South to Civilization

KTVC – KACB – KGKJ – KMMU

(Part of the lost trip report.)

After our incredibly, almost-theme-park-like stay in Traverse City, we needed to return to New York City, where Nell would meet us. We had a small cooler of salmon to drop off at TW’s, definitely worth driving to the airport for . . . → Read More: Traverse City, MI to Morristown, NJ]]> Friday, August 13

South to Civilization

KTVC – KACB – KGKJ – KMMU

(Part of the lost trip report.)

After our incredibly, almost-theme-park-like stay in Traverse City, we needed to return to New York City, where Nell would meet us. We had a small cooler of salmon to drop off at TW’s, definitely worth driving to the airport for (plus, I had left my computer bag at his cabin and he offered to bring it up). I spent a lot of time in the FBO’s hangar with their roll of speed tape (aviation’s version of duct tape), sealing the two coolers so that they couldn’t possibly open. It still made me nervous to stow a couple containers of fishy ice water in the luggage compartment.

Water in Michigan

The ten minute hop up to Antrim County was uneventful. We hopped out, swapped cold salmon for computer, and were back in the air in a few minutes.

We couldn’t quite make it to Morristown, New Jersey (our airport near Manhattan) without a fueling stop (something TW complains about too, since he has the same plane). Certainly not comfortably. So we had planned a stop at KGKJ (Port Meadville), a tiny airport in North Jersey. We flew over a lot of the northern peninsula of Michigan, nearly directly over Detroit and onto into Canada. The route took us directly across Lake Erie, and one of the only times we were unable to land immediately one of the passengers needed to pee. If we landed in Canada we would have caused an international incident (we hadn’t filed an eAPIS and no one in customs on either side would know we were coming). Usually a bathroom break is a fine reason to spiral down to explore a new airport, but this one time we had to push on. The first airport after we cross Lake Erie was Port Meadville, and we descended with the nose pointed down quite a bit, rocketed over the ground to get our wheels back on American soil.

(We do carry emergency port-a-johns in the plane. These are easier for boys to use than girls, but they are not easy for anyone in a bouncing, fully-packed plane in the middle of summer. The passengers said, “It’s not that bad, I can wait.”)

Port Meadville at 5:30pm was totally empty. There was no activity on the field at all, although the terminal looked like it had been part of a bustling operation sometime in the sixties, now it was down at the heels and surrounded by a chain link fence with a bewildering method of gaining entrance. We gave up. We fueled the plane and peed on the grass behind the large fuel tank. We could hear the crickets in the grass around the entire airport, and the stillness of the large hangars was a little mysterious. We stretched our legs a little more and then climbed in for the last flight of the day.

Morristown, NJ has a nice FBO. They cater to the corporate jets of all the big companies going into NYC to do business. They are very nice to us little-plane guys and we’re able to take advantage of all of the amenities they have for the big-plane fellows. TW had called ahead with our ETA and they had a car waiting to take us into New York. (Subsequent research showed that we probably could have done better getting a free ride to the NJ Transit state and taking the train, but it was the end of a long, sweaty day in the plane and it was nice to relax in the air conditioning while we headed in.)

Water in New York

We spent an entire week in New York, our longest visit ever, seeing the Museum of Modern Art, the Liberty Science Center, the Central Park Zoo, and a ton of interesting places to eat. Sadly, we never got around to eating the salmon, but TW grilled his outdoors and reported that it was fantastic.

West Out of the Rockies

KJAC – KRAP – KFSD – KMSN

Part of the Lost Trip Report.

This was one of my favorite days of flying. It wasn’t easy, but it was an adventure and the whole family saw a lot of country that we would never see otherwise.

All AT&T Jets

We made it . . . → Read More: Jackson Hole, WY to Madison, WI]]> Saturday, July 31 2009

West Out of the Rockies

KJAC – KRAP – KFSD – KMSN

Part of the Lost Trip Report.

This was one of my favorite days of flying. It wasn’t easy, but it was an adventure and the whole family saw a lot of country that we would never see otherwise.

All AT&T Jets

We made it out to the plane early in the morning, before 9am. (There was a fun breakfast place in Jackson Hole that had a long line and fresh baked goods for your breakfast. That’s the sort of place you should have breakfast in when you are only spending one night in a town.) As our taxi drove us out to the airport, we went past the Elk Refuge. The driver explained that in the winter the elk migrate down onto the valley floor. In the spring their antlers molt off and drop to the ground. The boy scouts all come out in a pack, gather up the antlers and sell them in town. They use the funds to buy food for the elk. So, in some sense, the elk are self-sustaining. And a tourist draw.

Downwind KJAC 9:30am

We climbed in and fired up. It was a long taxi to get to runway one-nine, which runs downhill and points back toward town. It is a mile and a quarter long. Fully loaded, at over a mile above sea level, at 9:30am on the last day in July, it took a quarter mile to climb to fifty feet. The air was thin and the propeller had less to bite, so performance was, politely, “anemic.” We flew upwind almost to the town, turning and making a long downwind back past the airport. We saw no elk in the refuge, they are all up in the mountains in the summer, getting fat for their winter, but the valley is beautiful plains of grasses and small groups of trees.

The red terrain on the moving map very slowly turned more to yellow. We followed Route 26

Our Pass

north into the Teton National forest. The peaks to either side of us were higher than we can climb in the little Diamondstar, but we just made a gentle turn to the east to follow Route 26 out of the Rockies toward Casper, Wyoming. We were at 9,500 feet, but that was often less than three thousand feet above the highway we followed. There was already a little wind over the mountains and when a downdraft caused us to lose a little altitude we slowed considerable trying to regain the lost feet.

It took an hour and a half to make it out of the Rockies. We went by some breathtaking scenery. Mountains scraping the sky, clawing at the clouds sliding over their peaks. Below us long lines of cars labored up the incline, a lot of them filled with summer tourists, I’m sure, gawking at these granite monsters to either side. We glided overhead, wings tipped occasionally by the wind off the monsters’ tops.

Xanth Continues

On these long days of flying, the boys have their Kindles in the back. Rudy has a whole slew of Piers Anthony books (the Xanth series, I think there are over twenty of them; he read six or seven over the summer) and Dexter was laughing his way through the Darwin Awards. When they weren’t sight-seeing they were very content reading their books and listening to Broadway show tunes on the XM radio.

Casper was originally a fuel stop, but we had a tailwind and made such good time we cut the corner a little and pressed on. Our next stop was right around lunch time and we were going to land in Rapid City, South Dakota. That’s the town closest to the Mount Rushmore monument. I wasn’t interested enough to drive an hour from the airport to see it, but I certainly wanted to fly past it. It was just like being in a station wagon looking for a landmark. I asked the air traffic controller if we were close and he gave some instructions (“Stay above 3,500 MSL, south of the entry road and parking structure, it’s five miles at your one o’clock.”). Everyone had their eyes peeled and neck craned. We were quite a bit higher than most of the foothills around us, but finally, there it was! One man’s determination to turn nature and history into a huge piece of art. My favorite detail is the way Roosevelt’s glasses are implied.

Four Chiefs

Winds were intense at the Rapid City airport. There was a summer thunderstorm blowing in from the north west, sweeping across the Black Hills. We had thirty-five knots gusting to fifty almost directly down the runway. I danced on the rudder pedals and kept the nose right on the centerline. It was very bumpy down the final approach to the numbers, and even once on the ground the plane kept trying to jump back into the air. There are rules about how to keep the control surfaces set when taxing in high wind and I was using those (“Climb away from the wind, dive into it,” is the main mantra).

Parking at the FBO, we climbed out. The tail is heavy without me in the front seats, so the airplane tipped back on its tail. That put the wings in a position to generate lift and a lineman from the FBO jumped up and put his weight on the nose. He was there for pretty much the whole time were were on the ground.

Inside, the boys used the bathroom and Nell and I discussed plans. I showed her the radar scan, and the storm coming in. If we stayed in Rapid City we were almost certainly there for the night. It might be a nice place to be stuck (since then I have read more about the town and I sort of wish we had stayed), but we certainly hadn’t made a lot of progress toward New Hampshire. We decided to press on and watch the weather from the comfort of the cockpit, and figure out a good place to set down for a late lunch/early dinner. The boys had some snacks out of the vending machine, I tipped the lineman for draping himself on the nose of the plane, and we climbed back into our fully-fueled plane.

Amused by Darwin

Taxing downwind was a little nerve-wracking. The strong gusts shook the little plastic plane (well, carbon fiber, just like the new Boeing Dreamliner). It felt like it wanted to push the tail up (which would be nose down, not a comfortable feeling as we mosey along the taxiway). “Dive into, climb away…” I kept repeating to myself.

Rolling out onto runway three-two, I looked down the mile and a half of concrete. There’s no way we were going to use more than a thousand feet in this sort of wind. Sure enough, the moment I released the brakes, opened the throttle and applied the lightest back pressure on the control stick N971RD leapt into the air. We were more than a hundred feet up before we were over the thousand foot markers. I saw storm clouds directly ahead and we turned right, eventually completing a turn all the way to the south.

The storm was moving at about forty knots and was a line of thunderstorm cells fifty miles long. They were joining together in a single line and getting fatter as they collect moisture in the heat of the afternoon. We dashed ahead of it across South Dakota at over a hundred thirty knots. Poking through the database of airports, and cross-checking with our little brown book (the Airport Guide), we decided that Sioux Falls looked like a good bet for a big meal.

Two hours later we landed and Landmark Aviation tied the plane down nice and snug. I asked for a good place for a solid meal and they gave us directions to the Outback Steakhouse. They loaned us a car and started refueling us. We weren’t sure that we would stay the night in town or not. I grabbed a business card on my way out.

Outback was definitely what the boys needed. A nice big piece of steak and some french fries. Near the end of the meal I glanced up at the television in the bar and noticed that they were showing the weather radar and talking about the huge thunderstorm line that was approaching. I called the FBO and asked them to put the plane in the hangar. I didn’t want it sitting out for hail and torrential rain. After a short discussion with Nell, we decided to head back to the airport to plan the next step, which might be picking out a hotel for the night.

On the way back I called the FBO again. Was it raining there yet? Because it wasn’t raining where we were. No rain yet, and they hadn’t moved the plane yet. I asked them to hold off. We ran from the car into the FBO. Looking out the windows to the runway, I could see a wall of black clouds a few miles west of the airport, coming out way. I turned to the lineman who had helped tie down. “Do you think we can make it out ahead of that storm?” He glanced outside.

“If you’re out of here in five minutes.”

I told the boys to race to the bathroom while I scooted out to the plane to do my pre-flight inspection. Even though we were in a hurry to depart, it was as thorough as it always is. Drain the tanks and check for water, check the oil level, check the movement of all of the control surfaces, wiggle the antennae to make sure they are all firmly attached… and so on all the way around the plane. Just as I made it to my door, the boys and Nell came running out.

We jumped in and fired up. Gusts of wind shook the plane. We could smell the change in humidity even inside the plane. We started taxing (we were on the FBO’s ramp, not a legal taxiway) as I talked to the ground controller. We were cleared to taxi to runway two-one (just like home in Santa Monica!), and as I got to the hold short line I switched to the tower controller. He asked, “Direction of flight?”

I looked out the window at the towering wall of black, menacing clouds over twenty thousand feet high, less than two miles from the airport. “East, very east.” He cleared us to take off immediately and we started our roll.

Nell said, “This is very exciting.”

From the back seat, Dexter said, “I can think of another word for it.”

Hightailing It East

We lifted off and I banked to the left before we were even halfway down the runway. In the image from the XM weather display you can see the storm, over fifty miles behind us by the time I was willing to take my iPhone out for a photo, chasing us east. it was hundreds of miles long north to south. We were eating up the distance at 180mph because of the tailwind.

Once we were at cruising altitude I was able to figure out that in less than two hours we would be in Madison, Wisconsin. That’s a big enough (college) town that there were sure to be some decent hotels. We didn’t need dinner, since we were stuffed from Outback. Maybe a snack.

And Madison delivered. It was dark by the time we made it there, and it was a little busy in the airspace around the airport. I was on my toes. Once we landed and walked into the FBO I realized that Oshkosh was still in progress. That’s the largest general aviation gathering on the planet, held every summer at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, an hour’s drive north of Madison. So there were more planes than usual parked, in the pattern and doing quick fuel turns to make their way up to the fly-in.

Nell found us a great hotel for the night, one that sent a shuttle van for us. There was a little restaurant for the boys to grab a snack. I was out cold soon after getting to the room. I remembered that Wisconsin had a contest for the phrase on their license plate and one of the entries was, “Eat cheese or die.”

We had a separate blog for . . . → Read More: Spring Break Summary]]> The fifth and six crossings of the continent were a huge success. There was some bad weather and a few bumpy rides, but in general the family is getting better and better at enjoying the sights from the little plane and the adventure of traveling in little hops across our nation.

We had a separate blog for the trip and we will probably continue that tradition on future trips. It is on Blogger, though, which is a great platform for being able to mail in updates and a terrible platform otherwise. The important entries will move here (currently a WordPress blog).

This post serves as a directory for all of the Spring Break posts, since some of them will be dated back to when they were written. It also has a link to a bunch of the photographs from the trip. We actually had a video camera with us and did not shoot a single movie.

• March 28: The Plan
• March 29: (Flying) Ciderhouse Rules
• April 3: Rudy’s Summary from DC
• April 5: Dexter’s Summary
• April 7: Rudy’s Museum Review
• April 12: The Complete Trip (Colin’s flying journal)
• Images on Our MobileMe Webpage
• FBO’s we visited along the way

The first thing I learned was when I was at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. If you ever get the time, I would suggest going . . . → Read More: Flying from Museum to Museum]]> One goal of our trip was to make it to Washington, DC, where we have been to a lot of museums. Here are some of the things I learned while visiting them:

The first thing I learned was when I was at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. If you ever get the time, I would suggest going there. On the first floor, they have the Pulitzer Prize winning photos since 1940. Some of them give you the brutish, raw feeling of humanity while others inspire you and give you hope for mankind.

[Part of our Spring Break 2009 Trip.]

There was an exhibit in the Newseum on the assassination of Lincoln and the cat and mouse game of finding Booth. Did you know how long it took to find John Wilkes Booth after he killed Lincoln? Twelve days! He had a price on his head of approximately fifty thousand dollars which would be nearly a million today! What did president George W. Bush say about the press? That there should be limitations to its freedom and that it was harmful! The nerve of some people! The only time the press ever hurt me was when a kid tossed a paper airplane made from newspaper airplane and it poked my eye!

Those were the two heart-wrenching/warming exhibits but there were other interesting ones, too. They had a section of the Berlin wall, a checkpoint from along it and more. On the top floor, they had front pages of newspapers all around the world.

The next museum pales in comparison with the Newseum. It was the Natural History museum in D.C and though it was good, it wasn’t incredible. We mainly went to the marine biology wing with our uncle Adam (he studies fish for a living). He told us a lot about the fish, most of which I can’t remember. However, I learned something that might change my life forever. As you all probably know, Climate Change might cause a mass extinction. What you probably don’t know is that when there is a mass extinction, the dominant species dies out. We are the dominant species.

That is just about all I learned on this trip. Tomorrow, we will leave for LA and should be there in three days. Our blog will start again this summer when we do another cross-country flight.

Sadly, Nell got news of a death in her extended family, someone the boys had actually met the previous summer out in the Hamptons. After some discussion we decided to alter our itinerary and head up to New York City so that she could attend the service and the boys could see their cousin. . . . → Read More: Washington, DC to Morristown, NJ]]> Saturday, April 4

Sadly, Nell got news of a death in her extended family, someone the boys had actually met the previous summer out in the Hamptons. After some discussion we decided to alter our itinerary and head up to New York City so that she could attend the service and the boys could see their cousin.

Flying is sometimes serious

With TW doing some research on the better place to land in the metropolitan area, we head to Dulles in the afternoon. There we some wind, but it was not as gusty as Phoenix when we were at the beginning of our trip, and it would be a much shorter flight. The FBO lineman trying to help bring the bags to the plane lost one in the back of the van (he did a sharp turn before arriving at the plane and it slid behind the seats). That delayed us a little bit, but the plane was all ready to go, so it wasn’t too bad. There was the usual surreal moments of taking off in a tiny plane from an airport that serves such huge planes, but in ten minutes we were climbing northward, over the farms of Maryland.

[Part of our Spring Break 2009 Trip.]

It’s funny that looking at the Flightaware track, we were only directly northbound for the shortest imaginable segment of the trip, but at the time it felt like forever before we were allowed to turn on course. It is probably all because of the restrictive airspace around the capital, but it was still annoying.

It was VFR the entire way, but I had filed IFR since it is the easiest way to get out of the ADIZ. I cancelled once we were aloft. It was pretty bouncy, especially as we started to close in on Morristown. The airport was reporting twenty-five knots of wind gusting to thirty-five. They were landing on Two-three, but offered us Three-one, which was a better match for the winds. I entered a modified left base and started to bring the plane around for the final approach.

TW has flown more on the East coast than I have and said that turbulence on the East coast is down low, while on the West coast it is up high. A gross generalization. Totally true on this particular day. The closer we got to the pleasant pine forests surrounding the Morristown airport, the more we were bounced around. I was on a one mile final at a thousand feet up and from there to the ground I wrestled the control stick and the throttle the entire way. All I thought about was the landing zone and my airspeed. I kept twitching the plane’s nose back to the centerline.

I was very ready to put the power back in and go around if the landing became a bounce or I lost the stability of the approach. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary. “Stirring the stick” right down to the last six inches, I dragged the wheels onto the runway and quickly flipped the flap switch to put more weight on them. Then I had the following exchange with the tower:

Tower: 1RD, you can exit left when able. That was one of the better landings I have seen all day.

1RD: Thanks. Off at Bravo.

Bizjet: Well, you didn’t see mine.

Tower: Yes I did. You let a big grease spot on the runway.

It’s pretty rare that the tower comments on your flying and that was a tough landing. We were wheels up at 5:35pm and landed at 6:35pm. Definitely our shortest day of flying the entire trip.

The Morristown Signature people were extremely efficient and, true to TW’s billing, the car service knew their way into the City and were at the airport when we landed. It sure beat Caldwell, where we waited forever for the car and the guy had a very hard time finding Lincoln Center.

It was a great demonstration of the flexibility that the small plane allows us. We didn’t have any airline tickets to change, we didn’t need to cancel out of any travel, we just changed our schedule a little bit.

First thing Monday morning, we hopped in the plane and flew to Tucson, Arizona. The food was delicious, I had a waffle with chocolate chips, whip cream, and apples soaked in a variety of sugary substances that made . . . → Read More: Looking Back from DC]]> This is a recap of all of what has happened to us on this cross country trip so far.

First thing Monday morning, we hopped in the plane and flew to Tucson, Arizona. The food was delicious, I had a waffle with chocolate chips, whip cream, and apples soaked in a variety of sugary substances that made them taste like they had come out of an apple pie. The tastes blended perfectly well together and gave me one of the best breakfasts I have had in a while. After we had finished eating, we took a short walk around the FBO and saw a huge propeller stuck in the ground. I took a picture standing in front of it. Then, we were off.

[Part of our Spring Break 2009 Trip.]

If you are a faithful reader, you know that the next stop we had planned was El Paso, Texas, but due to advantageous tail winds, we managed to go straight to Marfa, Texas. When we landed, a sun shield flew out of the luggage area and began flying away from the plane. Even with my satchel on, I quickly caught up to the sun shield, but I noticed something weird: there was no one else here. Sometimes FBOs can be empty, but there is always some trace of life. When we entered the FBO, we found a cryptic reminder note to get a car for us and a unmarked jacket. When I felt like it couldn’t get any more like a horror movie, a windstorm started. If you went outside, you would be pushed around by the winds as though they were people. Luckily, the creepiness stopped shortly when the person who owned the FBO entered, claimed the jacket, threw out the reminder note and gave us the car keys. We were off to town!

There wasn’t much to do in Marfa on a Monday. Half the shops were closed and the town was deserted. There were no kids around and all the adults were driving in cars. It was seriously weird. We had diner at a little mexican place nearby our hotel then hid in our room and watched South Park episodes until it was time to go to DQ for dessert. Then Dad had the awesome idea of swimming in the motel pool. I stepped in and it was beyond freezing. A quick look revealed that there were cigarette butts and bugs littering the pool. The only really fun part of Marfa was seeing the Judd exhibit. Donald Judd was an artist who really made Marfa what it is today and his art was arranging concrete blocks facing different ways. I interpreted it as social grouping but I am unaware of what he was actually trying to accomplish.

After Marfa was Lockhart. We stopped at Lockhart because they were meant to be the Kansas City of Texas when it came to BBQ. I was slightly disappointed. We ate the BBQ in a peculiar fashion. You weren’t given forks, butcher paper acted as your plate and all you had to eat the meat with was some wonder bread. It was an interesting change of pace but I didn’t especially enjoy it. I had some good prime rib and acceptable brisket, but I didn’t approve of the atmosphere. The people who chopped the food acted nasty whenever we asked a question. Do you have forks? HA! Any chance you have BBQ sauce? Not now, not ever.

New Orleans has been the best stop of the trip. It was urban, something I am used to, and the people were friendly. One problem: I was not up for it. My brain was a cocktail of sleepiness, sickness and hunger. I needed food but couldn’t stand the moisture. It felt like we were walking through mud. Dad found a solution: I snatched the bottle of Coke out of his hand and chugged it down. Immediately, my vision began to sharpen, I got a huge burst of energy and my stomach settled. The effects were just wearing off when we reached our food. It was a place called Snug Harbor and was a jazz club separated into two rooms: the jazz room and the food room. Since we were hungry beyond belief, we chose food. I just had some calamari and a caesar salad while Dad had gumbo and Dexter chose fried shrimp. The food took a while but when it finally came, it was delicious. I went to bed happy as a filled-up gator.

In the morning, I learned that not all New Orleans food is good. I had a waffle which was okay… it just took thirty minutes! I wanted Dad to go and give them hell but we decided it wasn’t worth it. Instead of taking off, we went to the aquarium. It was incredible! There were two extremely cute sea otters and many beautiful sting rays. There was a glass tunnel surrounded with animals and water. It felt like you were walking through a sea. After the visit to the aquarium, we hopped in the plane and took to the skies again.

We landed to see my great-grand uncle Abbot. He served in World War II and actually took a bullet to the side of his ear, robbing him of his hearing. He is over ninety now and is legally blind. He had many stories to tell, about how he was in General Patton’s favorite battalion and how he actually saw Patton pee in the river Moselle like all the other troops in his battalion. My mom was happy to see him and I learned that legally, a kid in my school is a cousin four times removed. It’s awesome to see old family members.

Now, we are in D.C and loving every minute of it.

Turning North

We wanted to have dinner in Atlanta with Nell’s great-uncle Abbott. There was some weather over New Orleans when we woke up, but we waited it out (I went to the aquarium with the boys while Nell finished the re-write on her script). On the way to the airport I called the . . . → Read More: New Orleans, LA to Charlotte, NC]]> Wednesday, April 1

Turning North

We wanted to have dinner in Atlanta with Nell’s great-uncle Abbott. There was some weather over New Orleans when we woke up, but we waited it out (I went to the aquarium with the boys while Nell finished the re-write on her script). On the way to the airport I called the FBO and asked them to bring up the plane and make sure it was fueled. They called back in a few minutes and said, “Where did you park it?” I said they had parked it. “What time did you come in?” I glanced at my phone. I had called the Lafayette branch of the FBO instead of the New Orleans branch. I apologized and called the right one, and imagined the huge relief of the line crew when they realized they HADN’T lost some guy’s plane.

[Part of our Spring Break 2009 Trip.]

We took off at 2:40pm and headed northwest.

We banked over Lake Pontchartrain and I pointed out to the boys the I-10 snaking along an impossibly long bridge stretching across the lake. I remembered Lucinda Williams singing:

This town has said what it has to say / Now I’m after that back highway / And the longest bridge I’ve ever crossed over Pontchartrain

I wish our iPod system in the plane was as good as the system at home, where I can easily pull up any song out of the ten thousand was have in iTunes. I know we had Lucinda with us, but it would have been hard to find her. Goodbye to the Crescent City, we’ll be back at some point.

Dexter posted from the FBO as I was loading the plane:

I’m so glad to have finally seen some kids. In Marfa and elsewhere there were no kids that were older than me, or younger, aside from babies. In New Orleans there were tons of kids and one said I looked familiar but I told her that I was from California and I was not familiar.

Weather we chased East

We crossed unbelievably huge swamps on the way north. I would look down to see tin-roofed encampments, with no way to get to them except narrow waterways snaking through the swamp. I don’t know how people know their way through those mazes of mangroves and brown water. I always have an emergency landing spot picked out and I am sorry to say that a lot of the time over Louisiana and Alabama it was a water ditching. (Sorry for the passengers having to swim. Water ditching is statistically safer than forced landings on terra firma.)

We flew over Selma and Montgomery. As we flew past Tuskagee Nell wished we could stop, but we were trying to make it to dinner. There were a lot of clouds as we approached Atlanta and the approach controller vectored us all around the Class Bravo before letting us head directly for Peachtree Dekalb. The FBO had the first porte corchere for business jets that I have seen. You can walk out to your Gulfstream without getting wet. They were super and let us borrow a car to drive the two miles to Abbott and Harriet’s house. It took longer to drive to dinner than it took to get from cruising altitude to parked and chocked in the plane. We managed to hit rush hour head on.

Eighty-five years of age difference between fedora wearers

After a wonderful home-cooked meal (we’re so desperate to have those when we are traveling) and a good discussion of fedoras (Abbott took his out of the coat closet, Harriet was surprised to see it and he said, “I haven’t worn it since the war”), we headed back to the airport. I studied the weather, which included a few overcast layers at different altitudes. But it looked like with some good planning we could make it to Charlotte, NC that night. (That was key because it would let us make it to DC in the morning.)

We climbed out of the Atlanta area. A night flight is a good change of pace, although when there is an overcast layer below it makes it a lot harder to see the way that the bunching of lights describes the villages and civilization below. It was rainy as we approached Charlotte, and we were a small fish swimming into a big pond. Huge pond. Charlotte is US Airway’s hub and there are three huge runways (one of them is ten thousand feet long). We bounced along over the low hills around Charlotte, with me a little anxious about the rain we might get vectored into (it’s not dangerous, but it can be loud, distracting and frightening for the passengers). Finally we were lined up on the approach to three-six right. We did a nice soft roll onto the tarmac and a lineman with lighted wands waved me into a spot in front of Wilson Air Center.

We had left Atlanta at 7:30pm and it was 10:00pm when we landed. That was enough flying for me for the day and I was very glad to have Nell handle the hotel selection. We were in a gorgeous atrium hotel that the boys loved. I collapsed onto a bed with a lot of pillows.

Continuing East, staying South

Onward to “the other L A.” Nell worked on her script while I took the boys to a delicious breakfast at Squeeze Marfa. Who thought you were going to get delicious fresh-squeezed orange juice in a tiny town in the Texas hill country? Marfa is, in some sense, an . . . → Read More: Marfa, TX to New Orleans, LA]]>

Tuesday, March 31

Continuing East, staying South

Onward to “the other L A.” Nell worked on her script while I took the boys to a delicious breakfast at Squeeze Marfa. Who thought you were going to get delicious fresh-squeezed orange juice in a tiny town in the Texas hill country? Marfa is, in some sense, an invention of Donald Judd. We walked the length of his concrete box installation nearby, one of my favorite parts of our trip. Just the family of four, an unending landscape, and art bigger than any of us. The concrete boxes speak so much to an architect, to the idea of an artist reaching for permanence. (Judd is dead and the workmen are diligently trying to keep the boxes looking like they were just set down on the floor of the desert yesterday.)
But it was time to push on. I had my friend TW working as ground support. (He made sure there were hotel rooms available in the towns we were landing, checked to see which FBO had the best reviews and so forth. All things I can do if I have a decent WiFi connection, but when you are hopping through the Southwest it is a lot nicer to have someone doing it from a desktop and sending little queries and updates to your iPhone.) He said that Lockhart, TX was the place to stop for the best BBQ in Texas.

[Part of our Spring Break 2009 Trip.]

Dexter wrote into the blog from his Sidekick in the back seat of the plane:

Right now I’m in the plane leaving Texas. The best food I had in Texas was probably my chocolate pancake. We also got to see some art by the minimalist Donald Judd. In the town Marfa, we watched a lot of TV. We also got to see some hawks in Marfa.

Nell and the boys with Donald Judd

The flight to Lockhart was not as bumpy as the previous day, but I didn’t really appreciate the landscape. I think I am more of a New Mexico aficionado, rather than a Texas hill country sort. I would like a private airstrip and a chance to build a house in either desert, but I feel more drama a little further north. It doesn’t help that a lot of the land we flew over was pockmarked with drilling rigs and the network of dirt roads necessary to service them. Nell and I discussed what that life must have been like, or is probably still like.

We flew abeam of the Kerrville airport and heard a Mooney talking to the approach controller after leaving the factory field. That was cool. Around there Nell pointed out that the patterns of the green scrub on the grey desert looked sort of paisley. There were fascinating places where a line of trees (out in the middle of nowhere) would follow what must have been a drainage line. Arrow-straight, marching along as if planted by rabid French gardeners, they jumped out of the otherwise chaotic curves of the natural landscape.

Lockhart is sort of between Austin and San Antonio. It was just past San Marcos, TX, which looked like a little college town. The weather being reported from Lockhart favored runway 19. The nearby airport reported wind one hundred eighty degrees off of that, which agreed with what I was seeing at a couple thousand feet above the ground. I announced for one-nine, but flew over the airport and checked the wind sock. The reporting equipment must have been stuck or something. I entered the downwind for runway three-six instead, landing into a fifteen knot wind, gusting to twenty, on a three thousand foot piece of asphalt. If we had landed in the wrong direction that would have been a difficult stop at the end. A good reminder to always check things visually and to never blindly rely on the computer voice telling you about the weather at the airport.

As we landed, Rudy wrote in:

Finally, we are in Lockhart, Texas. The barbecue is coming soon and I am getting hungrier and hungrier.

The FBO (really just a tiny operation) was incredibly nice. They gave us a rundown on the various BBQ options and we headed off for one of them in their crew car (a big old suburban SUV, which Dexter loved bouncing around in). I bow to Rudy for the review of the meal. After lunch (and a stop at Dairy Queen; Texas has more DQs than any other region in the United States) we checked the weather, fueled the plane and let the boys run around a little. There was a thunderstorm that was headed toward New Orleans. We didn’t want to outrun it on our way east.

Hill Style BBQ

We planned a fuel stop in Lafayette, Louisiana, so that if we were going to be on the tail end of the weather into New Orleans we would land at Lafayette and just wait it out a little bit. The reviews of the FBO at Lafayette made it sound comfortable enough for the boys to play Magic while Nell and I checked our email.

Our tailwind was still with us, and it pushed the weather out into the Gulf. We followed the Mississippi into New Orleans, flying along the I-10 (which we had followed as we left Santa Monica), and hooking out along the southern edge of Lake Pontchartrain. The airport’s tower was closed, so the approach controller let us switch to the CTAF and we self-announced. The FBO was not as professional as you might have expected in a big city, but I believe the airport is probably still recovering from Katrina. The FBO was in a double-wide and was  surrounded by chain link fencing.

They called us a cab and we were soon headed toward the French Quarter with a driver who told us stories the entire way into town. New Orleans did not disappoint. Dexter wrote:

We have escaped Texas and we are now in New Orleans where we just had dinner.

and Rudy reported:

We are in New Orleans and loving every moment of it. I had a fantastic batch of calamari in a jazz cafe. Then, a storm started. After getting rained on for a couple minutes, we got to our hotel and are now watching a South Park episode.

]]> http://www.flyingsummers.com/2009/03/kmrf2knew/feed/ 0 http://www.flyingsummers.com/2009/03/smo-to-mrf/ http://www.flyingsummers.com/2009/03/smo-to-mrf/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:00:34 +0000 Colin http://www.flyingsummers.com/?p=447 Monday, March 30

The Southern Route

I had spent the last few days packing and re-packing the plane so that all the little bits and pieces I needed were on board, but out of the way. I had the boys’ clothes packed along with mine. We had delayed our departure for a day so that we were . . . → Read More: Santa Monica, CA to Marfa, TX]]> Monday, March 30

The Southern Route

I had spent the last few days packing and re-packing the plane so that all the little bits and pieces I needed were on board, but out of the way. I had the boys’ clothes packed along with mine. We had delayed our departure for a day so that we were sure we were landing in small Texas towns on a weekday rather than on a Sunday. That also gave me more time to re-pack the clothes and make absolutely sure that we had all of the gadget chargers we needed. (That didn’t work. A lot of the chargers have a little USB connector and I thought if I brought along a hub it could charge six iPod/iPhone/iThings at once. No such luck.) And Nell was able to do her first pass on a script she was rewriting, so she could print a clean copy to bring along on the trip.

[Part of our Spring Break 2009 Trip.]

We drove down to the airport and the boys helped push the plane out of the tie down spot. That let me park our car there for the duration of our vacation. Everyone climbed in, the boys installed their sun-blocking shades in the windows so that they could snooze a little more, and I fired up.

The ATIS was reporting a few more clouds than were forecast for the morning. I asked for a SADDE climb (standard out of Santa Monica to get above the marine layer), but the tower said that SoCal’s air traffic controllers weren’t giving them any climbs to VFR on top. I thought about it and decided I didn’t want to delay us twenty minutes while I filed an IFR flight plan that I was just going to cancel as soon as I was above the clouds, so I departed VFR to the west, turning right at the beach and right again to head back along the I-10 freeway.

As we climbed over the downtown area I checked in with SoCal. They asked my destination and cruising altitude. I said I would eventually be flying at eleven thousand five hundred feet, but that I had to wait until I was out from under the overcast layer at five thousand feet. The controller asked, “Are you IFR rated and equipped?” I acknowledged that I was and he gave me a vector (right on my current course) and clearance up through the clouds. That saved us a lot of time, hassle and fuel (we had a tail wind and winds are generally stronger higher up).

We missed getting a good look at Lake Arrowhead or Big Bear since we were in the clouds as we made our way to and through the Banning Pass, but the clouds did thin and we had a good survey of the Palm Springs area. We turned toward Blythe, with the SoCal controller handing me off to Phoenix Center. Nell and the boys napped as we flew on past Phoenix to the very barren desert around Tucson. Mindful that I might get stuck there (or anywhere), I had asked my friend Peter Murrieta for a hotel recommendation. He wrote back:

The Hotel Congress. It’s historic, if a bit rustic. I used to work the front desk, and it’s in the middle of downtown. No pool, but open since 1902 and they caught John Dillinger there.

Hell, that almost made me want to get stuck in Tucson. That seemed pretty unlikely as we scooted along over the desert, covering more ground in an hour than we ever had during our summer trip. We were up at eleven thousand five hundred feet and the air is pretty thin up there. Rudy and Nell were asleep, but both Dexter and I got slight headaches and, as Dexter said, “Didn’t really feel well.” When he announced his headache we started a slow descent for Tucson.

(Little planes are not pressurized. Passenger jets are pressurized to keep the cabin at eight thousand feet. So no matter how high the JetBlue plane is flying, you feel as if you are just hiking in the San Bernadino Mountains at eight thousand feet. When Adam and I flew to Ryan field a few years earlier we had an oxygen tank. (And when we flew across the country we had an even cooler oxygen concentrator.) It would be nice to have as an option on our trips, but the plane is small and fitting in a tank and the hoses and regulator… it’s just easier to stay a little bit lower for these trips. Maybe someday we’ll be in a bigger plane with a built-in oxygen system.)

We were wheels up in Santa Monica at 7:20am and we landed at Ryan field at 10:00am. We put twenty-six gallons of fuel into the plane having flown 382 nautical miles (nm). Google tells me that it would have been 515 miles of driving and it would have taken seven hours forty-five minutes. We would have needed a car getting twenty mlles to the gallon to match the plane, but a lot of that was because of the tail wind we had.

The fuel was self-service, so Nell and the boys went into the little diner while I got the plane squared away. Dexter wrote:

We’re at a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona. Next stop is El Paso, Texas.

Not a lot of detail, but I liked that he was getting the hang of his Sidekick and the blogging. Rudy actually blogged while hot food sat in front of him, which was remarkable restraint:

We just hit Tucson, Arizona. I love this place! Looks nice, locals are friendly and most of all, the food looks delicious! I am sad to have to leave so fast. Next stop, El Paso, Texas. The winds are with us and we should hit there in a little more then two hours.

Dexter's pancake arrives

An hour and a half after landing we were rolling down the runway for take off. The next flight was bumpy (the tail winds pushing us along tumbled over mountains and hills below us, producing waves in the air we were flying through). It was one of the only times that Nell has felt ill in the plane, which was probably a combination of trying to read while the plane was pushed around the sky by the wind, and the overall degree of turbulence (probably higher than anything we had on a family flight so far).

The wind was incredible. Occasionally we were pushed along with an additional fifty-two knots on our tail (so the wind was higher than that overall), and at one point our groundspeed was 201kts (we usually see that at about 138kts). The plane has a very accurate fuel meter called a totalizer, and the G1000 can draw a range ring right on the map (taking into account the current winds and the current fuel flow) to show you how far your fuel can take you. As we made it through the pass to El Paso (I wonder how they got the name for that town), we saw that we had plenty of fuel to make it to Marfa. The boys  were asleep again, so we just made the turn and headed direct for our night’s lodging.

The bumps were worse as we skirted the higher country along our route. It was only on the ground (and actually much later at night) that Rudy mentioned that he had been scared during some of the flight, that the bumps seemed like they were big enough to hurt our little plane. We had a talk about how it was like waves on the ocean, that we wouldn’t be flying if there were a chance of the plane being hurt by turbulence, because that was unsafe. Since we’re never that anxious to get somewhere, we don’t do things that are unsafe. Dexter slept almost all the way to Marfa.

Winds were high across the plains around Marfa. The airport’s automated weather system reported twenty-seven knots of wind gusting to thirty-five. Fortunately, it was nearly directly down the runway. I wrestled a little with the plane flying the pattern and I think some of my traffic announcements (it is a non-towered airport) were in a tight, clipped voice, but we made it onto the runway without incident. The wind continued to push the plane around as we were taxiing, which required a lot of my attention. We arrived at 2:20pm which was 4:20pm local time.

There were no welcoming line personnel running out of the little FBO. The only tie down I saw was right in front of it, so I spun the plane around into the wind and parked there. As I let the boys out the wind sucked one of the solar shields they use to block the windows. Rudy dashed after it and only with super-human effort was he able to grab it before it disappeared forever into the Texas hills.

He wrote:

With advantageous tailwinds, we skipped El Paso, Texas entirely and went on to Marfa, Texas. We just landed in the middle of a wind storm and took cover in the airport. The airport (technically a little FBO) was completely deserted and felt like something out of a horror movie when we read the reminder note about being here to get a car for us. Like I said, scary. We also found a guy’s jacket. The details are ambiguous but we might be able to get a ride from the hotel we’re staying at. Keep posted readers because this could be the weirdest day of my life.

Ron showed up a few minutes later. I had the plane buttoned up and he said it was fine

Thunderbird Hotel

where it was. He gave me the keys to a beat up Hundai and we loaded the bags into that. Nell confirmed our rooms at the Thunderbird Hotel and we headed in for some rest (me) and a walk (the rest of them).

Rudy’s follow-up post:

Good news. We got a car and are on a drive to the hotel.

Not bad for a little traveler who had made it 776 nautical miles that day.