Los Angeles to Palm Beach, Florida in a Robinson R44 Helicopter

I was the proud owner of a new Robinson R44 instrument trainer helicopter… for about one hour. Then our dealer called and said that a guy in Florida wanted to pay a $15,000 premium for the machine. If we delivered it to Florida, we could pick up a replacement at the Robinson factory in Los Angeles in early February. The prospect of making a profit, however small, in any aviation-related business was so exciting that I programmed the GPS for KLNA and headed east over Interstate 10.

My Los Angeles experience started at my cousin’s house on Mulholland near the 405. His teenage son has moved on to college, so I slept in his room underneath a 5′ high poster for the movie Taxi Driver. I spent the morning at the reopened Getty Villa. “I refuse to pay for one of those concrete bunker-type structures that are the fad among modern architects,” Getty had said when unveiling the original design. What have the bureaucrats to whom he left his fortune done? Built a massive concrete bunker alongside the original Roman-style villa. The Villa itself has been repainted and looks great; the restaurant, which is in the bunker, serves delicious California cuisine; the gardens and setting are magnificent as before. My friend Ray came in from Ireland and had never seen California, so I took him on a whirlwind tour: Venice Beach, the new LA Cathedral, Olvera Street (Mexican neighborhood downtown), the Hollywood Blvd Walk of Fame, LACMA (Ray was awed by the Latin American colonial art show), La Brea Tar Pits, the Petersen Automotive Museum (coolest exhibit for aviation nerds: Chrysler turbine-powered car), and In-n-Out Burger.

The trip out of Los Angeles is remarkable for the sprawl of hideous tract housing and the number of towered airports through which one must transition. As soon as the helicopter crested the ridge at Banning, California the heat rising up from Palm Springs almost punched us in the face. We continued to E25, Wickenburg, Arizona, for lunch with Maria Langer, author of computer how-to books and operator of a single-pilot Part 135 helicopter air-taxi operation. Temperatures were over 100 degrees F (39-40C). Using advice and a chart from Maria, we pushed through Phoenix Class B airspace down I-10 to Tucson, wiped out from the heat and stopped from going farther east by a wall of thunderstorms and rain.

We had the best hot dogs in the world at El Guero Canelo, a Tucson institution, collapsed in the Hampton Inn and managed to lift at 0630 the next morning. We stopped for breakfast in Las Cruces, New Mexico, home to about 70 U.S. Navy T-34s taking off in formation for training all day every day (they have air conditioning in their turbine-powered two-seaters). We passed through downtown El Paso and continued to Ozona, Texas, nervously watching ugly-looking rain showers get closer to I-10 and more numerous. We decided not to press our luck and put the helicopter in a hangar for the night, getting a ride from Charles McCleary, the airport manager, to a motel across from “the only bar in town.” We paid $3 per person for a temporary membership in the private club that would enable us to order alcohol, then ordered a bottle of Shiraz. Ray had never been to Texas, so I ordered him a chicken-fried steak. He was shocked by the size and audacity of the dish.

Weather the next morning was truly scary, with 300′ ceilings reported at the handful of airports along the route of flight. We decided to have ourselves a nice breakfast, but the best thing we could find were grilled ham and (American) cheese sandwiches (on white bread only) at the local drug store. What do folks do in town f0r fun? The airport manager had said “watch TV”, but the motel clerk said that crystal meth and other drugs were at least as popular. The only thing scarier than the weather was another night in Ozona, so we lifted at 1:30 pm and heated east under 900′ ceilings toward College Station, Texas (KCLL), home of Texas A&M. The visibility seemed to be poor east of Junction, Texas, so we set down to introduce Ray to barbecue at Lum’s, a restaurant famous throughout Texas, apparently. Folks in Ozona told us of a contest to see how Aggies compared to University of Texas graduates. The smartest Aggie and the dumbest U. of T. graduates were put up on stage in front of a large audience, divided by an aisle into A&M And UT graduates. The first question was to to the Aggie: “What’s 3 times 3?” The smart Aggie responded “9”, whereupon the entire Aggie side of the auditorium rose to its feet chanting “Give him another chance.”

We made it to College Station around 7 pm and got picked up by the LaSalle Hotel in Bryan. The next morning, the weather for the coast was low visibility in the morning; thunderstorms in the afternoon. We decided to proceed northeast to Jackson, Mississippi where our route would suffer from low visibility and clouds, but not nearly as much rain and no thunderstorms. The trip was challenging, with the clouds pushing us down as low as 300′ above the terrain in some places and encouraging us to study the chart very carefully looking for radio and cell phone towers (the on-board GPS has a database of these, but it is designed for airplanes, which tend to fly higher, and was constantly complaining about terrain and therefore not that useful for getting warnings about the truly hazardous towers). We were flying near some small airports and Ray wondered if we should announce our location on their “common traffic advisory frequency” (CTAF). I said “sure, but I doubt that anyone else would be stupid enough to be up here.” Ray said “What about that helicopter at 3 o’clock?” It was a Blackhawk, scud-running like us to Natchitoches, Louisiana. When we got on the ground we asked the crew “Why would you guys scud-run VFR when you have all of the equipment to go IFR (fly instruments) up at a comfortable 3000 or 5000′?” They said that the helicopter had just come out of maintenance and they were trying to do the first few flights VFR until the ship had proven itself. The weather that was terrifying to us was no big deal to these Iraq veterans.

We shut down for the night in Montgomery, Alabama at a Hampton Inn. Our dining options included Subway, Waffle House, and Burger King. The next morning we flew at 3500′ over a layer of scattered clouds and poor visibility to Moultrie, Georgia (KMGR) and then at 5500′ on our leg to St. Augustine, Florida. Ray hadn’t tried going airplane-style over the weather and was (1) surprised that it was legal to fly VFR over cloud layers, and (2) impressed by the smoothness and coolness gained. We had lunch with our helicopter dealer, Andres, walked around the historic center of St. Augustine, and lifted for a trip down the coast at 500-1000′. To make sure that we avoided the restricted area around NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, we contacted Orlando Approach for VFR advisories. We could see ugly black thunderstorms and lightning off to our right for the entire trip and we heard the controllers giving vectors and holding instructions to airliners that had gone missed at Orlando.

We arrived at Lantana (KLNA) after sunset but just before complete darkness and handed over the keys to the new owner. He was so grateful that we hadn’t crashed his helicopter, he took us for dinner at the best restaurant he could think of. This being Florida, it was a sports bar in a strip mall. We slept at the Hampton Inn and caught a JetBlue flight back to Boston the next day for $160, about what it costs to take an R44 from one side of a big airport to the other.

Total time for the trip: 5 days on the calendar and about 26 in-flight hours; average speed of approximately 95 knots (the helicopter is capable of going faster, but we slowed down when the visibility was poor).