My Flying Life

Yay! Disneyland.

The Garmin G1000 glass panel - cool!

Internet? No way!  If you stand just so and face North you might be lucky enough to find a couple bars on your cell phone.

Shelter Cove is spectacular - a place I would never drive to but which is a very pleasant flight of less than 2 hours straight up the Pacific coastline. The only trouble is it's often socked in with fog. We lucked out this trip and had perfect clear skies both there and back. 

Columbia is another favorite place, a very accessible Sierra foothill airport along the 49er Highway with a comfortable pilots-only campground right on the airfield. I've been there at least once a year since I began flying, and as a flight instructor have done several sessions of Boot Camp out there.

Pilot's view of Half Dome at Yosemite National Park.

I fly out of Palo Alto and San Carlos airports. Those are just a few miles down the peninsula from SFO but flying into SFO is expensive, busy and daunting. One year we organized a Midnight Run to SFO... imagine a line of six or eight small airplanes all in trail to that big, big runway. And imagine a passenger jet coming in from China trying to stay behind us. We figured if we went at midnight we would be less likely to get in anybody's way. Very cool! 

One winter, someone got the brilliant idea of having a Parade of Planes taxiing under power through downtown San Carlos. Well, I had to volunteer to be in on that! People came out of their houses in bathrobes to point at us - "hey George... there's a row of airplanes driving down the street!" We were lucky to cause just a slowdown - no collisions - on Highway 101 when we all came back over the overpass!

After September 11 there were strict limits on the kinds of flying we could do, especially in the sensitive San Francisco area - the "enhanced Class Bravo" in pilot speak. We had scheduled a landing contest, but that didn't fit into any approved category. Rather than cancel it, we reconceptualized it a bit to fit the new rules, and it became the landing no-contest. It was still fun.

The Rush for Gold Air Rally was the brain child of me and one of the San Carlos Air Traffic Controllers. Teams of pilots got a series of clues, which they could only open once they were airborne, that led them on a scavenger hunt involving several small airports. Eventually, they all ended up at Columbia - did I say that Columbia is one of my favorite places? - for a big meal and camping under the stars. Oh, and for a bag of "gold" coins. They still had to figure out the final clue in order to find the bag of coins, though... the first team in was so excited that they misinterpreted the final clue and needlessly sifted through the contents of the garbage can in the women's bathroom. We wouldn't be that mean! 

Death Valley has the lowest elevation airport in the United States... minus 178 MSL. It was also more than 110 degrees in the shade, which made for a crack-of-dawn take off the following day.

I just like this picture of me landing at Bishop, on the Eastern side of the Sierras, for a fuel stop.

The San Francisco Bay marshes are home to thriving communities of birds, plants and small mammals of various kinds. They are also home to the Leslie Salt ponds, which change constantly, producing different colors and patterns every week.

Summer moonrise over the airport campground at Kern Valley, California.