I am starting to find out that time spent blogging is what back in the day my pilot friends at the Palm Spring International Airport used to describe as “airport time.”  It worked something like this… you would arrange your schedule to go fly for an hour.  When you got to the airport and to your plane you would do a through walk around making sure everything was in order.  Also, you might have to get avgas or some other chore to be ready to fly; clock time you have burned at least 30-45 minutes.  Once you do get to the run up area and if there is not a long wait for clearance to take off, that may account for another 10-15 minutes. (I started flying out of Van Nuys; there you could sit so long you would need another biannual flight review just waiting for taxi instructions). 

I have mentioned this before, my flying years were primarily in my twenties. Yes, they had airplanes then, and no, you didn’t have to wear a leather helmet, goggles and a scarf.  I only did because I thought it imparted a certain zest for life.  Anyway, I owned a four place Cessna Skyhawk (a 172 model with wheel flairs & special paint job, kinda like an Eddie Bauer package, but for airplanes). 

The registration number was N2122Y (November 2122 Yankee), usually abbreviated in tower to plane radio talk as 22 Yank[ee].  Early on I would add to that “Student Pilot requesting to land,” which would usually clear the runway, taxiways and the first row of the parking lot.

 One of my friends actually had the coolest number of any plane on the field, Triple 7 Tango.  I always got the picture of Robert Mitchem, Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, or somebody like that who was flying cargo to Singapore, clicking the microphone button down with the drone of the engine noise behind them, and letting Triple 7 Tango roll off their tongue.

Once you get up, it is usually with an idea of what you need to practice on, or what you wanted to check out from the air.  Unless it is landing and takeoff practice (touch-and-goes) at the airport, you will usually fly some distance away from where you took off.  To do this you may have to gain altitude, for example if you are going through a stall series to practice recovering from a situation where the airplane looses lift, you would want to gain altitude as a safety margin and make sure no one was below you (get out over an uninhabited area). 

Your sight seeing trip or practice might have lasted 30-45 minutes or so, but it took you time to gain the altitude or reach the distance you traveled and now you have to loose altitude and return, so that could account for 15-30 minutes before you are back in the airport pattern ready to land.

When you get back to your airplane’s tie-down, or hanger space you go through the process of shutting down and securing the plane (10-15 minutes).  You think you are done, until you see Fred and Betty who want to know if you are flying down to Cabo with the group.  Also, Fred wants to show you his new piece of avionics and it will only take a minute.

When you add all of this time up, I defy anyone to fly for an hour without spending two (plus) clock hours.  There is actually much more “hanger flying” done than I described to you here.  Blogging seems to turn out the same way, often I will take the last twenty minutes to half hour of the day to work on a blog entry.  When I look up it is a quarter to seven and I don’t know where the time went. 

If you are a private pilot back east (or even the mid-west) and want to know what year round flying in good weather is like, take a look at the Coachella Valley.  We have two major airports Palm Springs International Airport (PSP)  and Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport (go to No. 4 on the contents menu, Legacy).  There is a smaller general aviation facility that might also interest you, the Bermuda Dunes Airport, as well as several others in the region.  Las Vegas is also an easy flight from the Coachella Valley, particularly going into North Las Vegas Airport instead of McCarran International. 

Riverside County can probably find a day job for a weekend pilot, if you would prefer to spend Novembers flying instead of taking bets on the first snowfall. Besides, November 3^rd is the annual air show at Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport.  Shoot a resume in and we will see what we can do.