Ten-Finger Exercises

Flying

The weather was good enough to go flying today, better than we'd expected. We headed west toward Yakima, into a strong headwind that kept our speed down to around 107 knots. Since it was close to lunchtime, I looked in a book of airports to see if there were restaurants nearby. One was listed at the airport, but we radioed the tower and learned it was closed. So we turned south and went to the little town of Prosser, which has a decent restaurant close by. On the way back, Bill wanted charts he doesn't usually use, and information from them that I didn't know how to find, and I was feeling frustrated. I didn't realize what he was doing. He was flying some instrument approaches to an airport in our path, and needed airways we don't usually fly. He just now explained them to me a little more, and would still be telling me if I hadn't pleaded that my head was saturated and I wanted to go blog.

It absolutely amazes me the amount of information necessary to be able to find and understand and communicate in order to fly. I've gotten comfortable with looking for highways and power lines and rivers to watch and navigate by, using the regular chart. There is so much information about frequencies and headings and altitudes and restricted areas that it is mind boggling. There are all sorts of points with names that no one but pilots would ever know about, but they use them to navigate. Airway intersections all have short names, but VORs, (Very high frequency Omnidirectional Range stations) have unuaual names, not necessarily connected to any towns on the ground. On the way to Reno we crossed Sod House, near McDemitt, NV; Mustang, near Reno; and Wild Horse, near Burns, OR. The one near Walla Walla is called Trina. As Bill looks on the map, he says the one near Mountain Home Air Force Base is called Liberator.

On the way home from the airport we stopped at the new home of our stockbroker, who is a childhood friend of Bill's, to give him a Christmas present, a gallon of Simple Green for airplanes. The regular kind, which they both used to use to get the grease off, was not good for use on aluminum. It was fun to see Fritz's new home and meet his new wife, although I think she's younger than my children.