by Pete Miller
During the week of April 21 I had the privilege of traveling to Van’s Aircraft in Aurora, Oregon to pick up a brand new factory-built RV-12iS for Rising Aviation High School. My copilot Travis was a young man from Thrust Flight who has about 1400 hours and is a CFII. He is working towards an airline career. We airlined up to Portland, and the next day we rode down to Van’s. We met with Greg Hughes, who is the current President of the company. He handed over the documentation for the airplane, gave us a tour of the facility, and then we met our new airplane.
After an introduction to the airplane, and a quick familiarization ride for Travis, we loaded up and departed.
The weather was fantastic along our entire route (until we were close to home), and this was a fantastic opportunity to see different scenery in our amazing country. Previously I was concerned about navigating the mountains and the restricted areas in southern California, but our route proved to make those concerns a non-event.
We flew by Mount Shasta and down through California, which I really enjoyed because I was stationed there during my time in the Air Force.
We stopped for our first night in Fresno, which was my night landing #1.
In southern California we flew within sight of Edwards AFB and Palmdale, which I didn’t think we could do, but we were using flight flowing for the entire trip.
One of our more interesting stops was Victorville, or the Southern California Logistics Airport. I knew this was the “boneyard” for airliners.
Not only were there a lot of parked airplanes out in the desert, but the ramp itself in front of the FBO was full, including a large contingent of Army folks who were getting ready to depart on an Eastern 777 for Killeen. It was a very busy place.
We crossed the state line into Arizona. We stopped at Chandler, which is part of the Phoenix “metroplex”, and visited with a very dear friend of mine whom I knew when I was in the Air Force. By the way, as we were taxing in towards the FBO, I saw the C-150 that I trained in and got my PPL! Couldn’t get a picture though…
The last stop for the day was El Paso, which was my second night landing of the trip. (WAY better than the one the night before…)
The plan the next day was to get as far as we could before the weather in Texas shut us down. We stopped at Midland, then decided to press on to Abilene. Enroute to Abilene, we were VFR on top of an overcast layer, but we were watching the storm over DFW move out slowly west to east. We decided to bring it home. About the time we reached Breckenridge, the clouds under us went away, and we could go ahead and proceed to Addison. The other first for me on this trip was flying over DFW. I hadn’t had the opportunity yet to do that.
The trip was a huge learning experience for me. Except for getting over clouds this side of Abilene, we usually cruised at either 7,500 or 9,500’ . We flew 2,186 miles, burned about 3.6 gallons/hour in cruise, and put 20.5 hours on the airplane and in our logbooks.
