the thin blue haze

No two days on the job are exactly the same.

Tuesday and Wednesday we didn't fly at all. We were weather-canceled. The spring winds which blow so fiercely in the Mojave at this time of year kicked up in force. The powers-that-be don't like the UAV to fly in high winds; it makes landing kind of tricky. Any less chance that the $3,000,000 piece of equipment will get bent is taken up. I stayed home, but Spud, my second boss, still flew. That governor on the Mooney "Sierra Hotel" was still acting up. Pete, Spud and a few others worked on it for two days and got it fixed at last.

On Thursday, the winds were calm. Spud and I met at the hangar at 7:00, had some of Anna's excellent coffee, rolled Sierra Hotel out of the hangar, cranked up and took off. Spud is solid. He's tall and extremely lanky, with a Roman nose, big honest eyes, and a ready grin. He'll never hesitate to tell you a story or explain an obscure aerodynamic principle. He lets me fly quite a bit, too, whenever there's a quiet moment in the air.

There was a bit of an incident on Thursday, though. It felt oddly breezy in the cockpit as we climbed out of Apple Valley and headed west to Victorville. Neither of us could figure out why. Then I looked up. I saw blue sky peering at me through a crack over my head. The door was open. I hadn't closed it properly. I'd fastened the bottom latch, but the top latch, directly above my head, was loose. And now the 100 mile-an-hour slipstream was blowing the door ajar. Neither of us panicked, nor even lost our cool, but I tell you what—unexpectedly seeing blue sky from inside the airplane is somewhat disconcerting. Fortunately, the UAV wasn't ready to take off yet, and we had a few minutes to spare.

We tried various things. Spud slowed us down to an absurdly low speed to reduce the tearing force of the slipstream. No good. Even with that, I still couldn't pull the door to. Spud called up the tower and asked if we could do a touch-and-go. We were cleared, and while on the deck, Spud reached over and helped me latch the door. We had to throw in a fancy handle-jiggle to get the job done. We took off again, just as the UAV called up and said they were ready to go.

Lesson learned: next time, look up and make sure the door's latched. I didn't feel too bad about it. Spud was gracious and passed it off. I hadn't delayed the United States government in the testing of its new über-advanced reconnaisance and weapons platform, either. Whew...

And then, there was a bit of technical difficulty. We escorted the UAV out to the test site, but the controllers at Victorville couldn't seem to hand the darn thing off. Control couldn't be transferred to the training base. After 30 fruitless minutes, they gave up. Spud and I escorted the UAV back to Victorville. We tried again at noon. This time, everything went off as planned.

Later that day, while Spud and I were sitting in the airport café, Boss #3 showed up. Dawg had come to take care of some other business, and thought he'd observe the afternoon mission. That meant I was let go at about 3:30 p.m. So I went back home and got some stuff done. All in all, it was an odd sort of day. Friday was more...well, normal. (As normal as things get around here, anyway.) In the morning, Spud let me orbit in Victorville airspace while we waited for the UAV to taxi. "Orbiting" is just what it sounds like: flying in a circle (or an oval, racetrack-like). Jetliners do this when they're in a holding pattern. We try to time it so we come out of the final turn right behind the UAV as it takes off. Sometimes we make it; otherwise, Spud has to haul an extremely tight turn. That's one major thing Mooneys have over less complex planes like Cessna 172s: the zippiness. You can pretty much roll a Mooney's wings straight up-and-down, and fly that way. You could never do that in a Cessna; you'd completely lose the vertical component of lift. Mooneys have the power to pull that kind of maneuver, though.

The mission went perfectly. We escorted 'er out; came back to Apple Valley; got some errands done, like returning Spud's rental car (a Prius...ha!); and then drove back to the airport and did some paperwork. I polished up a long article about mountain-climbing in Korea, and sent it off for publication. I also worked on my entry for the "Drunk At First Sight" Blogfest. (It's not too late to sign up for that, folks! Join the fun! Write up some romantic, comedic fiction involving St. Patty's Day, alcohol, or Ireland! Come the 17th, stroll around to everyone else's blogs and enjoy the read! Sign on today!)

Then Spud and I flew the afternoon mission. He let me fly out and fly back in. The thing that sticks in my mind about those two flights is just how beautiful the flying was. The weather was divine, and clear as a bell. You could see for miles. There wasn't a breath of wind, which almost made up for two days of tree-bending gales. We just sort of cruised along, behind and below the UAV, close enough to read some of the serial numbers on the tail, a vast sea of blue sky above us, a continent of sand and dust below. The snowy San Bernardinos glimmered in the distance through the thin blue haze. Rogers Dry Lake shimmered with a mirage the size of a battlefield. The Sierra Nevadas reared their hoary heads on the horizon. Our perspective was unlimited. We were masters of the world, and all that lay in it. Flying is joy, and as Melba Colgrove said, joy is the feeling of grinning inside.

The neat thing about working with an instructor who also happens to be a retired Navy fighter pilot is: you get to hear the most incredible stories. And all sorts of exciting military jargon is thrown in with your lessons, too. We sat up there on Friday afternoon, six thousand feet over the ground, the panorama of the desert spread out beneath us under the fiery western sun, the ground controllers updating us regularly on the position of the incoming UAV. A bubble of excitement bounced irrepressibly around my chest. There's a strange sort of deliciousness to waiting. Waiting for somebody's vehicle—even just the vehicle itself—is one of the sweetest kinds of anticipation. It doesn't matter what manner of conveyance it is: a train, a plane, a car coming around the bend. Whenever I'm waiting at the station for a bus or a train, excitement simmers in the pit of my stomach. Every time I see a film where people stand around and wait for something (or somebody), I am bodily thrilled. The opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West is one of my favorite movie scenes of all time...and I don't even like the movie all that much.

Things were no different as we slowly orbited the rendezvous point that Friday afternoon. Oh boy...where's he going to appear, and who's going to spot him first? And, as we waited, Spud taught me how to intercept. That's right, an old fighter pilot taught me how to intercept another airplane. Picture me, my hands on the thin yoke of the temperamental Mooney, Spud sitting in the left seat, his flattened hands held up in front of him, pantomiming two aircraft in flight, as he discourses excitedly about how to spot the enemy first and get on his tail. Tell me that's not awesome. Just try.

After I made a pretty decent mess of putting the Mooney into the traffic pattern for runway 26 back at Apple Valley (the wind was blowing out of the west, strangely), we landed, refueled, tucked the plane into its hangar, and prepared to depart for Ontario Airport, about 60 miles away. I had a moment's scare when I realized that my computer bag was not in my Jeep. And what's worse, it had my computer in it. Somewhat frantically, I drove down to the airport lobby, with Spud sitting in the passenger seat and calmly reassuring me.
"You ever read Nancy Drew stories?" he asked, as my heart jumped and pounded in my chest, cold sweat on my forehead, hands tight on the wheel. I was thinking about the USB drive with all my private data on it...in the hands of a stranger.
"Uh...no...what?" I stammered.
"Nancy's father gave her some good advice once," Spud said. His voice was strangely soothing. I felt like I was in a two-seat fighter jet, roaring over the ground at hundreds of miles an hour: a hapless trainee, sweating about what button to push next. Spud, my instructor, was at ease in the backseat, speaking to me in that same tone...an aural salve.
"Don't borrow trouble," Spud intoned, quoting Nancy's father. "You've got plenty enough of your own."
After I took a turn about 30 miles faster than I should've, he added "If it's there, it's there. If it's not, it's not. Nothing's going to change in five minutes."
That ready grin never left his face. Feeling marginally better, I dashed into the airport building and found my bag. It was sitting right where I'd left it, on a chair in the lobby. Nobody had even touched it. Everything was still there. Computer, USB drive, lock, stock, and barrel. Man, I love small airports in small towns. I ran Spud down to Ontario Airport, battled my way back through rush-hour traffic on I-15, and got back to the house about 7:30. I could now look forward to Dad's spaghetti, Mom's garlic bread, some Billy Squier, and InuYasha. I'd just put a twelve-and-a-half-hour workday under my belt. It felt good.