London, Ontario to Hayward, California in a two-seat airplane
Here’s a report, mostly for friends and family, on a recent trip to California. I met a guy in Hawaii, “Dr. Doug”, who purchased a two-seat Diamond DA20 airplane. This is a fast fun easy-to-fly trainer that is certified only for flying in visual conditions. The plane has instruments, but no lightning protection, and therefore is not legal for flight in the clouds. Dr. Doug is a Vietnam vet who served two tours in Vietnam flying Hueys and Cobras. After getting out of the Army, he became an emergency medicine doc and married another physician. Dr. Doug had three goals on this trip: (1) become familiar with the DA20 and its avionics, most critically the impossible-to-use Garmin GNS 530 combination communications radio, navigation radio, and GPS receiver, (2) build up his instrument flying proficiency, and (3) get the plane to Hayward, California where it would be prepared for shipping to Hawaii. A lot of four-seat airplanes are flown 13-17 hours to Hawaii. You take out the back seats and put in a “ferry tank” full of fuel. That isn’t possible with a two-seater.
Friday: Departed the Diamond factory in London, Ontario (CYXU) at 11:30 a.m. after sorting out some last-minute issues with customs, weather, and the GPS database loaded in Dr. Doug’s DA20’s Garmin GNS 530. Low ceilings and snow showers imposed a somewhat circuitous 2500′ MSL route on us, mostly following the north shore of Lake Ontario. We landed in Toledo, OH (KTOL) at around 1:15 pm and were greeted by a friendly customs officer. After an hour of resting and flight planning, we departed for KMLI with a practice ILS 25 approach back into KTOL. Dr. Doug hadn’t flown an approach for twenty years, but he handled the task well. It helped that the weather was good VFR and he wasn’t wearing a hood. We departed the Toledo area after I had showed Dr. Doug how to use the GNS 530 for missed approach guidance. After about 50 miles, we were having trouble maintaining VFR at 2000′ and there were some radio towers in the area at 2100′. It was time to give up and turn around. We advised air traffic control of our situation and they offered an IFR clearance, which we accepted. It turns out that instrument-rated pilots such as ourselves don’t do that much better than raw Private pilots unless we subject ourselves to the full discipline of IFR flying. ATC suggested landing at a nearby airport, KGWB, with an ILS. Another pilot on the frequency then reported the weather at GWB to be 700′ overcast, which wasn’t so bad on an approach where the minimum is 200′. His next bit of information, that the visibility was down to 1 mile, was much more disturbing. This is only a tiny bit better than the 1/2 mile of visibility that is the minimum for the ILS. It didn’t make sense to do an approach down anywhere near minimums when we had plenty of fuel and VFR conditions back towards Toledo. We said that we’d rather go back to Toledo. The weather improved with each mile east that we traveled. Toledo wasn’t even using their instrument approach by default. They offered visual approaches to the standard IFR arrival. We shut down at the FBO, rented a car, and drove into town for dinner at Tony Packo’s, made famous by Klinger in the TV series M*A*S*H. The Hungarian food was reasonably good, but I only finished about half of what I ordered. There is nothing like being surrounded all day by a tiny two-seat airplane and at your table by 300 lb. Ohioans to encourage moderation.
By 7:30 pm, we were checking into the downtown riverfront Radisson ($65/night, including free high-speed Internet). The desk staff advised us that there wasn’t a whole lot to do in downtown Toledo, even on a Friday night. Saturday morning dawned gloomy from the windows of the Radisson. It looked as though we might be staying in Toledo for at least one more day. We drove out through the deserted downtown to the Toledo Museum of Art, which I had often seen listed as the source of paintings in traveling exhibitions. The medium-sized museum is free and filled with one treasure after another from medieval to Old Masters to more modern works. French paintings are especially well represented, supplemented by a beautiful Barye sculpture of a heron meeting its end in the jaws of a big cat. The museum is not turning into a fancy club for rich people. The cafeteria-style restaurant is crummy. There is no new $100 million soaring glass atrium addition. They have great art collected when Toledo was getting rich off the American car manufacturers’ success and seemingly a large enough endowment to keep the place going.
By noon, the weather was lifting enough that we thought we might make it out. The clouds were generally 3000′ above the ground except where scattered rain showers reduced the ceiling and visibility dramatically. Our plan was to head southwest and divert to the south when we encountered rain in our path. It was bmpy underneath the clouds and especially near the rain showers, but with our airplane not being certified for instrument flight, we couldn’t climb in hopes of smoother air. We stopped for fuel in Bloomington, Illinois and talked to a retired guy who is instructing in a Diamond Star DA40 with G1000 cockpit. Only $110 per hour!
About 30 miles SW of Bloomington, the clouds thinned out and we were able to climb up into smooth clear air at 8500′. Towards sunset, we got cleared through the Kansas City Class B airspace down into the university town of Lawrence, Kansas (KLWC). Pam at the airport was kind enough to lend us the courtesy car overnight. Dr. Doug checked into the downtown riverside Marriott while I went to five chain stores looking for some cushions to provide extra padding and lumbar support in the DA20, whose interior was designed by a short Austrian engineer for 1.5-hour training flights. All of the clerks working in the shops were Kansas University undergrads. At elite high-tuition schools such as Harvard, it is tough for a teacher to feel that he or she is making a difference. And in fact, economists have shown that the Harvard education is NOT making a difference; students who were admitted to Harvard but elected not to attend ended up with the same lifetime earnings as Harvard graduates. For a lot of students at fancier schools these days, attending college isn’t a material necessity. Their parents are going to provide them with a house, a car, use of a private aircraft, and a job if they feel like working. If I teach one of these kids how to use a relational database management system, he might thank for showing him how to do something interesting and challenging, but the skill is certainly not going to enable him to thrive economically; financially, he has already gotten beyond where 95 percent of Americans hope to be. KU is completely different. The 20,000+ kids are coming from all over the state and from all kinds of families. They need the education that they are getting at KU to have a career and move ahead with their lives.
Lawrence, Kansas has a reasonably comprehensive downtown, with at least a few good restaurants (Freestate Brewery is supposed to be the best, but it was packed on a Saturday night and we ended up having barbecue instead). Unlike Madison, Wisconsin, the town is not home to a massive government bureaucracy as well as the university. Therefore, the town is a lot more compact. Within a five minute drive of downtown you are back in farmland or at the airport. For minimal $$, you could buy a farm right next to the airport and an 1987 Piper Malibu. This is pretty much smack in the middle of the U.S. That six-seat Malibu would take you, a dog, and a couple of friends non-stop from Lawrence, Kansas to just about anywhere in North America within 6 hours. When it was time to return home, the full instrument landing system and reassuringly flat terrain would welcome you back on bad-weather days. You could have the farm, the Malibu ($350,000), and ten years worth of Avgas (the Malibu carries six people at 200 mph and gets better mileage than an SUV) for less than the price of a single-family house in Cambridge.
I liked Lawrence so much that I was prepared to stay an extra day, especially after checking the weather forecast and finding out that surface winds were going to be gusting up to 35 knots with the turbulence you’d expect (right up to 18,000′ as soon as one got close to the rRockies). Dr. Doug wanted to press onward, however, so we departed for Hutchinson, Kansas. The steakhouse on the field is a popular fly-in destination and the fuel truck guy said that normally 10 or 15 light airplanes would come for Sunday brunch. How many had braved the winds and turbulence today? None.
We departed Hutchinson for Liberal, Kansas into a 32-knot surface wind that stiffened into a 50-knot headwind aloft. We were in time to become the sixth patrons at the Mid-America Air Museum. Going back to get our bags from the plane, we met Jeff Mawhinney, the aerobatic champion, refueling a Cessna 310 en route to Phoenix. Asking around for restaurant and hotel recommendations, we discovered that 9 out of 10 Liberal residents don’t know the population of the town, can’t give directions, have no idea which businesses are open on a Sunday, and think that Applebee’s is the best restaurant in town. We ate a steak dinner at Cattleman’s and came to share their comparatively high opinion of Applebee’s. County commissioner Joyce Hibler was quoted in the local paper as saying “I think we have a good future in Liberal. I like the new cotton warehouse. … We have an awesome landfill.”
From Liberal we flew over corners of Oklahoma and Texas into Albuquerque. I was sorry to get so close to Amarillo without stopping for lunch at the Big Texan, home of the 72 oz. steak dinner (eat within one hour and it is free). At the Albuquerque airport, we took a tour of Eclipse Aviation, makers of a $1.5 million twin-engine 6-person “very light” jet airplane. Getting the airplane certified has been a tortuous process and is running some months behind schedule. What’s holding up the plane right now? Is it the engines, which are much cheaper and lighter than any jets ever produced? The robotic friction-stir welding process, which has never been used on an airplane before? The fire suppression system, which uses a chemical formula that has never been used? No, no, and no. It is the code monkeys (local guys at a company called Avidyne) writing the software for the avionics. They’ve had about five years to catch up to the aeronautical and mechanical engineers, but it hasn’t been enough. Despite the reliably disappointing performance of the world’s computer nerds, the Eclipse should be shipping in June. We watched one of the test airplanes taxiing around and taking off. It is remarkably quiet on the ramp, perhaps 10 dB quieter than a standard business jet. It is also reasonably quiet on takeoff, probably quiet enough not to annoy neighbors at small airports. In an Eclipse jet, we could have made the trip that is the subject of this blog entry in one easy day without too much skill or planning. With de-icing boots on the wings and tail, you can go up into an ice-filled cloud. With the amazing climb power of the jet engines, you can get above that ice-filled cloud and into clear air 40,000′ above sea level. Using compressed air from the same jet engines, you will never be breathing air thinner than what you’d get at 8,000′ above sea level. We might have made one
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