Date: Tuesday, October 1, 2002, 11:27:22 AM Subject: Lots of Flying last weekend Last weekend, I did a lot of flying. Saturday, my wife and I flew our friends, a couple and one of their sons, to San Luis Obispo (SBP). We had originally planned to fly to Avalon (Catalina Island), but the shoreline marine layer obscured what would have been a picturesque view. Sorry Jay that we didn't meet you there, but we decided that the short flight to the better restaurant at SBP was the way to go -- and our friends had a time constraint. We filed IFR, but flew in sunny VMC. It was a beautiful day, mostly calm, with only a very slight burble of turbulence over the hills surrounding Santa Maria. After a smooth landing, and brief taxi, we pulled up and parked next to our larger and much more expensive Piper cousin, a Malibu, right in front of the airfield restaurant at SBP. If you ever get a chance to fly in to SBP, be sure to stop and eat at the restaurant there -- it is full of nostalgic aviation material: old newspapers from the '20s, posters, bulletins, and photographs. In addition to the period look, the food is actually quite good--even locals drive to eat at the restaurant. After a leisurely lunch, we climbed back into our "time/space machine", reved it up, and flew on back home to SBA. Sunday, my oldest daughter had to return to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), to begin her sophomore year, so I had planned to fly her, and her 200+ lbs of clothes (!!?) down to Montgomery Field (MYF), in San Diego. However, her sister, my younger daughter, had "borrowed" some of her older sister's clothes and gone to Bakersfield to visit with some friends. Not actually having planned it very well, she cannot get back from Bakersfield in time before her sister departs (with me) for UCSD. So, I "helped her out" by flying to Bakersfield to pick her and her borrowed clothes up, and brought them both back in time to return the clothes and so the sisters can make their goodbyes to each other. The flight to Bakersfield was bright and sunny, and increasingly hot as we approached our destination. Flying with my two boys, we landed, refueled, picked up daughter #2, and then turned around to head for home at SBA. It's a 2.5 - 3 hour drive by car from SBA to Bakersfield, but it's barely 35 minutes as the crow flies. Finally, a couple of hours later, my older daughter arrives with her 200+ pounds of clothing, which we manage to stuff into the Cherokee 6. There's an old saying about the Cherokee 6's: "if you can put it through the door, it'll carry it." We did, and it did. I guess I can recall moving that much stuff in and out of my college dorms each semester. The weather report from SBA to MYF is CAVU, up to 12,000 ft., so instead of filing IFR, and getting the typical and longer East LA routing from SBA down to San Diego, I simply filed VFR with flight following. Our route was much more direct, to VTU, LAX, OCN, and then MYF. As we passed VTU, we requested and received clearance for the shoreline route at 3500. After leaving the shoreline route of LAX, I climb to 5500 to get over the Long Beach airport airspace. After that, it's pretty much direct to OCN and then MYF, by way of the visual reporting point, Mt. Soledad. I get sequenced as #2 for a left downwind into MYF, and we're soon parking at Crown Air, the FBO right by the terminal. It's kind of ironic that if I file IFR, I get the SBAL9 route, which drives due east behind LA, then drops south from Pomona to Oceanside, and thence to Mission Bay, but if I file VFR, I can get a much more direct route, saving as much as 10 minutes out of an hour-long flight. The two routes are contrasted in the simple ASCII picture below. The IFR route is laid out with "-\|" characters, and the VFR route is laid out with ".". Please view in a fixed-width font such as Courier. SBA ---------------------------------\ ... VNY \ .... \ ... \ VTU... | .... | .. | LAX | . | .. | .. | .. | .. \ .OCN \ .. \ ..\ .. .. \.. MZB--.-MYF The IFR return flight from MYF to SBA is much like the VFR route. I don't know why it's not possible to get a more direct IFR routing from SBA to MYF. After we arrived at MYF and transferred her belongings to her new apartment, being my daughter's IT person, I spent the next 5 or 6 hours doing an operating system upgrade (to Windows XP) on her laptop, and then installing and re-installing software on it. I cannot tell you how much fun that was. Finally, I got back to MYF at midnight, for a very late night IFR flight back from MYF to SBA. Since MYF tower is closed, I contacted San Diego Departure control to get my IFR 'routing and clearance, which is SANL21 -- a very direct flight back to SBA via MZB OCN LAX VTU. The departure controller is very helpful (having nothing else to do that late at night), and vectors me straight to OCN, instead of having to do the usual IFR departure to Mission Bay VOR. The post-midnight flight back to SBA is uneventful, the normally crowded skies over LAX are clear, and, eventually, I get cleared for the ILS Rwy 7 approach for SBA. But, as I make my CTAF announcement about being on long final for the ILS, someone else, apparently flying VFR at 2am, approaching from over the city of Santa Barbara, asks for my position. I report being on short final for the ILS rwy 7, and then I'm down and taxing off. Shortly after, the other plane touches down and taxies over to the same FBO as I. What a coincidence! The only time that I've flown into SBA in the middle of the night, my tie-down neighbor does it also. I like the night flying: the air is very calm and serene, and the moonlit landscape seductively teases your eye with just enough detail to know where you are, but doesn't reveal too much either -- kind of like a well-designed dress on a beautiful woman.