Napa Wine Tasting and a little Swashbuckling with the Weather

I don't have any flying pictures from this past weekend... Flight up to Napa was soporific, great VFR, no bumps, engine quietly ticking away... Very nice.

Flight back to San Diego was much more interesting...

Lots of rain on Saturday but the ceilings always stayed pretty reasonable. 2000 or better.

The plan was to fly from Napa, 30 miles to Oakland, have lunch with Brother & friends and then work our way south by any means available.

Right away the forecasts showed rain, and that cold and freezing levels would be low, meaning Ice would be a problem...

The ceiling was at about 2000 for the flight from Napa with a scattered layer at 1000. Getting to Oakland wasn't the prettiest flight ever but we got there. Visibility outside of the clouds was good so the San Francisco Skyline was great as well.

We had a great brunch, and toured my brother's wacky workplace where he's building autonomous submarines.

Back at the airport things looked ok in the immediate airport area but ugly around LA and the San Gabriel mountains. Lots of rain, freezing level somewhere between 4000 and 9000. Conditions at the airports under the rain weren't great but weren't awful either... The San Joaquin Valley was showing good VFR all the way to Pasa Robles but the situation was changing quickly so I called XM Satellite weather and had my service reactivated. This got me inflight weather: radar for rain showers and METARs for current conditions. Hedge the bets when you can.

I departed Oakland with the intention of landing Santa Ynez. Small airport, instrument approach, good review from friends who have overnighted there and nearby Solvang is an interesting little place to visit. After 1:30 bouncing along I figured this would be a reasonable comfort stop.

About 30 miles south of San Jose the weather radar showed a gap toward Bakersfield, and for a bit I headed that way but then decided that I'd be better off waiting things out at Santa Ynez. Pasa Robles was another reasonable place to stop and the weather was still passable. That route would potentially lead us to the coast where we could scud run (fly low) along the coast if we had to... This wouldn't be an option from Bakersfield.

On top at 10,500 I was able to see ahead that I would have to go back down and swashbuckle a bit with the weather...

30 miles out of Pasa Robles, I descended down through a hole, and asked for an instrument clearance to Santa Ynez. East bound they like odd thousands so the deal I cut was that I would try 7000 feet but I suspected I would pick up ice in the clouds at that altitude. The air temp at 4500 was showing 41 F, at three degrees per thousand feet I'd be right on the edge of the freezing level at 7000.

As I climbed into the clouds to 7000 I noticed the rain turn to melting snow. Not ice but melting snow. At 7000 ft, the rate that the snow was melting became disturbingly slow... I asked for lower and got 6000, about 11 minutes later (not that I was counting but perhaps my wife was...) we were cleared down to 5000, and then cleared for the approach. Mountain tops were in the clouds, visibility underneath was bad in the rain showers. Going IFR was the better choice as opposed to VFR underneath.

On the ground at Santa Ynez by 5 PM we found that the situation wasn't going to get any better for at least 2 more hours... so now we were looking at flying in the dark moonless night over the mountains with a chance of Ice in a homebuilt single engine plane... This is starting to sound like an Ernest Gann novel. Santa Barbara and the coast wasn't too far away but scud running along the coast after dark wasn't appealing either... Then there is the problem of getting past LA...

We bagged it, got a rental car and then I had a delicious rasberry beer with dinner at the brew pub and that sealed the deal, we were spending the night in Solvang. Not the worst thing in the world.

5:30 AM, Monday Morning, we were greeted by patchy fog but good conditions otherwise. With stars shining above, the sunrise still an hour away but peeking over the mountains, we were airborne again and riding a 45 knot tailwind back to San Diego.

LA airspace had us climb to 10,500 where it was COLD! As quickly as we could we descended back to 7500 which was comfortably above the cloud tops. We asked for and were given the GPS 17 into Gillespie, landed uneventfully and made it to work on time.

Not a bad weekend. Big thanks to my wife for editing!

Sedona!

Ages ago, I was a young pilot with a freshly minted license. There was a gentlemen at my home airport with all manner of tangible and intangible aviation things. He had a multi engine airline transport license, he had a delivery position on a jet, he had a T-6 WWII trainer that I'd give up body parts to fly and he had a huge number of experiences flying places that I'd only dream of ever going. This type of pilot is very prevalent around the airport: Storied, well heeled and not shy about telling you. I'm probably sliding into that role these days... But anyway, Sedona came up in discussion one time. He warned, if you ever go there, be sure you're on your game, its a dangerous airport, all kinds of optical illusions, vicious turbulence, sink off the end of the runway not even a Navy Fighter could out climb. As I quietly listened, his words faded from my attention and I thought I've got as much of a chance of landing at Sedona as landing on the moon... I'm an east coaster, I don't have a plane, no hours, no Airline Transport ticket... Well sometimes I'm cheerfully wrong. This trip proved it.

Wife and I went to Sedona for the weekend. Wife is a new and wonderful addition to the mix since the last installment of this blog and she has been an all too willing participant in the riding around in a home-built plane business. Most people look at the plane and ask if it's remote control whereas she asked for a ride, and the rest is history. She's also taking flying lessons these days. I'm a little concerned that the disappearance of the "ignorance is bliss mentality" may wear off a bit of the impeccable pilot in shining armor sheen and expose me to a bit of doubt in my intrepid piloting... but these are risks I'm willing to take.

Anyway, back to the trip. Sedona's airport sits up on top of a mesa that is about 500 feet above the surrounding terrain. The problem for many pilots is that you think that you are higher than you actually are because you naturally judge your height from the terrain around you as opposed to the airport elevation hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of yards ahead. So Sedona does have a bit of a legendary air to it. That isn't even considering the "vortexes" that some of questionable scientific background seem to think surround the place. The landing was a bit of a non event. Landings after sitting still for a few hours can be less than picture perfect and this was no exception, even still I think I managed a perfectly fine arrival. I didn't think that the approach was all that different. I guess going from 45 hrs total time to 1800 total time changes your skills and perspective. Either way it was a non event. The scenery while meandering around to land was magnificent: Red Rocks everywhere, towering in columns over us as we maneuvered for our arrival.

Once inside the airport building, not a shack like most, this place was legit, I saw that they had hats for sale reading CV-3-21, making a reference to the airport being like an aircraft carrier and the two runway opposing directions of 3 (30 degrees magnetic) and 21 (210 degrees) magnetic. I didn't buy one.

This was the middle of the winter in Sedona but still this is Arizona, they don't actually have winter do they? Well it turns out they do... We went on a hike with the goal of summiting Mt Wilson but only made it to the bench about an hour short of the summit. Our reason was pretty legit: Snow and lots of it. The ground was soaked as well, after getting to the bench it was a slip slide mud fest. We saw three women on their way down and they were covered in mud and much better equipped with hiking boots whereas I just had on my 5-finger running shoes... poor decision. So we headed back down.

As it turns out Sedona was having a film festival and we managed to catch an excellent thriller type film that turned out to be way better than we were expecting. Independent films get a thumbs up from us.

The town was a bizarre mix of incredibly wealthy and incredibly earthy hippies. Not sure how that mix comes together but it does in Sedona.

Ah, Sedona.