Replies

I didn’t tell you how the day began... While I was working as a firefighter I frequently got 4 day stretches off. With our one fuel stop it took us about 8 hours to fly down to LA most of the time, but it was usually much less stressful than driving and we would often stop at little out of the way places along the route and the flights were always fun for me.

We usually flew into Santa Paula airport and used the folding tandem bicycle that we put behind the rear seat of the plane to ride to our favorite inexpensive motel that was about 20 miles away. Then we would rent a car from there for a couple days and go to the amusement parks and restaurants that we liked to visit. Santa Paula was a great little airport and we met a lot of celebrities who kept there planes at the airport. It is the airport John Denver made his last flight from.

My wife was a dead ringer for Sally Field at the time, so celebrities would spot her from afar and come up and introduce themselves. They were usually people at the fringe of celebrity, like the old guy who did cartoon voices like Baby Huey and a bunch of other characters. It was sometimes a little bizarre but very fun and interesting, and one of the reasons we liked making it our destination.

But that trip we both ate something that made us feel ill and it was really hot, so we decided to cut the trip short and just go home. After our free brunch we laid around at the motel until checkout time and got off to a late start. And then it took us longer than normal to ride our bike back to the airport because of how we were feeling and it was already getting much warmer than usual.

So we didn’t take off in the plane until a little after 1:00 p.m. which under good conditions would get us back to our home airport about 9:00 p.m.. The first thing that happened was that our fuel pressure dropped while we were climbing out, because the heat combined with the proportion of car gas we still had in the tank we started with caused a little vapor lock in the lines. The fuel pressure guage went down to zero and we lost a couple hundred RPM.

My other tank had almost all 100 “low lead” aviation fuel in it so switching tanks and turning the electric fuel pump off and on fixed it, but it made us a little uneasy for a moment or two. I had meant to start off with this tank for more safety in warm weather but of course forgot. The plane has both a mechanical and electric fuel pump - the electric is supplemental. The two combined sometimes agitate warm fuel, especially cheaper but more volatile car gas enough to cause it to vaporize in the lines. This was the first time we experienced enough of a drop in fuel pressure to affect our power output. This got my wife a little agitated but once we got up to the cool smooth air at around 10,000 feet everything was fine.

We normally only made one fuel stop about 100 miles North of San Francisco at Yolo County Airport where they sold the cheapest car gas on our route. It was an interesting place. At that time it was the “Skydiving capitol of the West Coast”. On the stop on our way down they were having a nudist sky diving event. When my wife went to use the restroom she noticed that all of the other women around the facility had matching brown skin suits on, then she realized the skin suits were their actual skin. I of course noticed the attire of the other people as well, but didn’t find it as shocking as my wife did.

Things didn’t go bad until after we left Yolo County. About the time we got to our cruising altitude of around 10,000 feet there were clouds starting to form below us and as we were getting over the mountains in Northern California there were thick clouds above us as well. Then the two layers started getting closer together. And that is when it started getting stormy and nasty. It was dark by that time and I can’t tell you how relieved I was when we were able to spot the lights at Grants Pass quite a few miles away because that meant that there was nothing solid between us, and the lower level of clouds was gone there.

But as we descended and got closer to the mountains we were hitting some harsh turbulence and the lights ahead of us started going in and out of view as scuddy clouds and heavy rain came between us and the lights. And as we continued on our descent we started running though those nasty little clouds and heavy rain showers and they would completely obscure our view out of the plane with big rocks an unknown distance below. It was very unnerving as we got bounced around and hit strong updrafts and downdrafts without being able to see anything outside the airplane.

For me it was a big relief when we finally got down to the straight stretch of I-5 that led back to Seattle, but my wife was worn to a frazzle by that time. And the choppy air was different but bad over the freeway because of the nature of the system coming in. So that is the reason my poor wife finally reached her breaking point.