Go West Young Man

As readers of this blog may remember, I attended a "fly-in" of Socata airplane owners from the East Coast back in May. On the trip, I was joined by a Socata owner from California, Vince Chambers, who just happened to be in New York that weekend. We'd had such a good time together, we agreed that I should try to attend the West Coast fly-in scheduled for October.  Since I usually travel to California 4 or 5 times a year anyway, and I had 4 months to work on my itinerary, it was not too hard to schedule a business trip around the same time as the West Coast Fly-in.

The plan was for me to fly to Santa Rosa airport (STS) in northern California via Seattle out of JFK on Friday, October 1st.  Vince, with wife and youngest son aboard, would fly from Chico, CA to Santa Rosa to pick me up. From STS, the plan was to fly about an hour south to Monterey, the site of the West Coast fly-in. Since Monterey usually fogs over in the early evening, I was Vince's back up plan.  He is only halfway through his instrument training and is not able to fly into IFR condition (i.e. fog), therefore, I was going to be PIC to ensure we could land at Monterey on Friday evening.  On Sunday, I had arranged to catch a ride to L.A. from another Socata owner who was flying up to Monterey from Redlands, CA. and my business trip would begin on Monday morning in Los Angeles.  What a great plan: a weekend with pilots, a chance to fly a different airplane, a private ride to Los Angeles and all this combined with a business trip which helped keep my expenses low.  What's the expression, "the best laid plans of mice and men........"

The weather on the Thursday evening prior to my trip was conspiring to ruin my weekend.  It was pouring rain and the wind was howling and gusting to over 50 mph. As I went to bed on Thursday night, I was resigned to not making it to the fly-in and having to reschedule my commercial flight directly to LA on Sunday evening. In the morning, I left the house by car service at 5:45am trying to catch an 8:15am Delta flight to Seattle.  I was surprised the flight was still listed as "on-time" and even more surprised the driver had made it to my house on time in spite of the continuing rain and wind storm.  As we left the driveway, I still had very low expectations of making to the airport in time for the flight as I was sure there would be downed trees or closed roadways or severe traffic that would prevent us from getting there, but I was up already, so why not try. We indeed were delayed for about 10 minutes on the parkway with massive flooding causing a single lane of passage, but to my surprise, we arrived at 7:15am for the 8:15am flight. Check-in was a breeze and I found myself at the gate at 7:25am and the gate agent assured me the flight would leave on time and we would be boarding shortly. Holy smokes, I thought, this may actually all work out. Hope was beginning to replace dejection.

During our taxi out to the runway, the pilot advised us of a potentially bumpy ride up to altitude, but then surprised me by saying we were #2 for departure! No ground delay at all! The climb out was indeed bumpy, but when we leveled off at 38,000ft the ride was smooth and soon the movie began. We'd left on time, I had a 2 hour layover to make my connection out of Seattle, the weather on the west coast was perfect -- for the first time, I said to myself "Wow, this is all going to work out great!" At that moment, the captain interrupted the movie with the following announcement, "Ladies and gentleman, we're experiencing a slight issue with the #2 engine so we're going to land in Syracuse and check it out. Stewards, please prepare the cabin for landing." WTF?? Landing in Syracuse?? How badly do we need to be on the ground for the captain to want to land a fully loaded 767 in Syracuse? This is not good!! Damn you travel gods -- why would you head fake me like this?

The landing was made onto a runway lined with fire trucks and reverse thrust and hard breaking was employed to keep us from running off of the end.  It was 9:15am as we deplaned in Syracuse -- I quickly realized my connection was never going to happen. Delta said they were sending a replacement plane and it would be in Syracuse by 1:30pm. There were later connections for Santa Rosa, but Vince could not wait. I now needed to get myself to Monterey. The replacement 767 was now due at 3pm. I decided to get out of Syracuse in favor of a Delta hub, so I booked myself on the 3:30pm flight to Atlanta and then onto the 7:15pm flight to San Jose arriving at 9:45pm local. A very nice west coast Socata owner who lives in San Jose offered to pick me up and drive me down to Monterey.  Originally, he was not going to go until the next morning, but he was kind enough to collect me at the airport and head down Friday night.  We arrived in Monterey at about midnight local (3am by my body clock) so I'd been traveling for 22 hours straight.  What a day!!

Vince was also affected by my travel delay because he was unable to land at Monterey airport due to fog and had to divert to Salinas airport (SNS) and rent a car.  This had a knock-on effect for Sunday's departure because Salinas was hosting a large Airshow and the airport was closed to traffic from 11am to 5pm.  Since Vince wanted to leave around 2pm with the rest of us, we needed to reposition his airplane to Monterey before 11am on Sunday. The weather was an overcast layer at about 1,400 AGL, so he couldn't do it himself, so I went with him and got to fly my first TB-21.  The extra power from the turbocharger is fun, but the plane basically flies just like mine.  20 minutes after departing SNS and climbing up through a layer, I was shooting the ILS10 approach into Monterey in N20FR.  We followed the ILS down below the clouds and broke out to find the runway right ahead of us and I made an acceptable landing.  There was a treat waiting for us on the ramp at Monterey.

The star performers of the Salinas airshow, The Thunderbirds, were staging at Monterey prior to their 3pm performance. WOW is all you can say.  Everything about them, the planes, the pilots, the ground crew, are all awesome.  They do everything with military precision and perfection. I had a blast on the ramp checking them out!

It came time to leave, but Vince had another problem.  The cloud layer had not lifted, so he could not leave to fly home. The prospect of a 5 hour drive home without the airplane was not very appealing, so the Socata owners huddle to come up with a plan.  We knew the cloud layer was only on the coastline and that 10 miles inland the skies were basically clear.  We decided that I would fly N20FR with Vince and his family out of Monterey on an IFR departure plan, as would the other plane that was taking me to Los Angeles, and we would land at King City, CA (KKIC) for me to switch planes and continue south while Vince would take control of his plane and fly back home in VFR conditions. The plan came off without a hitch and 30 minutes later, with 0.5 more time in a TB-21 in my logbook, I was climbing into a 1986 TB-20 to make the 2 hour flight down to Santa Monica, CA. The 2 hour trip south was beautiful - California coastal topography is so different than what I'm used to on the east coast.  It is inspiring.

My business trip began Sunday night with a dinner with a customer and his wife and the rest of the trip was uneventful, but the chance to experience G.A. on the west coast and make a few new friends in the pilot community was well worth the difficulties that plagued the start of my trip.