Our story picks up again on an April Saturday morning in Tucson. When checked the previous night, the forecast weather beyond El Paso was a combination of ugly and iffy. Despite the weather forecast and having flown 5 hours (collective-cracked time, so closer to 6 hours of rotor-spinning time), we were at the airport a little after 7:00 am.
After weight gained via the previous night’s Sonoran hot dogs it would have been nice to steal this civilian Blackhawk with which we shared the ramp (they were dropping supplies into the forest for powerline construction):
Here’s Interstate 10 climbing over some of the hills in southern New Mexico. It is possible to do the trip at 5,500′, the highest elevation that we must fly in order to bring a helicopter from coast to coast along I-10:
We stopped for the bathroom and found some porn for pilots:
Due to a slight headwind, we couldn’t make it to El Paso on one tank. We stopped in Las Cruces for fuel and on-airport bbq:
Once we arrived in El Paso, just after noon and having flown only three hours from Tucson, we discovered that the forecast wall of bad weather in Texas was, in fact, impenetrable by prospective helicopter migrants. My copilot wanted to press on, pointing out that conditions weren’t so bad at various airports to the northeast, e.g., 1200′ ceilings were available in Carlsbad (elevation 3295′). I reminded him that we’d have to climb above 8,000′ to clear the mountains between El Paso and Carlsbad and that the 1200′ ceiling wasn’t going to follow the terrain. It hadn’t occurred to him that airports tend to be built at the lowest elevations in a region, not on hilltops or mountaintops. (He had more than 500 hours of airplane time and nearly 200 hours of helicopter time so I can’t explain this gap in knowledge.)
Million Air KELP is a favorite spot for military instructors and students. It’s also a great place to make sure that you don’t get sunburned when transferring from your pavement-melting SUV into your Greta Thunberg-approved Gulfstream:
We headed downtown:
More about El Paso in our next thrilling installment…
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It’s so hard for GA pilots to pull out their credit card when the weather gets sketchy. 1 of these days, Greenspun is going to start in an R-44 & finish in a blackhawk. Could have been a comanche if only we had the money.
Greenspun will never end up in the blackhawk because it requires two pilots to fly it!
TS: We were a crew of two pilots. If someone had started the Blackhawk for us I think that we could have picked it up and flown it away.
I asked a military pilot how long it took to start up the black hawk using all of the check lists. He said it took about 30 minutes. I then asked how long it would take if you were being shot at. He said 30 seconds!
$150/month hangar rent at Lordsburg? Hotter than Stormy Daniels in her prime!
For comparison purposes — I’ve flown into KBVY in your former neck of the woods a few times, and the fee for one night in their — unheated — hangar was . . . $150!