flight the Cirrus, I notice a bunch of people already hanging around the aircraft … students, being instructed on how to preflight it and a bunch of other club planes. The instructor beckons me over to the port wing and shows me a small but marked dent under the wing near the leading edge, ringed with a black circle and some sort of marker pen annotation. He says it's the result of a bullet, made sometime in the last week or two. I say it's just a rock, isn't it? Nah, he says, it's a bullet, and it's been reported. Probably so, I think, especially around here, but it still looks like a rock ding to me, but what would I know? There used to be a rifle range under 27L's left base at Oakland we used to joke about, and Hayward's not exactly the safest of cities, and there used to be all those stories about planes being shot at by the pot farmers in rural Humboldt and Mendocino counties…. I don't know. In any case he just cautions me to look at it after landing again to make sure nothing's got worse. I will, I will (and I do, of course — nothing to report…).

An AIM Too FAR

Off to John's place in Berkeley to do the (delayed) oral part of the BFR. If you've ever done a US BFR (biennial flight review) before, you'll know the drill: it's not really a test, just a review, but you don't want to be too unprepared or clueless or you may end up not getting a suitable endorsement in your logbook. I'm not actually due for a BFR until the end of March, but it seems smart to get it over and done with as soon as possible when it's actually convenient for me. And in any case I've already successfully got the flying bits out of the way along with the Cirrus checkout.

One of John's CFI candidates, a rather droll and amusing ex-Navy F14 pilot, sits in on the exercise and gets a good lesson in how to cope with smartass students like me; in return John and I get to hear a couple of choice stories of Navy flying around the remote bits of California and Nevada that I know well from the ground. Anyway, as soon as the review starts I realise I've concentrated on learning the wrong sections — I guess I expected to be grilled a lot on IFR regs and things like what happens to visibility minima when certain lighting components are out, but John's reviewing the more basic Part 91 and airspace stuff, which I've only skimmed earlier. OK, no big deal, and if I sometimes forget minimum cloud distances for things like Class G airspace or the procedure to be followed after an "incident" as opposed to an "accident" (and I can never remember off-hand the different definitions of either…), the rest of it is stuff that's either common sense or stuff you should have internalised a long time ago. In any case my own personal minimums are well above the legal versions for things like VFR visibilities and cloud clearance anyway, and you can always look up some of the more obscure and not-needed-on-the-fly regs up when needed.

So, after somewhere between an hour and 90 minutes (I sort of lost track, what with the sidetracks about Owens Valley, Saline Valley, Mt Ubehebe, Faultline Road, US 50 to Ely, etc.), I'm successfully signed off to fly for another two years. Well, something like that — there's all the other stuff that's more relevant, like the pursuit of IFR competence and proficiency, that the BFR just isn't really intended to help with. But it's a good start… and really a very easy way to stay at least minimally competent at flying and flying regs.

And you can blame John for the title :-).

Mr. Hat

The Cirrus has one of those little hat switches on the sidestick for electric aileron and elevator trim (just like the yoke for my sim). It's nice that it has both types of trim, and that it's in a convenient place on the stick, but it's touchy, especially with aileron trim. It's taking me some time to get used to it, and I'm learning that you have to use a lot of slight nudges in one direction or another to slowly converge on the correct trim without causing a major upset. But getting trim correct on this plane is important — it's barely dynamically stable, and has a bunch of oscillatory modes that manifest themselves as altitude swings or subtle turns, and flying it manually with the sidestick can be tiring over longer distances, especially as the control stiffness can cause you to jerk the bloody stick too far to one side or another, with predictable results.

So the trim hat switch has become something of an obsession for me: I find myself thinking of it as "Mr Hat", an alter ego at the end of my hand that seems to have something of a life of its own. Maybe I'll start talking to it with a Mr Garrisonesque accent. I dunno. But it's true that during this evening's hand-flown ILSs in the Cirrus I actually found it easier and more productive to keep Mr Hat at arms length (sorry), and only work on the finer points of trimming after almost everything else was taken care of. This does seem counterproductive, I admit, and it's something I need to work on more.

(And if you don't know who or what Mr Hat is, oh well, never mind).

* * *

Anyway, this little … wrinkle … aside, after another flight or two whose details I won't bore you with, I'm signed off for renting the club's Cirrus, I've maintained my instrument currency (but not necessarily my proficiency…), I'm 80% of the way through my BFR (just need to do the oral part), and I'm night current. Woohoo. Now if only the weather would improve….

Greetings from Jingletown! (Shameless Self-Promotion)

Due to the suprising (and short-lived) onslaught of rainy weather in the last couple of days I've had to postpone the next installment of the SR-20 sign-off thing with John, meaning I've had time to do something else in my studio instead. The result's unlikely to interest too many of you, but I'm shameless, so if you've got the time (or you're curious), wander over to my new Jingletown shop at CafePress.com. I've produced a bunch of slightly oddball and off-kilter postcards, greeting cards, coffee mugs, etc., for sale based mostly on my neighborhood, Oakland's Jingletown (it's about bloody time someone gave poor old Oaktown and the surrounding areas the recognition they deserve…). Yes, I'm a photographer in Real Life. And no, none of the images there are directly related to flying, but at least one of them's appeared in YAFB before (a free 8-pack of the postcards of their choice to the first person who identifies that image either in email or here :-)). And yes, that sunset clutter of masts and barges and derelict vessels is one of the views from my extended back yard in Oakland… :-).

So take a look…. Note that it's still a bit of a work in progress, but you can probably see where it's going (there are also a couple of other shops in store, so to speak, for my other ventures), and there's likely to be a few more images and products added over the next few months (and if you have any requests — like dog shirts or fridge magnets :-) — tell me and your wish is my command (or something like that)).

And if you're really curious and adventurous, I have an otherwise-unpublicised store on Imagekind.com for a very small selection of my high-resolution high-quality non-commercial photo prints. It's still embryonic, but it might give you food for photographic thought (Imagekind's prints are much better than I'd expected; the prints on canvas of some of my stuff surprised me by how good it was). And no, this is most definitely not how I make money from photography — the entire combined annual profits from these stores will probably barely cover an hour's SR-20 rental. You make money from PR shots and events in this industry, not arty-farty prints or snarky slightly-hip postcards :-).

Sooper Sekrit!

What I now know about the-airport-formerly-known-as-McClellan-Airforce-Base (KMCC, in suburban Sacramento), an airport I've never seen before today: it's big. Very big. It has a long single runway. It has a huge amount of empty ramp space with lots of painted yellow taxiway lines arcing around and leading … well I never did find out quite where. It has one of those tall military towers that's permanently closed. It has a lot of big rounded hangars. It has an immaculately-painted ATI DC8 freighter sitting on the ramp with the new high-bypass conversion engine cowls — but no engines inside the cowls (it took me a few seconds to work out what was wrong with the plane). It has a lot of very confusing and not-ICAO-conforming (well, not obviously-conforming) taxiway signs. It has a large number of really cool-looking OV-10 Broncos in white-and-red California CDF colours, and a bunch of older fire-fighters, C130s, and an odd-looking Canadair amphibian, all also in CDF colours. And it has a lot of helicopter traffic nonchalantly doing rather close training passes to each other in the pattern.

I know all this really useful information about an airport I would probably otherwise never visit because as I was pre-flighting the club's Cirrus SR-20 for my second familiarisation / checkout flight with John this morning, Keith, the club's owner, wandered by and casually asked where I was headed. I said I wasn't sure but we were probably off to Franklin (F72 — an airport I've also never seen before) for landing practice…. So can you do me a favor? Keith asks, and in a minute or so I've agreed to ferry a new starter motor and a club pilot to McClellan so we could get another of the club's planes back without a round of musical airplanes. It's not out of the way for us, and when John turns up a few minutes later he's OK with the whole thing, and soon Keith's joshing me about my Sooper Sekrit Mission To Save Calair. He'll pay for the fuel (not a small amount of money in the Cirrus…), and since John still owes me instruction hours, what's to complain about? As long as the other pilot isn't too worried about being ferried by a novice like me, at least.

Carl, the other pilot, turns up a few minutes later with not just the starter (which went into the baggage compartment in a taped-up cardboard box) but also with his small pet dog in a dog carrier (which stayed with Carl in the back seat). The dog's called Romeo, apparently, and both he and Carl are relatively quiet and well-behaved while in the air. Carl's a bit of a character, and has actually flown GA out of Bankstown in Sydney over the years (as have I); I've seen him around the club without really knowing who he is. Now I Know.

It's one of those beautiful warm Northern California winter days, bright sunshine and dry air, and you can see the Sierra from just above Hayward. Perfect flying weather. We get flight following all the way to McLellan, and the flight out from Hayward's both fast and routine (35 minutes door-to-door for what would normally be about a two hour drive). The landing's actually one of my best ever, and we face the first problem: where the hell are we going? Carl himself has never been here, and John's airport diagram (Jepp) isn't quite corresponding to what we see on the ground (John: "let's get off at Kilo just up there". Me: "I can only see Delta...". "That should be Kilo!". "It's Delta...". We never did find Kilo...).

Carl gets out his cell phone and calls a person-who-will-remain-nameless back at Calair (no, not Keith) to find out exactly which FBO we're heading for. What follows is a gentle argument over the phone that threatens to turn into a polite shouting match as Carl (and John and I) start to wonder if the-person-who-will-remain-nameless back at Calair has sent us to the wrong airport: there's also a Mather ex-AFB within spitting distance, also in Suburban Sacramento. I taxi around the ramp from one end of the FBO-ish part to the other and back again, between hangars, around the DC8, etc., with Carl trying not to lose his temper in the back while still on the phone. It's not getting any better, and just as the FBO actually calls us on CTAF to ask if we're lost, John sees the plane Carl's here to rescue in the hangar off to our right. The person-who-will-remain-nameless back at Calair is still insisting that the FBO's name is Mather Jet Center, even though we can actually see the plane in McLellan Jet Center. Carl shuts his phone off and we taxi around to park next to a nice-looking Citation (or whatever it was) in front of the FBO. I feel like a complete idiot, taxiing around like the Flying Dutchman, but just for once on the ramp, It Wasn't My Fault.

Carl gets out, starter and dog in tow, and we climb back in and taxi back to the runway for a series of touch and goes in the pattern. This turns out to be an educational and enjoyable twenty minutes or so: the normal landings actually go rather well (OK, there was no crosswind (or any wind) at all, which made it easy), and the no-flap landings were an interesting exercise in sink-rate / airspeed management and tradeoffs. The Cirrus drops like a rock at the recommended no-flaps landing approach speed of 85 KIAS when clean, and the difference between that and the Vg of 95 KIAS is quite marked. So my first no-flap landing using 85 KIAS has to be salvaged with more power than I'd hoped, but it was still a smooth landing. The next few times around I get better at managing and estimating things, and by the time we're heading back to Hayward (with flight following from NorCal) I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.

The first half of the flight back goes smoothly, so John asks if I want to do the GPS 28L approach back into Hayward just to get a feel for how it works in this plane. I'm up for it, and while I'm still feeling a bit iffy from a week's worth of sore throat and colds, I put on the Cone Of Stupidity and head for SUNOL intersection, and start programming the GPS. I suspect I'll probably put the hood back up when the going gets tough, but I'll try it anyway. But there's really not much to say about the approach — it went well, I didn't get out from under the hood until 50' above the MDA, and if the approach was a bit agricultural, it was well within the private instrument PTS limits, and I felt able to nail the approach speed and descent rate pretty well with trim and throttle early enough to just leave it set up like that nearly all the way down. Woohoo!

I look up at 500', and there's the runway, dead ahead (that always makes me feel good, of course). The landing's pretty normal, but John, who's noticed that I have a Cessna Driver's aversion to stepping on the brakes while slowing down, shows me just how quickly you can bring the plane to a standstill with them. Cool! I guess I'm just a cautious kind of guy…. We taxi off to be welcomed as heroes by Keith (well, not quite, but it's the thought that counts. He was pleased by the way it all turned out, though).

* * *

So what's left? Probably just another flight for VFR signoff (short-field landings, real crosswind landings, etc.), and an IFR flight with a bunch of approaches for IFR signoff. And that bloody ten page familiarisation sheet. Urgh — I'm really having trouble finishing it. Not because it's particuarly difficult, but because it asks lots of questions that don't strike me as always being terribly relevant. Oh well. A small price to pay for being allowed to fly something like this, I guess.

The Cirrus Driver

Some of us in the US GA scene have this … thing … about Cirrus drivers. You know: arrogant, a little clueless, flying fast complex planes (toys for the boys) a little beyond their experience and ability simply because they can afford to — that sort of thing. Around here the Cirrus has something of a (rather unfair) reputation as the dot-commer killer, the dot.com equivalent of the old doctor-killer Bonanzas. And as we're cruising back towards Hayward (KHWD) over Oakland we can hear this Cirrus Driver on Oakland's tower frequency missing a mandatory readback and then asking a couple of really clueless questions about his (standard, canned) departure instructions. Urgh. This guy's about to takeoff in a fast, powerful, loud, and rather slippery plane straight at us….

But what am I flying as we hear all this? Yeah, the club's Cirrus SR-20. Yes, I'm becoming one of them. True, it's the smaller, cheaper, much less powerful SR-20 rather than the Big Boy SR-22, but it's still a Cirrus. As John, sitting in the right seat, says with a grin sometime during the Cirrus Driver vs. KOAK tower exchange, "Cirrus Drivers! Dontcha just hate them…".

* * *

So what am I doing in the Cirrus? That's easy: John owes me a few hours of instruction, and hell, the Cirrus looks like a good way to do those longer flights (for example back to Santa Monica again later this year) quickly and relatively cheaply, and, as always, I'm just really curious what it's like to fly one of these things. Plus it's on a pretty reasonable special intro rate at the club and I can just about afford it (at least every now and then). So here I am…

The club's Cirrus is one of the older ones, with conventional (steam) instruments rather than a glass cockpit, but that's almost light relief for me (at least it's got an HSI). There's one of those weirdo S-TEC S-30 autopilots (literally) attached to the turn coordinator (more on this later), and one of those sui generis multifunction displays that turned up in GA in the early days of such things, a unit I don't think I've ever seen before but that seems straightforward to use, if not quite as useful (or pretty) as the G1000's MFD. And there's the early-day Cirrus Garmin 430 / 420 combo set for the radios and nav (for the life of me I still can't understand what Garmin were thinking with the 420 — a 430 without nav radios — did this save them all of $100?!).

I've had to do my homework to be allowed to fly this thing, of course: there's a ten page familiarisation sheet that has to be filled in before sign-off (not too hard, but the sheet itself is rather oddly structured, leading you to have to page back and forward in the POH between questions), and the usual 350 page POH to be internalised. Nothing I haven't done before, and (perhaps unfortunately) I have an Aviatrix-like fascination for systems and figures (hell, I am an engineer by training…), so that part goes fairly quickly as well. The two things I think I'm likely to have trouble with are the whole side-stick control thing (I'm used to either yokes or conventional sticks, both of which are just fine by me), and keeping ahead of what's likely to be the fastest and smoothest plane I've ever flown as PIC. Yes, I've had a complex endorsement for years and have many hours in an old Arrow, and have a few hours in a Tiger, so I have some idea of what to expect, but there are always surprises.

Preflighting this thing is straightforward, except I can't open the baggage compartment door without major swearing and key-jiggling (what are the manufacturers of expensive GA planes thinking when they use really crappy locks on things like this?), and I embarrassingly couldn't find the gascolator fuel drain under the nose (it looked like an electronics attachment to me and I didn't want to break anything). At least there aren't thirteen fuel sump drains to be tested as with the Cessna 172 SP's.

Startup and taxiing turn out to be pretty simple — as with the Tiger, the Cirrus has a castoring nosewheel and uses differential braking for steering on the ground, and despite having heard a few horror stories about getting Cirruses (Cirrii?) started, it starts first go. Very smooth. But I haven't flown enough in the past few months to avoid sounding really flaky on the radio, and I embarass myself a couple of times on the radio taxiing to the runup. Taxiing and runup expose what will become one of the only real annoyances with this aircraft: the power lever (which controls both manifold pressure and RPM) has very non-linear characteristics, and is extremely sensitive at lower power settings, and I end up lurching around with the engine changing speed all over the place (the Arrow's separate MP and RPM levers were both pretty linear and easy to use by comparison). John urges me to learn how to anchor my hand and use very slight adjustments at the lower end; of course, at the other end of the power settings, dramatic movements make almost no difference. This causes problems for the rest of the flight — not dire problems, but definitely major irritations and some rather rougher-than-I'd-like adjustments. I'll get used to it.

After runup, the first real test: takeoff, with that sidestick, and the general speed demon thing. We're cleared for takeoff, and take the runway. I push the power lever forward, and (maybe predictably) with the exception of minor issues to do with trim, from this point on the sidestick is no issue at all. I simply don't really notice I'm using it (as opposed to a yoke or whatever) — it's intuitive to use, the mechanical feedback feels right, and not having the damn yoke keep hitting my knees (as used to happen with the Arrow which had fixed-height seats like the Cirrus) was a real plus.

The speed thing, however, and the general slipperiness of the SR-20, does keep me occupied for the entire flight. Not in a particularly worrying way, but this plane certainly flies faster and reacts quicker than any non-aerobatic plane I've flown, and the urge to just roll it over and do a quick roll or loop while no one's looking stays around in the back of my mind (no, of course I bloody wouldn't…). The plane certainly feels heavier on the controls than most others I've flown, but it's not a ponderous sort of heaviness or stiffness, just a reminder that it's not a Decathlon or Aerobat or even a 172.

Which brings up the next issue: while climbing over the hills towards Mt Diablo at an airspeed of about 140 KIAS (and not at full throttle) I start trying out the electric trim system, which is a must for longer flights with the heavier controls. It's controlled with one of those hat switches on the top of the sidestick, and elevator trim seems to work just fine: no surprises there. But roll trim turns out to be incredibly touchy, and it takes a long while to get the hang of just nudging the hat in the right direction quickly enough to not cause a major upset. I guess I'll get the hang of this, too (at least it has roll trim). I also try out the S-30 autopilot: again, no surprises, but it's a clunky interface compared to the ones I'm used to in the 172s, and altitude hold seemed pretty, well, impressionistic, at least when I tried it. I haven't tried the nav modes yet, but it looks fine in general — and especially useful with longer flights, IFR or VFR, because (again) of the general heaviness of the controls, and the twitchiness of the trim.

We head out (quickly) to do some airwork over the Delta with traffic advisories from Travis Approach. Disappointingly, I'm sure, nothing here went wrong or felt odd either, and stalls, steep turns, etc., were all (more or less) done within PTS the first time. Stalls are a non-event in this plane, but you need to be rather lighter on the rudder on the edge of the stall than with some of the planes I'm used to. Steep turns were a joy — the plane kept level and easily predictable in either direction — and the emergency descent workout was as dramatic as I'd expected (this plane flies fast). I think the thing that started to bug me slightly at this stage was the lack of separate manifold pressure and throttle — this is a rather non-complex plane in comparison to the Arrow, and I guess I miss the ability to change RPM independently of MP (at least up to a point). I guess you just have to trust the engine control. The other side of this is that mixture control can be left to the default engine controller as well, but you can do manual adjustments if you want (and we did, right down to a metered 9 gallons per hour — not bad for a 200 HP engine doing 140 KIAS).

And so to landings. We head off towards Napa (KAPC), probably my favourite little towered airport for landing practice. John does the first touch and go on 18L, the small runway, and we request 18R (the larger one) for my turn(s). So I do right traffic for 18R, and try to keep to the recommended airspeeds and engine settings (etc.) for each leg. Not too bad, and I line up fine and go over the proverbial fence at 75KIAS… and land, pretty much as instructed. You fly this thing on and keep the nosewheel off the ground much the same as I used to do with the Arrow, and everything feels familiar and, if I crabbed a little too much on landing, Oh Well. At least I didn't kill anyone or break anything. A couple more touch and goes, and I still haven't killed anyone or broken anything, so we head back to Hayward through Oakland's airspace, talking to NorCal and Oakland tower.

The landing at Hayward goes fine and I start to feel I can fly this plane — and I could really enjoy flying it long distance. We shall see. In any case, I have at least another flight to complete before VFR signoff, and I'd like at least a flight or two after that under the hood for IFR. Given the state of my professional and private life at the moment that might all take longer than I'd like, but it's a goal worth aiming for. And no, I'm really not interested in the SR-22. I couldn't afford it even if the club had one. But the SR-20's a good alternative to the club's 182, even the G1000-equipped 182. Nothing's cheap about this sort of flying, but I guess I can rationalise the extra hourly cost of the SR-20 by pointing out that you actually get a hell of a lot further during those hours, and when well-leaned, the fuel consumption isn't a lot worse than a 172SP. Well, that's how I rationalise it, anyway.

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!