South West Fly Out Trip

General

For those of you who do not know I am eternal private pilot student. I have been doing flying lessons now for about 18 months, between here and Australia I have now had 3 schools in 2 countries. Since being in the US I have given the whole flying fly a good nudge to try to get it finished off, I am now one regulated flight away from getting my license (the actual final test) -  although I will do a couple of revision lessons before that point. Needless to say I will blog about getting my license when (if) that day comes.

I am a member of the West Valley Flying Club at the Palo Alto Airport. This is where I do my flight training and it is very convenient being not that far from where we live and close to work. It is probably the shortest airfield I have used yet in all of my flying (2443 feet) - even the grass strips at Archerfield are 3300 feet ! That being said it is about 3 times what I need depending on loading so all is good :-)

Emily and I recently did a fly out trip with an informal group of instructors and pilots to the South West of the USA (California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas), it took 4 days and almost 21 hours in the cockpit. We saw some fantastic country side and had a good time.

We departed from Palo Alto on Thursday 16th of April, the aircraft I was flying was a Cessna 182.

This was a little different to the Cessna 172 that I normally fly in that is has a bigger engine (230 compared to 180 HP), can carry more weight (1100lb compared to 851) and most importantly it has a 'glass cockpit'. Glass Cockpit is fancy pilot talk for a computerised instrument panel, instead of the old dials discrete instruments you traditionally associate with an aircraft.

This has many important features such as built in mapping, fuel computer and full integration to almost all instruments. The only thing that was not fully intergrated was the auto pilot but that was no real big deal. This system also has a satellite radio hook  up for the latest weather, storm activity, lightning and similar. It is very tightly coupled to the aircraft systems allowing you to free yourself from much of the cockpit management that makes flying troublesome and whilst learning makes it seem (to be honest) dangerous. If you ever had to lookup in the airport facilities directory (a good sized paper back) for the frequecnies and traffic pattern details for an airport you know this - it means sticking your head in a book and not looking outside of the aircraft - you know what I mean !   

 (yes yes, I know, 1000 old timers have just groaned at me for my impudence in daring to use technology in the cockpit - I am learning using the older methods - chart, pilotage, dead reckoning, VOR, NDB etc for my license but once I am free from having to prove that level of basic understanding I fully intend to use as much technology to make flying safer where I can. If my fancy new fangled gadgets ever fail I will be OK - go take a hot cup of tea and have a lie down now...)

Anhow, enough of the pilot geek stuff - on with the trip :-)  The following maps shows the spots we stopped at, you can use the satellite view on Google Maps to compare against some of the photos we took.

View SW Trip in a larger map

We operated the entire route under Air Route Traffic Control, where we contacted the ARTC people and they gave us radar transponder codes and traffic advisories the entire way - this is called Flight Following and it is a great service. 

Day 1 Palo Alto to Lancaster (Gen William J Fox Airfield) to Sedona via Grand Canyon (photos)

Our first day we went from Palo Alto to Sedona, Arizona. Near Palo Alto are the distinctive if not famous airship hangars at Morphett Field, they are very large and quite a site to see.

From Palo Alto we flew to William J Fox Airport at Lancaster in Southern California. This was the first of many eating stops ! It seems that the done thing is stop and have a meal at every place you land - alot of fun, don't get me wrong but we landed in a lot of places and US meals are never small.

On the way to Sedona we fly via the Grand Canyon. This was the only bad weather we got for the trip and it was just cloudy, there is a special flight rules area over the Canyon (to prevent dozens of light a/c descending into it I imagine) and this mixed with the cloud that was present meant we did not get the best view although what we saw was fantastic:

This is the view of the attraction at the Grand Canyon where you can access a glass walk way over the canyon and see all of the way down.

Sedona was fantastic, the airport there was rated recently by a flying magazine as one of the top ten hardest approaches in the US. Now might be a good time just to let you all know that I had a flying instructor in the right hand seat at all times (no license yet!). 

I am not sure if it is obvious from this image but we landed from the other end and you can sort of make out a vertical feature down that end that was quite imposing on final - just sitting there like a raised hill almost in your path.

The airport was quite high and the surrounding features give you illusions on the way in that make you think you are constantly too low - as such a few go arounds were required until my mind got happy with the fact that I was not going to crash into things like this :

I am not trying to over dramatise it, it was a good fun place to land. My first attempt was OK but I had some communications issues so I tried it again the next morning on the way out and that was where the go-arounds started  - I got there in the end and learnt a whole bunch of things so it was very worthwhile. 

 

The town of Sedona is beautiful, set amongst the Coyote and Road Runner country. We did not see as much of this place as we would have liked (too busy eating) and it is definately a must do next time.

Day 2 Sedona to Sierra Vista (Tomstone) to El Paso in Texas (photos)

We left Sedona nice and early to beat any late day turbulence and from Sedona to Tucson we flew over Meteor Crater - it's name pretty well gives it away.

This was one of the nice things about flying as I was just able to do circles over this as much as I liked. 

After Meteor Crater we also stopped in at Scottsdale, Arizona (northern Phoenix suburb) as if we are ever going to fly to see our friends in Phoenix this is our most likely destination, so it was good to get the practise. That is one very busy chunk of airspace, in and around Phoenix. ARTC were calling traffic targets for us left, right, center, on top of center and stacked 3 high on center. Not dangerous but a place you had to stay focussed for sure. When you are number 4 or 5 in the pattern and get called in behind a Lear Jet that is on a right pattern/base entry and you are on a late left downwind you know it isn't quite normal (at least where I normally fly).

Over Tucson we flew over the aircraft boneyward, where the US military store in the dry desert a good few air forces worth of equipment for spares:

Have a look at the Day 2 photos Flickr to see more high resolution images. There were a lot of aircraft down there, some very modern. If you enable the view in Google map for the satellite image overlay it looks really good.

We got to the town of Tombstone via the airfield at Libby near Sierra Vista, they have kept the town's main street pretty authentic, there are placards at the various places around town celebrating the gun fights and deaths that made the town famous.

We also bought ourselves a Stetson hat each in Tombstone:

Between Sierra Vista and El Paso we paralleled the US/Mexico border staying on the gringo side, this was good to see. Along the border region there was a site that had a balloon suspending at 15,000 feet - from memory ground level was over 5,000 but it was still impressive. We saw the balloon and took an image of that can be seen here - it is a very large image as it is not easy to see.

The border crossing into Mexico at El Paso was something that was fairly cool as well, you can see all of the traffic congestion caused by it here:

At the end of Day 2 we finished off in El Paso where that night we ate - again ! 

The El Paso stop over really showed us the cooler side of aviation here in the US -there is an entire industry setup to service the drop in pilot. When you land and go to an FBO (fixed base operator) they want your business (fuel), they will send out little carts with 'Follow Me' signs on the back, fill up your aircraft, wash your windscreen and you get to use the FBO facility - things like rest rooms, planning rooms and similar. Whilst our little Cessna 182 didn't take that much fuel (60 or so gallons, typically half that because it was all we needed) the bigger corporate jets parked at these facilities can take many hundreds if not thousands of gallons - they really suck up to those people to get their business. We were told stories of some FBO who deploy red carpet for you when you land - I suppose if Britney got off the plane she would expect it !

Day 3 - El Paso to Deer Valley (Phoenix) to Lake Havasu City (photos)

Day 3 saw us fly to Lake Havasu City, a big lake on the border of Arizona and California. On the way we needed to pull into Deer Valley in Phoenix to use the facilities, light aircraft lack some nice features no matter how cool the electronics. So we pulled into Deer Valley, used the restrooms and had a late breakfast !

Probably the most memorable thing about Deer Valley was the 50 minutes it took for the newby tower controller get us off the ground, we were stuck at or near the hold point for the right hand parallel runway with about 20 other aircraft whilst he worked out his stuff ! 

Lake Havasu City was good, we did a good lap over the lake on the way in, this place is famous for its authentic London Bridge (purchased and brought over brick by brick) and for its Spring Break festivities - we were there for the tail end of Spring Break.

If you use this link you can see a super sized version of the bridge, also one from ground level below.

The kids were there enjoying spring break and it seemed that they all had a high power speed boat and beer ! All of the boats had very loud stereo systems and they were all exercising their constiutional rights of freedom of loud music. That sounds like I am getting old, it was pretty cool to see, something were better to see than others !

Click here (and here) for a super sized version of that young lady !

We had a good hotel room, take a look here to see it relative location to the night club ! It was a nice room, especially once the music stopped at 2am - god - I am getting old !

That night we went out and had a nice meal :-)

Day 4 Lake Havasu to Catalina Island (Avalon) to Palo Alto (photos)

The last day of our trip saw us off early, once again as the cooler part of the day is better for turbulence. We flew through the LA area and that was awesome, that is one large chunk of urban landscape - when I fly into LA on commercial travel I usually find the landscape depressing but this time it was quite interesting and exciting.  Catalina Island is the big island (one of them anyhow) off the coast of LA people might be familiar with if you are coming in or out to Australia commercially. There is a quite an interesting airport at Avalon on the Island, it is not as bad as Sedona for approaches almost from these images you would not think so:

We land at the right hand end looking at the image above and the wind was doing all sort of exciting things with the cliff faces at either end. The airfield is raised in the middle so you cannot see one end from the other - makes using the radio really important ! Once we were on the ground we went and ... had lunch! This time is was buffalo burgers as they are a specialty of the region due to some buffalo being released during a movie shoot after being brought across from the mainland back in the thirties - tasted like a burger !

From Catalina Island we stopped for fuel at Camarillo after transiting right over the top of LAX  (safer over the top as landing/taking off aircraft do not tend to be there) - that was also some awesomely busy airspace.

We continued up the coast past the Hearst Castle and Big Sur until we landed back at Palo Alto. This was the end of our little trip, almost 21 hours flying in four days was a fair bit, I would not be that adventurous again - at least when it came to flying for flying's sake. It sure was a great way to see the US and we do plan more trips once I can lose the instructor beside me.

Thanks verys much to Dan Dyer, the flight instructor and the rest of the crew who flew along as well in other aircraft. I look forward to flying out again soon.