#7.3: Flying across the USA - Days 5 and 6

Day 5: Monday, October 26th

I get up this morning after a decent night at the casino hotel. Parker is right on the Colorado and the hotel has some very pretty views. 

This is today’s route. The yellow mess on the left is LA and the section in the middle with the magenta trapezoid around it is the Coachella Valley, containing Palm Springs, etc. But what about the strange sudden dogleg to the south?

Well, funny you should ask. About 10 years ago, after I got the original yellow gyro I called Woodstock, I made it my project to fly to and land at an airport in every county in California. There are 58 counties of which 57 do have at least one airport. I made good progress in the first months but starting in the middle of the state, it of course gets harder as you work further outwards. Eventually it would take me a couple of days to reach any of the remaining ones in the corners, and I made a few trips to do just that.

But a few years ago, I got to the point where there were only two left at the very bottom of California - Imperial County and San Diego County. Getting to them is not straightforward, partly due to distance from home but also because not all times of year are good for that kind of trip - too hot in the summer down there, often too smoky during a lot of the fire season months, and so on. So those counties remained on the “to do” list and I hadn’t thought about including them in this trip.

Until this morning when I look at where the county lines run and suddenly realize that with some minor changes to the flight plan, I can add in Salton City and Borrego valley and complete the set! Hence the planned dogleg. The Salton Sea is a huge body of briny water in the SoCal desert. It’s about 15x35 miles across but not very deep. It used to be fed by the Colorado river, but now it’s drying out and is rather polluted by agricultural chemical runoff. I have always wanted to see it.

 Salton Sea

Salton "City" airport

Salton City is definitely not any kind of “city” that most would recognize as such. More a cluster of huts and not even a paved runway. Imperial is a relatively poor county with little industry - perhaps that is why. Whereas Borrego Valley, in more upmarket San Diego County, turns out to have a very nice paved airport.

We land at both and I find it rather cathartic to have unexpectedly added those two waypoints at short notice and complete the project. Though it did rather take me by surprise, so I’m now left thinking “Now what?” (Probably that’s a bit premature and I should get home first before worrying about what’s next…)

The next task is to fly through the Coachella Valley, home to Palm Springs, Palm Desert and Indian Wells (famous for its tennis tournament). There are large mountains on either side, particularly towards the NW corner where it forms a natural wind tunnel, known as the Banning Pass. This is not somewhere it’s normally wise to fly a light aircraft, but the forecast is for calm winds, so we decide to go for it. Of course, this also means we will be in the LA basin and have to go out again through the Cajon Pass, also a major funnel for winds.

But despite the detour to finish the counties project, this all works out well. We land at Banning and chat with the airport manager who tells us of fearsome winds of past times and will probably still be telling stories long after our departure.

Banning Pass

We carry on and talk to San Bernardino control tower, home of the friendliest air traffic controller I have ever heard. She must be new. 

Navigating the Cajon Pass is tiring with a constant need to climb among lots of air movement, but we come out on the top to see the huge open plain that becomes the Mojave Desert. The next task is to fly to Palmdale, home of the famous but (ironically) extremely secretive Skunk Works location operated by Lockheed. As I previously mentioned, this is where such legendary aircraft as the U2 spy plane, the SR71 Blackbird (fastest aircraft ever) and the F-117 Nighthawk (first stealth aircraft) were designed and built. Our goal for the day, General Fox airport, is only 10 miles beyond it. I call the Palmdale tower and request permission to fly through their airspace. They agree but caution me that I am not to overfly any of the runways or the buildings! That’s a new one, but understandable given their trade. As we fly past, you can see strange hangars with covered ends to prevent anyone looking into them. We do see a B21 stealth bomber just sitting outside – the picture is in my camera so I will share it tomorrow.

We land at General Fox airport whose restaurant won’t serve us (too close to closing time, they say) and where three different companies tell us we can’t overnight in their hangars. I flew into that airport 11 years ago and really liked it, but I’ve gone right off it now. Maybe it’s because of that photo of the bomber I took...

Tomorrow the plan is to get up early again and get going. We have one more pass to get through - Tehachapi - which crosses the Sierra Nevada mountains and like the Banning Pass is festooned with gigantic quantities of windmills. After that, we’re practically on home turf with just the last 300 miles to go. 

Day 6: Tuesday, October 27th

Made it! 

After six days of flying, 2,500 miles, and over 33 hours in the air, I’m back. I saw 34 airports across eight US states. I'm really pleased to have made it successfully and with so few issues along the way. I’ve wanted to make that trip for 33 years, long before I knew gyroplanes were a thing, and to have done it in a gyro is really special. For it also to be one that I built myself at the factory in Italy earlier this year, makes it doubly so. 

First things first, here is a picture of Palmdale Airport, home of the famous Skunk Works facility where the secret planes are built that we flew over shortly before the end of the fifth day. We did see what looked like one of the new incredibly expensive B21 stealth bombers sitting next to a hangar, but sadly it’s not visible in this rather poor still from the GoPro. Either that or the ‘guvmint’ deleted it with their mind-altering rays (sorry – spent too much time in certain other parts of the country). 

Palmdale and the Skunk Works facility

This is the route for the final day of the trip.

We get a slightly later start and the sun is already above the horizon when we leave General Fox airport at 8am. The air is very calm, but as we approach the Tehachapi pass, the incredible array of windmills there are already stirring. Tehachapi is another famous wind trap and when there are strong winds, pilots try to avoid it. But that early the winds are fairly mild, and it isn’t bumpy as we fly through at 6,000’. 

Mojave Desert - looking towards Edwards Airforce base

Loadsa windmills

Although the air is very clear on top, as we go through the pass we can see some fairly thick haze ahead and have to decide whether to drop down into it or continue to fly on top.

Haze over the Tehachapi Pass

Checking airport reports from the many airports on our route up the California Central Valley shows it will clear as we go further NW, so we continue for a while then drop down as the land gets lower underneath us. Until this morning, the days have been warm and I haven’t needed to wear multiple layers - a big change from the open-cockpit Woodstock, where I have worn as many as eight in the past!) But perhaps I have been a bit optimistic today in just putting on a t-shirt and long-sleeved shirt so early in the morning. Bluebird has lulled me into a false sense of security with its enclosure and doors, because frankly this morning it’s bloody cold! There are vents at the front of the cabin which blow fresh air in, and unlike the other vents in the cabin, they are not adjustable/closable. While I was in Texas, Matt showed me what he called his "paint brushes” - a stick with foam rubber on the end of it with which you can plug the vents at the front. OK, now I get it - I need some of those! Caroline (who’s wearing some more appropriate clothing including a padded jacket) laughs at me, saying that I’ve already gone soft and how am I going to cope when flying Woodstock again?

After a fuel stop, we continue up the Central Valley, over endless fields of crops, and pass over the Lemoore Naval Air Station. I call them to ask if we can fly directly through their airspace and they say yes, but we might want to offset to the East a little to avoid some arriving F-35 fighter jets. “Er, OK, yes, we’ll do that!” We arrive at Livermore, after flying just over the area called Diablo Grande, east of the Bay Area, where there’s a lot of very rugged terrain and quite high mountains - the famous Mt. Hamilton Observatory is up there. 

Diablo Grande

Livermore is one of the few airports left (in the Bay Area at least) where you can easily walk to a restaurant from the airport, so we are glad to stop there for some lunch. Given how cold I still feel, I am especially glad they have hot soup on the menu and warm up with some of that. It’s called Cowboy soup, but I don’t believe it contains real cowboy. We carry on NW and reach Vallejo, where we cross over the Carquinez Strait (assuming Trump hasn’t renamed it after himself while I’ve been away).

Home strait - flying over the north of the Bay Area at Vallejo. Sonoma Mountain is in the distance with Petaluma on the other side of it

After another 20 minutes or so, we are flying over Sonoma Mountain, which always marks the home airport when flying out of Petaluma. It’s really good to see it, although now it hits me that this journey is coming rapidly to an end. We land at Petaluma and taxi to the hangar to introduce the gyros to each other, and more importantly, work out how to safely fit them next to each other in such a way as to avoid risks of collision damage (which pilots call “hangar rash”) when moving either one in or out.

Room for one more…?

After a little re-organization of the hangar and some careful application of tape to the floor to show where to place the two gyros, we get them both safely inside. With its tundra tires and side-by-side cabin, Bluebird looks way larger than Woodstock, but the aerodynamics, rotor system and so on are almost identical. I’ve already been asked several times which one I expect to fly more, and the answer is probably Bluebird as I’ll be using this model for training. But when I’m flying for fun? That’s a harder question to answer. The difference is similar to that between a motorbike and a car - the car is more comfortable and easier to travel in, but the bike is more fun (at least on shorter trips). I’ll let you know.

Many thanks to Caroline for sharing a significant part of the journey with me, keeping me entertained, and helping with my occasional sense of humor failure (when restaurants were closed or out of key items, for example!)

Thanks also to everyone who has waded through this lengthy series, especially those who sent me many encouraging comments along the way - really appreciate it!