The withdrawal symptoms are bad. Apparently there is something about air breathed at altitude while hearing loud engine noises that causes endorphins to flow. In any case I am not only acutely aware that the last time I flew was Saturday, but like any good junkie I am even more aware that a fellow junkie has been shooting up more often than I have.

The flight with Colin to Big Bear and the desert was my last trip. It was exactly as much fun as I had hoped to get in the plane with just the two of us and push off. As we walked to the plane I suggested to Colin that we try the seventeen airport hop with no GPS. He looked at me, thought for a moment, and said ‘I had not even considered that.’ Of course he was as into doing it as I was. More it turned out, since I would have peeked at the GPS when we were flying around looking for the first airport and could not pick it out in the haze. I have to admit that I am singularly bad at picking out airports. On long final for Paso Robles, descending at the behest of the designated examiner, I did not have any idea where the hell I was landing.

We made it to eight of our destination airports and it would have taken another four hours to get all seventeen. The ride home was quite direct once I looked ahead and saw the contrast between the clear desert air and the haze of the coast. We had flown up in it, but with no clear air comparison it was not an issue. The idea of diving back into it for another nine airports seemed nuts. We shot the pass at Palm Springs and headed back to SMO. At one point I was asked to divert from direct flight for faster traffic. I did and a few minutes later was told to resume own navigation… also to look right if I wanted a view of a 757 on final for Ontario. A Fed Ex plane at my altitude heading in, very cool. About half an hour later LA Center again told us to avoid entering Class Bravo. The controller then asked whether we planned to drop below the bravo and head direct to SMO. I replied in the affirmative and he said, ‘Oh good, because right now you are lined up on final for LAX.’ LAX was still a good twenty miles away, but apparently the big boys were dropping in right over our radar blip and it was making him nervous. I diverted a bit north to make my intentions clear.

I have to go get checked out in a Cessna at Torrance so I can fly Mom and Alex around. I am hoping to get them up on two flights but the loft trauma may have sensitized them so much that they want to stay on solid group for the first few days.

As great as it was to fly all over the Los Angeles basin and out into the desert with Adam, yesterday was really the image in my head that brought me down to Santa Monica airport to begin with. I soared over the Malibu coastline, checked in with SoCal and then looked across at Nell. She smiled at me. I looked over my shoulder and saw the boys singing into their voice-activated microphones, listening in their headsets, and each looking out the window on occasion at the landscape sliding below. Rudy had a Calvin and Hobbes book in his lap.

Nell said, “When you are driving around down there it seems so random, but when you get up here and look down it all makes sense.” In ten minutes in the plane she nailed exactly one of the things I struggled with for months to get a handle on, one of the enticing things about being in the air.

We flew from Santa Monica up to Santa Barbara. It was about a fifty-minute flight. We were in N2902S (zero-two-sierra), which is nearly identical to Victor Pappa, which I have flown over sixty hours in. Tiny little things were different, which made me nervous. That meant that I looked over at Nell and said, “Sorry it’s so hot up here, usually it cools off nicely at altitude.” She glanced at me and smiled, “It’s perfectly nice in the airplane. You’re just sweating a lot.”

The push-to-talk button on my yoke failed eight minutes after take off. That was a drag. I swapped intercom places with Nell (by passing her my headphone plugs while she passed me hers.) From then on I spoke on the radio by pressing the button on Nell’s yoke (she wasn’t using it).

The boys certainly liked it more than riding in a car. There were times I looked back and it didn’t seem any different from being in a car, but they looked out here and there and they asked questions over the headsets. Neither one seemed uncomfortable in the plane and they amused one another.

We were meant to have Victor Pappa available at ten o’clock. When we arrived it was not yet back from it’s early morning flight. We waited around for half an hour. Nell went up to the Farmer’s market with Rudy and I went down and got the boys each a flight log so that they could record their flights from now on. The plane still wasn’t back so we decided to take Two Sierra.

It was hazy near Santa Monica (the Santa Ana’s are blowing and pushing a few hundred feet of dirt up into the atmosphere. That meant there wasn’t a great view of Santa Monica, the Palisades or the beginning of Malibu, but it cleared around Point Dume.

Flying over Oxnard it seemed like that would be a good place to have a beach house. It looks like you can walk from the Oxnard airport to the beach.

Santa Barbara approach vectored us inland at the harbor and we followed the 101 to the airport. I lined up nicely for one-five-left and touched down with a slight bump but no bounce. I’ve talked to Nell a lot about landings and she said that bumps don’t bother her. Adam and I will remain much harsher critics of our touch downs than most of our passengers.

I had arranged a cheap-as-possible rental car for our arrival. We taxied to Mercury Air, a service that is at a lot of general aviation airports. They waved us to parking (I felt like I was piloting a much larger plane, follow a guy in a gold cart who was waving a fluorescent baton) and we walked to their little building and out to the rental car.

We drove down to our friend Rodman’s beach house and had lunch with him and his son at a nearby Chinese place. Nell took each of the boys for a nice walk on the beach. We drove the fifteen miles back up to the airport and started home in the late afternoon. It was really a great day for flying. As we headed south we watched the sun set into the Pacific. For a short while we had the grey haze that makes it hard to see the horizon, but I just kept my eye on the artificial horizon.

It had turned into a real night flight as we came in over the Palisades. It was a little clearer over Santa Monica. As we glided over the intersection of the 10 and the 405 it was nothing but brake lights down there. I did a passable landing for my second night landing without an instructor.

It really couldn’t have been better. Flying is a whole other world and being able to bring Nell and the boys along into it is better than I could have hoped.

There is tremendous satisfaction in flying precisely by instruments. Keeping the altitude at exactly four thousand five hundred feet as you glide along held in the fingertips of the atmosphere is an accomplishment. As it becomes more and more automatic, so that you can both keep the altitude correct and follow a heading while occasionally enjoying the view from above, there is a surge of confidence about being able to fly well.

And it keeps you alive. That’s always a nice bonus.

A lot of flying, for me, is about risk assessment and management. It is dangerous to loop or roll and airplane not rated to loop or roll, so I don’t do it. That keeps that risk (all the accidents of acrobatics performed in a non-acrobatic airplane) off my chart. Eventually, by making sure that I always perform my pre-flight check, by making sure I always fly with full tanks on take-off, I get down to risks that I find acceptable. Really, I deal with risks that I know to be lower than using the freeways around Los Angeles (particularly at night, particularly on a weekend night).

The way I examine the risk is by reading accident reports in the database of the National Traffic and Safety Board, and by looking at the aggregate statistics of those accidents.

One out of nine accidents is a mechanical failure. A control cable snaps; a piece of the cowling flies off and smashes through the windscreen; the fuel line clogs. These are difficult to control, but keeping the plane in good working order is not impossible and, to me, mostly seems like a question of budget.

Then we have pilot error (which will be discussed in a later entry) and weather-related accidents. Seven out of ten weather related accidents are known as “VFR into IMC” or “VFR into IFR conditions.” In short, a pilot rated to fly only in Visual Flight Rules conditions winds up “in weather.” In a cloud, in a fog bank, trapped in haze… just unable to fly the plane by reference to things outside. In these conditions it is very easy to become disoriented, to believe your body instead of the instruments, and to wind up spiraling down to the ground in a steep diving turn. This is known as the death spiral. It is what killed JFK Jr and his two passengers. Before there were instruments, the death spiral killed hundreds of pilots, most of them air mail pilots flying at night.

So seven out of ten planes go down in weather because the pilot is trained only to fly when he can see. It’s not difficult to learn to fly while looking at the flight instruments. It’s not hard to trust them, but you have to learn to do it. While learning VFR you have to do three hours of IFR flying, so that you know what it is about. The basic idea is that they want you to learn enough so that if you fly into a cloud you can turn around and fly back out. JFK Jr had those three hours of training and I guess it just wasn’t enough.

There’s a lot to learn in instrument flying. There is a system in the sky for flying without visual reference. The air traffic controllers keep the planes separated from one another (by three miles horizontally and a couple thousand feet vertically). When you are flying in reference to instruments you give up some freedom, the controllers will tell you where to go, when to turn and when you should descend to land. The tradeoff is that they are protecting you and helping you find your way. All of the commercial jets are flying IFR from the moment they take off to the moment they land. No zooming around in the sky for them.

Additionally, there are instrument approaches to most airports (except the really small ones), and you need to learn the maneuvers for entering and executing these procedures.

I haven’t decided to go all the way through with Instrument Training, but I have started to keep track of the hours I would need to take the practical exam and Adam and I will start doing some hood time (simulated instrument time) whenever we are flying together. A lot of the people that I talk to about flying private planes think it is dangerous. They act like I am crazy for suggesting that Nell and I could fly somewhere for lunch together. I guess the crashes of small planes get a lot of press. The statistics say that Nell and I are safer than if I drove us to the same place. I will continue to decrease our risks with more training.

Into the clouds!