Almost in the Flight Levels

I must apologize; I'm a day behind in posting stories from the big trip. :-( But not to worry, details are still fresh in my mind.

After an overnight in Tahoe and the requisite breakfast at Starbucks (coffee + bagel), we went across the street to check on the Heavenly Ski Resort Gondola. You can actually get a much better view of Lake Tahoe from the airplane on approach into the South Lake Tahoe Airport, but we thought we'd go up for a ride anyway. Alas, it turned out that the gondola was "on hold" for high winds, with no ETA for a re-open time. So, alas, we did not get to go on the gondola ride. But that's OK. Maybe I'll come down to Tahoe once the ski season starts, and I'll take the gondola then.

Our next stop was going to be Las Vegas (er, Lost Wages), with a landing at the North Las Vegas Airport (we did not land at McCarran due to the broad daylight robbery on avgas - almost twice as expensive there than at North Las Vegas). The TAF's that day did not look great as far as surface winds were concerned: gusts up to 30 knots or so. And a 30 knot wind at 30 degrees produces a crosswind component of 15 knots - quite a lot. Normally, crosswinds wouldn't be that challenging if the wind would just keep blowing from one direction. But, that never happens in practice; you get something like "there was wind coming from the left, there was wind coming from the right..." So, we elected to stay in Tahoe a bit longer, and to arrive in Las Vegas at dusk, when the winds were forecast to calm down a bit. As a plus, we'd get to see Vegas all lit up.

What do you do in South Lake Tahoe for several hours? We rented a couple of bikes and biked around. The city is actually wonderful for biking - relatively flat, and there are a lot of scenic bike routes. Trouble is, these bike routes aren't always well marked, and the maps that depict them are not very detailed. Since this is an aviation-related blog, I'm going to say that it's kind of like flying around complex airspace with only a WAC chart. :-) Except that if you stray from your intended path when biking, nothing bad will happen -- unlike like flying when you go somewhere you're not supposed to. Speaking of going where you're not supposed to, check out Sam's post on a pilot who wandered around Southern California's airspace, and even flew into Mexico and attempted to land at Tijuana.

We left Tahoe around 5pm. Since South Lake Tahoe does not have an operating control tower (operating is the key word -- they have a tower building, beautifully blended into the landscape, but the tower is no longer operational), we left VFR and called up Oakland to get the clearance. Turns out that apparently Oakland Center did not have our flight plan on file... Hmm. Maybe it's because we refiled with an amended departure time (I tried to call FSS instead of refiling via DUATS, but alas I was on hold for over 4 minutes and just hung up - thank you Lockheed Martin). But in any case, that wasn't a problem, and we got the clearance after a couple of handoffs. :- We went up to 15,000 feet -- the tailwinds were not as spectacular as on our trip from Seattle to Tahoe, but they still yielded a respectable (for a straight-leg Cessna 182) 150 kts over the ground. That's only 3,000 below the flight levels, hence the title of this post.

That's not it, though - we had to climb to 16,000' to avoid some VFR traffic at 14,500'. The 182 managed to pull it off, and with density altitude factored in, we were almost at the service ceiling of the airplane.

Flying up high has the added "advantage" that you may be assigned a STAR for arrival, if one exists. And indeed, Los Angeles Center gave us one -- "after Beatty, cleared FUZZY SIX arrival into Las Vegas". This was actually the first time that either Milen or I flew a STAR procedure. They say that every flight should be a learning experience, and I learned a thing or two about Jeppesen plates on this flight. It turns out that for North Las Vegas, all STAR's are filed with McCarran's STAR's. We almost reported that we didn't have a plate for FUZZY SIX, but fortunately we thought of looking at the plates for McCarran before we embarrassed ourselves on frequency. I also learned about the G1000; when you put in a STAR, it apparently does not "fix up" the waypoints for you automatically. We had to delete some enroute fixes in order for the flight plan in the GPS to make sense.

Folks flying around Las Vegas may be familiar with the "Janet" callsign. There's a webpage on it here, and Wikipedia has an article on Janet Airlines as well. We got to hear "Janet 221" on Las Vegas Approach frequency - it sounded like he just took off from McCarran into a direction unknown. Speaking of this direction -- Groom Lake is prominently marked on the Las Vegas Sectional, and it lies inside restricted area R-4808-N; that's the approximate location of the Area 51 USAF installation. While flying between Coaldale and Beatty VOR's, we saw an airport-type circle with a "R" displayed on the moving map of the G1000 (photos coming soon); it looked like it was in the same place as Groom Lake. The identifier was KXTA, and the G1000 displayed it as a private airport - Homey, NV - with runways 12-30 and 14-32. Hmm... Looks awful lot like the Google-provided satellite photo of Area 51.

In any case... We arrived at North Las Vegas after about 2.5 hours of flying. I had a bit of trouble finding the airport initially - it's "swallowed" by the city lights nearby. Good thing I had that big MFD on board - that made finding the airport, and getting positioned for the visual approach, easier. :-)

Where did we go today? Well, I'll blog about it in my next entry!