It was a perfect plan, until it almost wasn’t. We planned a ski trip to our place in Colorado, but I was in California and Kathy was going to start the trip in Utah and end it in Idaho. How do you make that work? With a Mooney of course. After taking a commercial flight to UT to see a granddaughter’s school performance, she would take the shuttle to St George to visit her dad. I would fly to St George and pick her up on the way to CO, and then after our vacation we would fly to Mesa, AZ to visit my dad where she would catch a commercial flight to ID while I headed back solo to CA.
The First Setback
The plan looked good, the weather was going to cooperate, I had the time off from work, and I was looking forward to the last ski trip of the season. I was supposed to fly on Wednesday, but about 2am on Tuesday morning I woke up wondering if I had eaten something wrong. I tossed and turned and got up at my usual 4:30am to work out but quit halfway through, it just wasn’t happening.
I called Kathy on the way to work and informed her that I might not be flying the next day and was thinking of cancelling the whole trip. She may need to find her way to Vegas and catch a commercial flight home.
I managed to suffer through the workday and headed home where I had saltine crackers and Gatorade for dinner while sitting on the couch watching a hockey game. I woke up later, much later. The game had ended, the TV had gone into screen saver, and I had slept through the text notifications on my phone and my watch buzzing on my wrist. I called Kathy and told her I still felt wasted and was going to bed. 9 ½ hours later I woke up feeling like a new man. After some breakfast I told a surprised Kathy that I was on my way to the airport.
I'm Good to Go
The skies were scattered at 1,300’ becoming a thin overcast layer at 2,200’. After a short stint in the clouds, I popped out on top into a beautiful sunny blue sky. Santiago Peak at 5,720’ looked like a small island in a sea of white. The clouds pushed up against the San Bernardino Mountains and flowed into the Cajon Pass before spilling out at the top into Victorville where they dissipated. It was a beautiful sight.
I leveled out at 11,000’ with my cannula pumping oxygen out from the Inogen G5 keeping my sats in the upper 90’s. The skies were fairly smooth, and 1:50 after wheels up with St George in sight 40 miles away through clear skies I canceled IFR and began my descent.
Kathy and her dad were waiting at the airport with lunch, which was my first mistake of the day. The ham and cheese sandwich was delicious but it was going to come back to haunt me in about 13 hours. We said goodbye to her dad, loaded up, and were on our way climbing out to the east. Our route was almost due east for the next 330 miles, too far north to see the Grand Canyon, but directly over Lake Powell and Monument Valley.
Listening to the AWOS at Pagosa Springs (KPSO) the wind couldn’t make up its mind. Out of the 12 times I have landed there, 11 of them have been on runway 19. I make a habit of listening to the AWOS every couple minutes from the time I can pick it up until about 6-7 miles out because the winds like to shift. On this flight the winds were shifting from the northwest to the northeast. About 8 miles out the last update was “variable at 4” so I decided we would enter a left base and come in on 01.
KPSO sits at 7,663’ and I know my ground speed is higher than when I’m landing at 100’ elevation back home, but on short final it looked/felt a lot faster than normal. Sure enough, I glanced down at my indicated airspeed and ground speed which showed I had about 10mph pushing me from behind, hardly the “variable at 4” I heard on the AWOS. I considered going around and setting up for 19, there was nobody else flying, but with 8,100’ of runway in front of me I continued the landing. The wheels finally touched down about 2,300’ down the runway and we made the next turn off a little over halfway down the runway.
We borrowed the crew car to go get ours from the house and after getting settled in we headed out for my second mistake of the day. We’ve had a new property manager for about a year now but haven’t been able to meet in person so had a dinner appointment with her and her husband. There was that little voice in the back of my head telling me this might not be the best plan, but I didn’t want to cancel.
This was a Bad Idea
Dinner at Rosie’s Pizza was great, but my stomach wasn’t ready for the pizza or the pizza knots that had chicken, bacon, mozzarella, and green hatch chilies in them. About 3-4am I thought my insides were going to end up outside… It wasn’t until about 8:30am after a piece of toast and some applesauce that we finally headed up the mountain.
Coming Back to Life
It was our 15th wedding anniversary and I had reservations for dinner at a great place in town, but the thought of eating “real food” was not appealing so I changed it to Friday. I had a bland dinner at home and although I felt a little better on Friday I went with oatmeal for breakfast and then changed the dinner reservation to Saturday.
Finally by Saturday afternoon I felt like I was back in the land of the living, and we had a wonderful (if two days late) anniversary dinner. The other bonus is I was feeling up to the 5 ½ hours of flying I had ahead of me on Sunday.
Pagosa to Phoenix
I’ve been flying our Mooney for over 8 years and 1,100+ hours, but I’m still amazed at how much time it “gives back” to us. That same 5 ½ hours of flying would be over 14 hours of driving. We took off from KPSO at 9:30am for what would be an almost constantly 2:32 bumpy ride to Mesa-Gateway (KIWA). It might have been smoother up higher, but the time penalty from the winds at 10,500’ compared to where we were at 8,500’ was about 15 minutes. We landed early enough to visit dad at his home for a bit before going to church with him and then having lunch at one of my sister’s homes. Later in the afternoon my sister and dad dropped me off at the FBO before dropping Kathy off at the main terminal.
IFR Back to California
Usually when I am going to need my IFR to get back into the LA Basin I will file a plan from the Blythe VOR to KFUL. It’s usually faster to get out of the Phoenix area that way but on this occasion, I decided to just go IFR the whole way. I took off on 12C and was handed off to Phoenix Departure flying runway heading.
Me: “Phoenix departure, Mooney 1015Echo, just departed Mesa-Gateway, heading 126 climbing through 2,700.”
Departure: “1015Echo, Phoenix Departure, radar contact, climb maintain 5,000.”
As I continued my climb to the southeast, away from my destination I was beginning to regret not departing VFR. Eventually, 8 miles later, I was given a right turn to 270 and was westward bound. The headwinds started in the 30’s and climbed higher and higher as the flight progressed. By the time I was nearing Palm Springs they were over 50mph and SoCal advised myself and the plane in front of me to expect moderate turbulence in the Banning Pass.
A few minutes later I got a couple of bumps, tightened my seat belt, and thought “here we go.” I was surprised as I went through the pass with 61mph on my nose when it was almost completely smooth. On the other side of the pass ATC turned me off the airway to get me out of the way of the commercial flights descending down through my altitude on the STAR.
The winds were giving ATC some difficulties trying to point me the direction they wanted. “Turn left heading 230” was followed by “right heading 250” which was followed by “fly heading 230” and finally “15Echo I’m sorry, I think the winds are a little weird today, fly 240.” Those “weird winds” were 50+ mph from the northwest, but the 240 heading did the trick and I cruised along above the clouds with the remnants of the sunset fading in the west. A descent to 8,000’ put me skimming right along the top of the clouds, enjoying the feel of speed.
I was in a descending right turn as I entered the clouds and the landing light shining off the clouds as they rushed up to meet me created a ground rush sensation, but I was quickly on the instruments and then inside the soup. I leveled off at 5,000’ still in the soup and then down to 4,000’ still in solid IMC. I was watching the miles tick off and as I got closer to the IAF I pulled some power to slow down and have a little more time to descend once I got past the hills. I was finally given a turn to intercept final along and broke out at about 2,800’ just past the IAF, 800’ too soon to log the approach.
The trip that was almost sidelined, twice, was wonderful and couldn’t have happened without our Mooney.
