I've been flying my new old airplane quite a bit, not working on the Falco that much lately. I can feel the season changing from summer to fall, and I predict I'll fly less and hole up in the workshop a lot more as the rains descend on Northern California.
The last time I posted here, I was about to go up to the West Coast Falco Fly-in. I did go. The first day I zipped up there with Dan Dorr, a Southwest pilot who recently completed his Falco. It is a fast airplane, a litle faster than a Bonanza, I'd guess. We didnt' stay long since Dan wanted to get back before dark. We actually left at dusk. It's interesting watching a pilot with that level of experience, someone with his procedures as buttoned up as his are. He looks for an airstrip before he switches fuel tanks, he gets flight following. He is generally concerned about flying at night, and it's not hard to see why, I mean the dude is used to having two engines and a copilot. Approaching Santa Rosa, Dan pointed the nose down and we made our descent at 205 knots groundspeed. The airport was clearly under a marine layer already, so we shot a night ILS approach into there. When you dip into the clouds the wingtip strobes start lighting up the clouds around you, you are genuinely relieved to see the brilliant lights of the runway emerge beneath your nose as you descend out of the clouds.
The next day I drove up to the same airport, an airpark with Larry Black's house right on the field. This time I came up with the whole family. I can't recommend this. I still, (naiively, I suppose) picture hammocks and naps and devouring Micheal Crichton books when I think of vacations, but with a 1.5-year-old and a 3-year-old we are more or less a travelling daycare center. And the delightful combination of spinning propellers and toddlers made this trip that much more nerve-wracking.
We were hardly a part of the event, sneaking out of dinner early to avert tantrums, and showing up for only a couple hours the next day. The Falcos arrrived one after another, returning from a breakfast run to Trinity Center. My wife finally got to fly in a Falco with Larry Black. Sporting a wristband to prevent motion sickness, she was even game for a couple barrel rolls. While we waited, my son Benjamin was hell bent on flying in "the green airplane", so by and by we got a ride in a Piper Turbo Arrow, of all things, which I landed. How random, but that's fate. The pilot also had a gyrocopter, which he said sometimes took to cruising down the convoluted Sacramento River at 10 feet above the water, occasionally sprayed by jet ski rooster tails.
So I've been on vacation this month, fiddling with the Cessna, flying it a lot (I have 12 hours already), moving some stuff into the hangar. I flew it up to Williams, where my glider is, and Rex said "I want to fly it." So we hopped in and I passed him the "nice" headset, keeping the 40 year old David Clark headset for myself, thinking I'm doing him a favor. He looked at me disgustedly and said, "I ain't wearing that thing. C'mon, man, this is flyin'. This is FLYIN', man!" So he fired up the Continental O-300A, the short stacks roaring in our unprotected eardrums, and took off. He remarked at the short run before it leapt into the air, then levelled off at 400 feet, choosing not to go any higher for the duration of the flight. He said he used to fly up at 5,000 feet like everybody, but an old pilot from Redding explained some years ago, "What'da wanna be up there for? 'smore interesting down here! You don't wancher ears t'bleed do ya? Of course he climbs up to get over the hills, but for the most part, he stays under 1000 feet AGL. Of course he's relating this whole thing to my by shouting at the top of his lungs. I guess that's how all flight instruction used to be.
Since then, I've been flying more that way. At least around the valley, where there's a place to land everywhere you look, and when you're that low, you really can see a lot. I took my son Ben up for a ride a few days ago, his first, and he fell asleep after 30 minutes or so. That was fine, and I continued my relaxed exploration of the delta. I looked down on Ryde, Locke, Walnut Grove, then looked up to see some impossibly tall obstacles poking up 2000 feet from sea level: radio towers, the highest ones I've ever seen. That signalled my return home. I did it all at about 1200 feet, and it felt right. I think the airplane likes it. Something about the shapes of that Cessna 170 put it in the same category of the Cub. If somebody looks up and sees a Bonanza zipping along a 1200 feet, there must be something wrong, folks are expecting to hear a crunch of metal into the earth after it passes out of view, but if a 170 or a Champ or Cub is puttering down the valley at that height, it's all okay for some reason.
I took it to Pine Mountain, in the foothills, and I certainly didn't do that at 1200 feet. It's noisy, but the plane travels well. Someday I'd like to take it over the Sierras, over to Lone PIne in the Owens Valley, where the plane aparrently began its life with a stripped interior, air dropping supplies to hikers in the Sierras. On my return to Tracy that morning, I did ten touch and go's, and I enjoyed every one of them. That airplane is fun, and a fun airplane will serve me well during the years the Falco is being built.
