Walking on the Moon

I’ve been swamped by the holidays and work, so I haven’t been up in a couple weeks. I got a chance to remedy that today, and scooted out to Cable Airport for breakfast at Maniac Mike’s Café. Cable’s another one of the few uncontrolled, privately owned, public use airports in the LA basin – like Flabob. It’s usually an interesting place to drop in to.

I’d like to claim that my couple weeks off was the reason I screwed up my radio work on departure, but honestly, left and right are more fundamental than correct radio syntax. I asked for a right downwind departure and made a left downwind departure. Duh.

The flight out was under astonishingly clear skies. It was so clear I thought I’d mis-set my altimeter and was flying too low. Simply gorgeous views of the San Gabriels en route.

At Cable I joined the pattern (which was hopping) behind a CHP Cessna who was arriving from the opposite direction. My radios were better here, though less formal. Both of us slipped in without incident.

I took a bunch of shots at the airport, including the breathtaking mountains and a wing of RVs that had flown in. I’ve uploaded a couple here and more to Facebook. If you want to see the Facebook pictures and aren’t on there, drop me a line.

Breakfast was good, and I had a cup of coffee with it. I usually don’t indulge, but there’s something about Maniac Mike’s that makes me want a cup. One’s plenty for me, as I have no tolerance whatsoever.

After enjoying breakfast and scoping out the Pacific Flyer, a source of endless entertainment (and some actual reportage), I headed back out to SMO. Before I left I watched a pretty unusual looking aircraft land. It had an in-line gear arrangement like a glider, but was also a powered A/C. Maybe it was some kind of motorglider. In any case, the fellow flying it called it a Europa.

On the return trip I throttled back to a 90 kt. airspeed to enjoy the trip a little longer. I had some other stuff to do, and couldn’t really justify flying too much further, but slower worked just fine. Coming into Santa Monica, the tower asked for best forward speed to the runway to stay out in front of an arriving LearJet. I’m sure the controller was pleasantly surprised to watch me pick up 30 knots on final.

I even made a good landing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Aviation, blogbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.