Trips & Airports - Summer Trip to the US - Part 3

17-Sep-14 16:58

So after getting to Vero Beach I had to solve one technical problem. The high latitudes in Greenland has stuffed the G1000 almanac so it would no longer get SBAS. The guys at Vero Beach Avionics sorted it our alongside help from the Garmin guys at Piper and the problem was solved. I also had to put some air in the main gear tyres. This sort of maintenance gets draining on a turboprop! :)

I had a trip up to Daytona Beach to get my son and then back to Vero and we had more of the same convective weather. When joining the GPS approach for Vero, I was asked if it was full stop which surprised me. I realised that they are used to people with funny accents being Flitesafety students. Certainly Daytona (Embry Riddle) and Vero were very busy training airports.

After a night the beach in Vero, we left for an airport near San Antonio Texas. But we needed fuel which was solved with Foreflight to get us the cheapest Jet-A enroute. We left Vero and had to skirt serious frontal weather around Talahassee which led to the more northerly track (see image above) than we wanted. Our stop was to be Minden Louisiana. Minden had of courtse a nice GPS approach in spite of being almost deserted as well as one of the oldest Coca Cola factories and as a tribute to its German Heritage, Wurstfest!!

After taking the free crew car into town for BBQ and then leaving Minden we went into New Braunfels Texas. A lovely airport near a great waterpark and within easy reach of the city of San Antonio.

Our next stop was San Diego. But that is a long way even from Texas and we chose to stop at the incredibly remote airport of Deming New Mexico. We arrived there but a few Apache’s got in before us. My son was allowed to sit in these that had only weeks before been in Afghanistan. US Army personnel were friendly and bored waiting for their armoured support column to arrive.

Flying along the border the comparison between the planned US cities and the mess on the Mexican side was stark…Here is El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

Anyway, we arrived into San Diego before having a couple of days rest. It had been a long, hot crossing of the continent but SD was cool and has a wonderful microclimate.

We were due into San Diego but before that wanted to stop at a friends’ place in Lompoc north of Santa Barbara. There was however somewhere we had to stop (and this will be understood by anyone who flew Microsoft Flight Simulator in the early days) – Avalon Airport on Santa Catalina Island off LA. Now this is a short strip set on top of a cliff and I particularly enjoyed seeing the approach the second time after ending up way too high the first time. It was the first time in my life I have had the visual illusion of a cliff airport. I was low on downwind. Low on base then turning final realise I was actually way too high. Second time was better.

We proceeded into Lompoc and on departure had to carefully avoid the Vandenburg Air Force Base airspace. It is really close and a rapid right turn after rotation kept us clear. Oakland awaited and after a few days there we continued to Las Vegas.

Area 51/Andrews…