All of that is prelude to saying that I spent my birthday this week flying to Baker, CA to have a milkshake at the Mad Greek.  It was an awesome time, and served as further proof that the journey is often the whole point, and to hell with the destination.  Baker is a tiny town off I-15, in the middle of the desert, that most people know only from passing it on the way to Vegas.  There’s a giant thermometer that can be read from miles away, and that often reads in the triple digits (Baker is literally hotter than hell most days).

Baker also has a tiny airport, which is a generous word to use.  It would be more accurate to say that Baker has a runway.  3300′ long or so, and 50′ wide, which is basically separated from the neighboring highway by about 100′ and a chainlink fence.  You could literally just drive off the road and onto the runway and nobody would notice or care.  At least there’s a wind sock and some parking.  The runway was also in surprisingly nice shape (compared to, say, SAS at the Salton Sea).  The airport’s call sign even screams out obscurity.  Orange County is SNA (Santa Ana).  Los Angeles International is LAX.  Baker is 002.  Naturally, I’ve wanted to fly there ever since I saw the little blip on the Los Angeles chart:

Baker on an aeronautical chart. No other airports for miles and miles in any direction.

Having only a few hours to fly, it seemed like the right day to finally make the trip, so I took off from Corona and enjoyed a calm, cool, beautiful flight to Baker, a 2 mile walk to town for a milkshake, and an easy flight home.  I also got a chance to finally play with Hipstamatic a bit, and I can see why people are hooked.  It’s not perfect, but it does make photography on the iPhone a bit more casual, and at least gives the images some character (maybe a bit too much, but it’s something).

By the way… it was a peanut butter milkshake.  And it was delicious.

The hotel in Guerrero Negro. We sent this photo to our wives back home to let them know we weren't dead or tied up in the back of a 1989 Chevy.

We woke up on the morning of the 18th, grabbed some coffee, hopped in a cab, and headed back to the airport.  A regional flight at the airport was boarding when we arrived, on a mid-sized twin-turboprop plane.  Those are the kind of planes that most travelers, who are accustomed to 737′s and Airbus 320s get scared of when they board one in Fiji or whatever.  This was most people’s version of a “small plane,” and when they get back home from a trip where they flew on one, they inevitably tell their friends how they had to take this tiny little deathtrap of a plane and they were so scared.  The plane we were flying was literally 1/4 the size of the plane people were boarding, or even smaller.  Size is all a matter of perspective.  Anyway, I digress…

We had a bit of a hard time convincing the uniformed soldiers, who were busy inspecting bags for the boarding flight, that we were getting on the little plane over there, and that we shouldn’t be standing in line for a commercial flight.  Security, by the way, consisted of a wooden table between the parking lot and the airplane, where men with rifles opened your bag and dug through it.  You could literally throw a rock from the dirt parking lot and hit our plane parked on the ramp.  There were no metal detectors, no x-ray machines, or any other of the security apparatus that people are used to in the post-9/11 US… which I suppose is all fine when you have men with assault rifles opening up your bags.  The whole process took place outdoors, in the slightly chilly morning breeze of the Pacific ocean, and I couldn’t help but think that I’d MUCH prefer having to go through this kind of security process than being herded like cattle through narrow lines and giant machines.  At least we had fresh air.  If we could just all stand next to the plane, and let some guys with guns dig through our bags, I’d almost feel less violated than the system that’s evolved in the US.

So we get out to the plane, and do our pre-flight inspection.  I discover that the plane only has 8, maybe 8 1/2 quarts of oil.  The POH (Pilot Operating Handbook) says not to take off with less than 9 quarts.  In my haste to get in the air at Corona, I didn’t bother to make sure that we had a couple extra quarts in the plane, which meant that we had to try and find aviation-grade oil at an airfield that didn’t even have fuel.  Crap.  So we walk back over to the soldiers, and try to explain what’s happening.  They go get the guy in charge, since he speaks a bit more English, and he tells us we’re out of luck, basically.  We’re pretty sure he doesn’t understand what we’re saying, as his English is only slightly better than our Spanish, but it looked like he was in charge of the military unit there, so I didn’t want to push our luck.  I think we were asking for fuel in Spanish, but I didn’t know how to ask for engine oil, and the stupid iPhone app I had bought to translate English to Spanish required an internet connection.  Data roaming was $20 per megabyte.  Fail.  I should have stuck with plan A and bought an actual book.

Good luck trying to find aviation oil HERE. They don't even have fuel, or at least they don't have fuel for people who only know a combined 50 or so words of Spanish.

We notice a couple of guys hanging out at the other end of the airport, near a hangar.  So we go ask them about oil, and they go get a pilot named Victor, who is very friendly, and speaks English quite fluently.  Compared to everyone else we’ve met in Guerrero Negro, Victor seems strangely… I dunno – worldly.  He’s wearing a black v-neck sweater over a white dress shirt, neatly pressed gray slacks, and shiny black leather shoes.  He’s not the guy in charge, officially, but you get the impression that everyone there knows him and looks up to him.  He’s like a pilot from back in the days where kids would get to go in the cockpit of an airplane and get little plastic wings, and the captain was a larger than life figure who’d been everywhere and done the kind of things you’d write a novel about, but to them it was no big deal and all part of a day’s work.  A skinnier, younger version of that guy from the Dos XX commercial, in a way.  Victor had his shit together.  Victor would help us out.

And help he did.  After explaining the situation, Victor said that the military had a Cessna 182 based on the field, and they probably had a few quarts of oil (seriously – Mexico’s military has one plane here and it’s the same model of plane that WE’RE flying?)  Victor went back over to the uniformed honcho that we were talking to earlier, clarified things a bit, and informed us that they could spare exactly one quart, and it would cost us $10.  It’s not exactly the same grade that the POH calls for, but after a quick Google search on my iPhone, which probably cost me 5 bucks in data roaming fees, I convinced myself that it was fine, and we poured our precious quart of oil into the engine.  Preflight complete, we started the plane, taxied over to the runway, and took off.

There was another low, overcast layer of clouds that morning, so we cruised below them at 1000 feet, looking for a hole to fly through so we could get up above them.  Navigating a plane through an unpopulated area from that altitude is tough.  You aren’t really high enough to have much of a view, so landmarks aren’t as obvious, and keeping a handle on where you are isn’t easy, as there aren’t many landmarks to begin with.  The road we were supposed to be following was quickly lost to the East, and my certainty about our position on the chart was eroding with every passing mile.  I was a bit nervous, but since we were following a line that was pretty near the curve of the Pacific coastline, I figured we could always turn West and intercept the coast.

It was then that I noticed several thin streaks of oil threading their way up my windshield.  Light, clear, new oil.  I looked over the instruments at the cowling and found that it was coming from the door that covered the oil fill tube.  Oh shit.  I had forgotten to put the cap back on after adding that quart.  The single quart that we had managed to find, against the odds, at a tiny airfield in a foreign country, was now slowly being smeared by the wind against the front of our plane.  To make matters worse, I was even less certain of where we were than before.  I looked over at the engine gauges, and they were all in the green.  Oil pressure, oil temperature, and engine temperature all still seemed normal, but I had no idea how long that would last with oil burping out of the engine.  I decided that we should take advantage of a hole in the clouds to gain some altitude, because if you DO have trouble with the engine in a small plane, altitude is all you’ve got.  From 1000 feet, we wouldn’t have many options, but a few thousand feet of additional altitude would allow us to glide a few miles in our plane, and that could make a big difference.  So we climbed to 3500′ and tried to figure out what to do.  Even higher would have been better, but I didn’t want to climb too high because I had a hunch the engine wouldn’t like being run at full throttle for several minutes while it bled oil.

After consulting the chart, I determined that we were about halfway to our next checkpoint, which was a dirt strip still some 20 miles away.  Since I didn’t know exactly where we were, I only had a vague idea of how to get there, so I turned to a heading that I guessed would take us to the field, cheating a bit toward the West so that we would be more likely to hit the coast North of the airfield, instead of overshooting it to the South.  We flew onward, but unfortunately, the clouds were once again thickening beneath us as we neared the ocean, making it hard to spot landmarks, and even harder to keep tabs on a suitable place for an emergency landing.  The ground below was becoming dotted with vegetation, instead of being just sand and salt flats, which meant that we couldn’t just land anywhere if there were problems.

As we progressed onward, the glimpses of the ground that we could catch through the broken cloud layer revealed an increasingly rugged and rocky terrain.  The situation seemed dire indeed.  The oil patch on the windshield was getting larger and progressively darker.  In all likelihood, all the fresh oil we added had leaked back out, and we were starting to lose the 8 quarts we had started with.  The engine gauges were all still in the green, but that’s only a small comfort when your engine is puking black stuff onto the body of your plane.  It was at this point that I seriously started apologizing to Mark, in advance, for the inevitable fact that we were both going to die.  I was convinced that at any moment our engine would seize up.  I couldn’t see much of the ground below, due to the clouds, but what I did see convinced me that there was nothing but rocks and cactus for us to land on.  I was thinking that the odds were about 50-50 that I’d be trying to steer us as gently as possible into a boulder at 50 knots.  Any minute, now.  Mark was pretty calm and collected about the whole thing.  I was shitting bricks.  Despite all the different things they tell you when you’re training for your license, I had gotten into a very, very stupid situation, with three strikes against me.  1 – I was lost.  2 – I was flying a plane with a potentially disastrous mechanical problem.  And 3 – I had flown into marginal weather, which was making it difficult to cope with problems 1 and 2.  I was a cautionary tale.

Oil on the windshield. Maybe not the absolute LAST thing you'd like to see as the pilot of a small aircraft, but close.

Despite my white knuckled grip on the controls, the landscape continued to roll lazily along 3500′ below us, and the clouds began to break up.  Within a few minutes, we could see a bay in the distance, which, according to the chart, had a dirt airstrip beside it.  We could see a road beneath us again, and the ocean was now only a couple miles to our right.  We weren’t going to die after all!  We might be stranded in a fishing village halfway down the Baja peninsula, but that’s better than dead.  At least a road offers a flat place for you to land a plane in an emergency, and the possibility of someone driving by to help out.

As we approached the spot on the map where the airport was supposed to be, however, my skepticism returned.  There was nothing, and I mean nothing where the airfield was supposed to be.  Nothing that even resembled a runway, or even tire tracks.  Certainly no buildings or people, or even the faintest outline of a road.  It was just a salt flat, which wrapped around a small bay on the Pacific coast.  It looked hardened enough, but there was no way to be positive it wasn’t just soft, salty mud.  We could probably land safely, but after my last experience driving on mud beside a big body of water , I was pretty convinced that we wouldn’t be taking off afterward.  This was the first time I had seen an aeronautical chart give inaccurate information, but I figured it must be a fluke.  It’s Mexico, and they probably just don’t keep things updated on the same schedule that we do in the US.  Besides, it’s the only navigational information we’ve got.

So we decided to fly another 20 miles to the next airport on the chart, another dirt strip beside a small fishing village.  The oil patch continues to grow, but the gauges are still in the green.  Maybe engine failure isn’t imminent.  We make it to the next airport and, thank GOD, it’s actually there.  A dirt runway, but a runway nonetheless.  We’re going to be alright.  I start bringing us down to 1000′ AGL so we can check the condition of the runway and try and gauge the wind.  As we near the airfield, I notice several black lines running perpendicular to, and directly across the runway, spaced out about every 200-300 feet.  That’s odd, I thought… I’ve never seen runway markings on a dirt field, and certainly not running across the runway.  We continued our descent to the field, and when we were nearly over the runway, the black lines across the runway turned into a line of small circles.  They had placed goddamn TIRES across the runway to close it.  Not only did they want you to know it was closed, but they wanted to make sure that you’d shear the landing gear clean off your plane if you dared to touch down there.  I added power, retraced 10 degrees of flaps, and started climbing back out.  WHY the HELL would they do something like that?  It’s charted as a public airport with a dirt strip.  Pilots (like me, for instance!) might someday have an emergency, and they might count on being able to land there to save their bacon.  Closing the runway, in a manner that made a landing impossible, seemed not only rude, but just downright dangerous.

Well, we figured that we made it this far, so we may as well go another 50 or so miles to the next airport, at the next tiny fishing village.  Every time we climbed, it seemed that just a little more oil ended up on the windshield.  The streaks of oil had long since run all the way to the top of the windshield, and it was beginning to get hard to see from the pilot’s side.  In about 25 more minutes, we could see the next airport on the chart.  From the air, it was hard to tell which of the two stretches of narrow dirt was supposed to be the airport, but after flying one pass over the town at 1000′, we decided on the strip of dirt to the East, and squared up for an approach.  It was small and rough, but at least it didn’t have tires strewn across it…. but just as I was preparing to pull power and glide down to the runway, we noticed something worse.  The runway was small and rough, and dotted with… rocks.  Big ol’ rocks, about 12″ in diameter, dotting the runway.  They had blended in with the dirt from afar, but now that we were practically on the ground, they were very obvious, and looked hungry for some riveted aluminum.  Seriously?  Fucking ROCKS?!?  I was growing weary of surprises at this point.  Flying in Mexico had been charming and fun the day before, when I was cleared to land with a casual “Okie Dokie,” but the lack of standards, infrastructure, and communication here was anything but charming today.  I just wanted to land my damn plane before we ended up with every last quart of oil on our windshield.

I’ve heard, by definition, an insane person is someone who does the same thing over and over, but expects different results each time.  Therefore it was literally insane of us to expect the next two airports to be different, but flew toward them with genuine hope for a different result anyway.  15 minutes later, we had arrived.  Sure enough, one of the two strips had tires across it, and after making an approach on the second, we found the same kind of rocks strewn across the runway that had nearly taken the wheels off our plane before.

We tried to land at 5 different airfields. We were 5 times denied. If you're flying to Mexico, don't count on any of those dirt strips to be open.

At this point, we were only 30 minutes from a real, paved, international airport, with a control tower and everything.  We were starting to get used to the oil on the windshield at this point, and so even though we had to basically cross the entire Baja peninsula to get there, over mountains and rocky terrain, the flight to Loreto International barely warranted a 2 on the adrenaline-o-meter.  I didn’t have much worry left to give.  We landed at Loreto without much incident, taxied over for fuel, greeted the men with the rifles, and took stock of the situation.

By the time we finally landed, after nearly two hours of flight without an oil cap, the plane was a royal mess.

The plane was covered in oil streaks from nose to tail.  It was all over the engine cowling, on the undercarriage, seeping out from the cowl flaps, on the windshield, wings, and back window.  It was on the pilot’s door, in the door handle, and seeping out of the baggage door.  Oil on the landing gear, the wing strut, and even coming out of the air intake at the front of the plane.  It took us a whole roll of shop towels to clean the mess up, and thankfully the plane that landed behind us a couple minutes later was piloted by an American headed back North in a Cherokee Six, and he let us bum some of his plexiglass cleaner.  Despite all the mess, we were actually only down to 8 quarts.  I had halfway expected to pull the dipstick out of the engine and find it clean.

After determining that there wasn’t any oil to be found at Loreto, either, we made the somewhat rash decision to take off again and fly the remaining hour or so to San Jose Del Cabo.  I think we were feeling emboldened by the fact that we weren’t dead yet.  The plane behaved itself on the last leg of the trip, and we made it safely back to the ground at our final destination.  More oil had seeped out onto the plane during the flight, and it was a bit of a sight to see a tiny little 182, streaks of oil running along the fuselage, parked between two private jets.  We were THOSE guys, I thought, as I wiped up more oil with a dirty shop towel.  But we were alive, in Cabo, and the situation could only get better.  Surely there was not only oil, but also good surf and cold beer awaiting us over the next couple days.  Two out of three ain’t bad.

Flying the final approach to San Jose Del Cabo International Airport:

Apparently, Mexico doesn’t really care if you fly across their border.  We called Mexicali Approach (the air traffic control center in charge of that area) upon crossing the border, and they kept saying to call back when we were closer.  We finally got a hold of them after having been over Mexico for like 10 minutes, and they basically just said to report when we were 50 NM away.  We did, they said goodbye, and that was the end of that.  Mark was a bit queasy at this point from the light turbulence we had been flying through, so he took a nap while I followed the highway southbound over the salt flats and toward the Sea of Cortez.  Holy shit, we were flying in Mexico.  The air was smooth, the light was beautiful, and the landscape was hauntingly barren.

After another 70 miles or so, we reached our intended port of entry at San Felipe International Airport (ICAO code MMSF).  San Felipe is a towered airport.  In the US, that usually means that the tower has control over an area several miles in radius extending outward from the airport, and that you need permission from the tower to enter that area or land at the airport.  There’s a frequency for the tower published on navigational charts, and you contact them prior to entering their airspace to ask for permission and to state your intentions.  I had no idea how the whole process worked in Mexico, but I assumed it was similar to the US, so about 10NM away, I called up San Felipe tower.  No answer.  I kept calling with no response until we were literally right above the field.  I double-checked the chart.  Yup, we were on the right frequency, and this was certainly San Felipe, but no answer.  So I called Mazatlan Approach on a different frequency.  Those are basically the guys that handle all the in-between areas, and they mostly deal with airliners flying at 40,000 feet on Instrument flight plans.  I ask them if there’s anything happening with San Felipe.  We can’t get a hold of them, we say, and what should we do?  He says to hold on, and tried calling them on the phone.  Meanwhile, we’re circling 3000 feet above the airport.  There are exactly two other planes on the ground there, both small single engine birds.  San Felipe is, by US standards, a tiny village, and the airport is a couple miles away from town.  There’s barely any other sign of life around, and we’re starting to worry.

After a few minutes, the controller with Mazatlan informs us that he can’t get a hold of them either.  We ask if he can give us permission to land.  He says no, but perhaps we should try to descend into the traffic pattern and get light signals from the tower.  Light signals?  Wow.  Welcome to Mexico, I think to myself.  For the non-pilots reading this, light signals are the kind of thing that you learn about in your pilot training, but never, EVER expect to have to use.  They basically entail the control tower flashing red and green lights at you in certain patterns, and you rocking the wings of the plane back and forth to acknowledge.  I looked up the section in the AIM (Aeronautical Information Manual) on light signals as a refresher, which I thankfully had with me in the form of a handy iPhone app, and referenced my checklist cheat-sheet.  Okay, light signals it is, then.

I tried contacting the tower one last time and, against all odds, finally got a response.  “Are you the Cessna circling above the field?” he asked.  I responded – “San Felipe tower, Skylane N92073 – affirmative, request permission to land.”  The controller proceeded to give us a brief weather advisory and informed us of the runway in use.  “Thanks for the infomation, but do we have permission to land?” I replied.

“Okie Dokie!” came the cheerful reply.

Seriously?  At that moment I simultaneously loved and hated flying in Mexico.  On the one hand, he left me hanging above the field for 10 minutes while he was presumably taking a shit or playing Bejewled or something.  On the other hand, that was probably the first and last time I was going to receive landing clearance at an international airport with an “Okie Dokie.”  In the US, it was “Skylane 073 cleared to land on runway 31.”  Here?  Apparently it was just “okie dokie!”  It was so casual and friendly and… LAID BACK, that it made just about every air traffic controller in the US seem like a high school math teacher by comparison.  I didn’t know whether I wanted to buy him a beer or punch him in the weiner.

So we land, laughing about how ridiculous the whole thing is during the entire approach.  Literally cracking up all the way to the touch down.  It’s a very nice, recently paved runway, and my landing is prettier than it would have been elsewhere.  We taxi over for fuel, and shut the plane down.  A guy comes out of the fuel building to tank the plane up, and from the other direction come two young men in desert camo fatigues and combat boots.  Once carries a clipboard, the other an assault rifle.  Once again, welcome to Mexico.

Actually, they were very friendly.  They ask for my license and medical certificate, along with the plane’s registration.  We give it to them, they make some notes on their clipboard, and then usher us over to the administration office where we get our first real taste of Mexican bureaucracy.  If you think the Post office is inefficient, then check this out.  First, we give our passports to a very nice gentleman who tells us to head over to an office in the corner to fill out a flight plan.  We do so, and upon telling them of our destination, San Jose Del Cabo, they tell us that the airport closes in an hour and we can’t make it there.  Crap.  Where CAN we go, then?  After a polite but frustrating exchange in the limited common ground we have, linguistically, we decide on Guerrero Negro, which is the farthest south we can get that day (night VFR flight isn’t allowed in Mexico, presumably to keep drug running at bay).  Okay then, I guess that’s where we’re going, we decide.  I’ve never even heard of the place, but the worst possible case is that we have to sleep in the plane.  Sounds fun.  So we fill out the flight plan (typed, in triplicate, on an actual typewriter).  Then we have to take it to another office to get approval from the Commandante of the airport.  Then back to yet another office to pay our landing fee and for fuel.  Then back to the original office to have our flight plan filed.  Finally we head back to the first guy to get our tourist visas.  He say it’s 10 bucks, which we pay him in cash.  He sticks the cash in his top desk drawer, and we don’t get a receipt.  Everyone has been very nice and polite, but I wonder to myself it that newfangled internet thing everyone’s talking about would have maybe sped things up a bit.  Thank God only a half dozen planes come through there per day otherwise I can’t imagine how they’d deal with the paperwork.  There would be a line out the door.

The barren interior of the Baja Peninsula. Photo by Mark Becklund.

We depart San Felipe, and have an uneventful but picturesque flight to Guerrero Negro, where I make a very pretty little landing.  The sun sets over the Pacific Ocean as we taxi over to the ramp, which looks like the taxiways back at the Salton Sea, and tie the plane up for the night.  Soldiers approach, bearing guns that could no doubt take either of our heads clean off our shoulders, look at our flight plan (plan de vuelo en espanol) and send us on our merry way.  Miraculously, there’s a taxi driver waiting for us there, and we hop in the car and manage to ask him to take us to a hotel.  As we drive along, we hope that the hotel he takes us to doesn’t rape, rob, or kidnap American tourists, as I’ve never even heard of the town we’re in, and it’s not exactly a place that sees a lot of American tourists.  Thankfully, however, it turns out that he’s a nice enough guy, the hotel isn’t half bad (especially for $43 a night) and they have a 2-for-$3 special on 40oz bottles of Tecate at the attached liquor store / restaurant.  After grabbing dinner, we say “hell yes” to the Tecate, and Mark and I manage to finish most of our respective bottles before sleep gets the better of us.  An exciting day, to say the least.

That’s nothing compared to what happened the next day, though…

Sunset over Guerrero Negro Airport. The ramp is in absolutely miserable condition.

I’ve wanted to plan a surf trip to Cabo ever since I accidentally scored some great waves down there shooting a wedding a few years back.  There’s a point break called Zippers, at the southern tip of the Baja peninsula, that has the most amazing right on a good South swell.  When I was there in 2007, it was a couple feet overhead, and the waves would just peel on for what seemed like a hundred yards… predictable, mechanical, rippable waves with barely 8 other guys out, and 78 degree water that was clear enough to count the rocks on the bottom.  It was like Upper Trestles on its best day, except without the crowd, the wetsuit, or the attitude (and it was walking distance to beer and tacos).  There’s even a boutique hotel, called the Cabo Surf Hotel, that sits at the upper end of the Costa Azul region (where contains Zippers and 2 other rad surf breaks).  It was my first taste of surf paradise, and I had been thinking about my sessions there ever since.  Every time I went surfing back home, I measured it in my head against my sessions at Zippers, and it was almost universally a disappointment by comparison.  So finally, this year, I resolved to make a trip down there with my good friend Mark Becklund, come hell or high water.  We chose a date in late May 2010, and booked the hotel, hoping that we’d get good waves, and crossed our fingers.

Fast forward a month to the week before our trip.  Surfline‘s forecast basically said that the surf would be amazing the few days before we arrived, and amazing the few days after we leave (like 8 foot+ and offshore winds all day).  The three days we’ve planned to be there?  1-3 foot.  Fuck.  So what could we do?  Wednesday (our original last day in Cabo) was supposed to be flat, but Thursday should be better.  If we stayed an extra day, at least we’d get a good day of surfing in, but our non-refundable plane tickets were already booked.  Seemed like an impossible situation.  Not like Jack Bauer impossible, but I was getting frustrated and upset with the whole thing.  Of all the days for crappy surf, why ONLY the three that we were going to be there?

There was a way, but the girls weren’t going to like it.  I recently earned my Private Pilot Certificate.  I could fly us down there myself, and we could shift the whole trip back a day to maybe catch some decent waves.  That meant 7 hours of flying each way in a tiny plane (instead of 2 1/2 hours on a commercial flight), but that also spelled awesome adventure, and who could possibly find fault with that?  Quick call to the Mark, and he’s stoked about it (despite having puked in the back of the plane the last time he flew with me – he’s a trooper).  Call the hotel  – no problem.  Our wives are less than thrilled with the idea, but we both beg and plead enough that they don’t physically restrain us from going, so we figure that’s about all the approval we’re likely to get.  We’ll have to eat the plane ticket price, but what’s a few hundred bucks for the experience of a lifetime?  Just the idea of piling some surfboards in the back of a tiny plane and flying across half a country for waves sounds like the kind of thing that you read about in magazines but never get to do.  I made some calls to Fly Corona, the flight school that I did my training at.  They have a flying club, which I could sign up for to get access to better planes than the ones I trained in.  Hook that shit up, I thought – I wanted to join that club anyway.  I drove down to Corona, did an hour and a half of training in a Cessna 182 (bigger, faster, and more badass than the planes I’d been flying), and signed on the line.  I walk away with keys to a 1969 Skylane that I’m currently the only pilot of, and a shiny new High Performance Endorsement, which allows me to legally pilot planes with over 200 horsepower.  We schedule a whole week with the plane, and I even buy a new headset for Mark so he doesn’t have to wear the crappy flight school ones for 7 straight hours.  N92073 is our ride, and we’re going to Mexico, baby.

The copilot's control yoke on the Skylane. 41 years old, and still solid as a rock. Photo by Mark Becklund.

The next few days are a flurry of activity and research as I try to determine exactly HOW the hell one flies a plane from California to the very Southern tip of Baja California.  Thanks to teh interwebs, I learned some (but not all) of what I needed to know to make it to Mexico and back alive.  I’d need a new chart (CH-22 WAC, in case you’re wondering).  I’d need insurance from a Mexican insurer, which I acquired same-day for $66 from MacAfee & Edwards.  I’d needed a Radiotelephone Operator’s Permit, which you can get from the FCC’s website (well technically, anyway – I was never asked for it).  I needed an eAPIS account with the Department of Homeland Security, and I needed to submit a manifest for our trip in advance.  I’d need a fricking notarized letter from the airplane owner, explicitly giving our permission to go to Mexico (which Ryan actually got for us – thanks man!).  AND I needed to actually do a 800 Nautical Mile VFR flight plan from Corona to Cabo (and back!) which covered an entire World Aeronautical Chart, and six pages of of nav logs (despite the legs averaging like 50NM).  In short, I had nearly two solid days of work to do making sure everything was in order.  But damnit, I had already set the thing in motion, and I would see it through.

So I started planning and scheming and plotting and wrangling papers.  My family begged for attention.  My business was on hold.  I was a man on a mission.  I was living LIFE.  Why bother getting a pilot’s license if you aren’t going to do something like this – actually GO somewhere awesome?

The only trouble was the weather.  I’m not an Instrument-Rated pilot.  That basically means I can only fly when the weather is good.  I can’t legally fly through the clouds (or more precisely, I basically have to stay 1000 feet above, 500 feet below, and 2000 feet laterally from clouds in most places).  On most days in Corona, literally like 300 days out of the year, that’s not a problem.  But the weather forecast called for overcast clouds ALL DAY when we were supposed to leave, and half of the day after.  Of two years out of flying our of Corona, I’ve literally had to cancel only two flights due to weather.  WHY the 17th?  The trip seemed doomed.  No surf.  Shit weather.  We should just cancel, right?

No way.  I obsessively checked the weather forecast leading up to our estimated departure.  NOAA was forecasting a small window in the afternoon when the clouds’ stranglehold would loosen (from OVC to BKN, or from roughly 100% cloud coverage to 75% cloud coverage, technically).  That meant there was a chance we could get out without flying through the clouds – a small chance, but a chance nonetheless.  All we needed was a mile-wide hole, and we could fly above the clouds, and head East to the desert, where the skies were clear.  I’ll be damned if we weren’t going to try.  I packed my bags, filed our flight plan, and went to bed on the night of the 16th, committed to at least driving to the airport the next day, and waiting a few hours for a break in the weather.  Bobby A’s has good burgers in any case.  Hopefully, we’d even get to fly an airplane…

On the morning of May 17th, I woke up, and filed our manifest with DHS (Department Of Homeland Security) for the trip to Cabo.  The TAF for Ontario (Terminal Area Forecast for the uninitiated) still hinted that we could probably find a hole in the clouds around noon, so Mark picked me up, and we drove to Corona.  The weather was nasty along the way, but when we arrived the clouds were breaking up, and it gave us some hope for the flight.  All we needed was a hole in the clouds, and we could climb above them and head toward blue skies inland.  We preflighted N92073, a 1969 Cessna 182-M, loaded our surfboards and luggage into the back, and crammed our luggage in like a real-life game of Tetris.  Wanting to wait a little while to see if the weather improves, we headed across the field to Bobby A’s, and had a couple (delicious) burgers while I finalized our plans.  I had to re-do the flight plan for our journey’s first leg because the original route took us out to the coast and down through San Diego.  The weather said “hell no” to that idea, so I re-routed us through Palm Springs and down through Calexico to San Felipe, on the Sea of Cortez side of Baja.  Since I had flown out to the Salton Sea a couple times before via that route, I did a rough plan to get us to the desert, with the idea that we’d just pick a strip out there to land and plan the rest… IF we could make it above the clouds.

Mark's barf bag. Last time Mark flew with me, he had some... issues with the bumpy air. Chenin thoughtfully decorated him his own bag so that he could toss his lunch into something pretty this time, if the need arose. Photo by Mark Becklund.

After lunch, we took a look at the sky, and a quick call to the Corona AWOS (Automated Weather Observation System) told us we should get airborne and have a go at it, because this was likely the best chance we were going to get.  We started the plane up, taxied, and took off on runway 25.  As we were taking off, a hole in the clouds passed above the field, and headed eastward, which was the direction we wanted to go anyway.  Staying in the narrow corridor between the 1000′ AGL and the clouds, we followed the clouds toward Lake Matthews, which is only a couple miles from Corona, and commonly used for flight training.  The hole in the clouds was now directly above us, flirting with the edge of KRIV’s airspace (March Air Reserve Base, a Class C airspace, in case you were wondering).  I made the somewhat rash decision to try and poke through that hole in the clouds, with the intent of corkscrewing upwards through the hole.  The cloud base was at 2000′, and the cloud tops at 2500′ (according to the forecast), which meant less than a minute of climbing until we were above, and only a couple minutes until we had achieved out legal cloud clearances of 1000′ above the cloud tops.

Without giving it more than a few seconds’ thought, I pulled the yoke back, gave full throttle, and established us in a climb at Vx (the speed that yields the maximum angle of climb).  The Skylane, nearly a decade older than I am, gave us all she could, and at the gross weight of nearly 2800 lbs, we started our ascent.  The first 2/3 of our climb came quickly, but then a couple of unfortunate things happened.  First, upon passing through 2500′, we realized we weren’t nearly above the clouds… more likely, we were still 300-400′ below the cloud tops.  The forecast had underestimated the thickness of the clouds, and therefore we needed a bigger hole to get through them than I had thought.  Second, we were nowhere near 2000′ horizontally from the clouds at this point.  We were now officially breaking FAA rules for VFR flight.  I turned around, planning to head back to the blue skies behind us, which brought us to problem #3 – the hole in the clouds we were climbing through was closing up… either that or we has vastly overestimated the size of the hole, but either way, going back down wasn’t really an option anymore.  There was no way we were going to avoid penetrating the clouds.  That’s a BIG no-no, but we were committed at this point, and only had another couple hundred feet of altitude to gain until we were above them.  I watched the ground disappear as the clouds closed up below us.  The clouds were closing in around us like a gang of thugs promising a beat-down.  I berated myself in my head, and over the intercom came I kept saying “this is NOT good… this is NOT GOOD!”  All I could see were visions of FAA officers stopping us at our next landing and revoking my license.  The eye in the sky had seen us.  What we were doing was illegal as hell.  How could I be so stupid!

The clouds marched inevitably toward our bird, and within seconds we were flying inside of them.  With nothing but white vapor on all sides, and while getting jolted about by the unsteady air, it was total spatial disorientation.  I fell back on the small bit of instrument training I had completed.  Watch the 6-pack.  Attitude, airspeed, rate of climb, attitude, heading, and then back.  We were climbing at barely 500 feet per minute, in a shallow turn, watching the GPS to make sure we didn’t break the class C airspace immediately North, and hoping we’d see blue skies again any second.  And finally, though we were probably only in the clouds for 15 seconds, we broke through.  We’d made it.  No F-18s came to escort us back down.  No sky cops and no mid-air collisions – we could see where we were going again, and it was beautiful.  I climbed another couple hundred feet and regained our bearings.  The view between two layers of clouds was breathtakingly gorgeous.  Saddleback mountain poked its head through the clouds to the south, and the horizon stretched on infinitely in all directions, a carpet of misty cloud tops extending forth from every compass point to greet us.  After breathing a huge sigh of relief, we headed for the Banning pass and onward to the desert.

Saddleback summit peeking above the clouds. Photo by Mark Becklund.

I was so afraid of our transgression being discovered that I avoided landing at the towered fields along our route.  I decided instead on landing at KSAS – the airport at the Salton Sea.  KSAS is charted as a dirt strip, but really it’s a paved strip that’s in such bad shape that you couldn’t reasonably call it paved.  Instead of asphalt, you just have rocks that were once bound together into a runway by asphalt.  The actual black stuff has long since been burned away by the desert sun.  There’s an empty hangar and office that presumably were once occupied an FBO, but long since abandoned.  From the looks of things, there was once a terminal building and circular drive leading to the airport, but those have long since been bulldozed down to the foundation (which is covered in graffiti and broken bottles).  Literally nothing of use to aviators remains.  Even the runway and taxiway lights are only shattered blue and white glass sticking up from the ground, and the runway markings aren’t discernible at all.  There’s still a windsock, though.  Nonetheless, I’d been fascinated by the mere existence of this airfield since I knew about it, and had visited it (twice) by car, so you bet I wanted to log a landing there.  After one botched approach (the runway is narrower than it looks, so I flew the pattern too close), we set our Skylane down on the scarred runway at KSAS, and taxied back on the runway to the lone taxiway.  We couldn’t figure out how to taxi over to the (ironically) freshly paved ramp, so we just shut it down on the taxiway and got out.  My first thought was that this place should probably have big X’s at the beginning of each runway (indicating a closed airport).  I apologized to our plane for taking it to such a place.

Final Approach at Salton Sea airfield. You can see the freshly paved parking area off on the right, but the runway looks like it hasn't been serviced in decades. Photo by Mark Becklund.

We got out, took a couple photos, and did some quick flight planning.  I filed a flight plan for our Southbound border crossing with Lockheed-Martin, and we were on our way.  Strangely, we actually got better cel coverage there than I do at my house in the middle of the suburbs (thanks AT&T!  Always there where we DON’T need you).

KSAS, like a half-dozen other airfields near the Salton Sea, is below sea level. It's one of the few places on earth where you see the fat hand on your altimeter wind to the left of the zero.

Reviewing our flight plan before departure. No FBO means that you don't get cookies or a couch to sit on. Photo by Mark Becklund.

Only a few hours into the day, and the hard part was behind us.  Blue skies ahead, right?  What could possibly go wrong after that…