So there I was, sitting in the old lobby at Cal City waiting for my little brother, Ken, to come back with our 1-26. Only, I was hoping he wouldn’t come back. In fact, I was making radio announcements, in the blind every 20 minutes or so, to warn him that the runway was IFR in blowing sand with 50-60 knot winds and that he needed to land somewhere else.
Just then a Mission Airlines employee runs into the lobby and says there’s a sailplane in their parking lot.
Mission airlines operated out of the big yellow hangar at Cal City. It sounds like a religious organization, and in a sense, I guess it was. Their business was flying explosives around.
Anyway, my little brother was the only one up flying that day, so I figured it must be him and followed airline employee back.
It was Ken, but he wasn’t in their parking lot. He was at the end of the street that leads to their parking lot, which was amazing considering the obstacles along the street and power lines above it. It was clear that he had helicoptered in vertically.
Apparently, he had been on the ground quite some time, with the brakes on and the stick forward, before someone stepped out of the back of the yellow hangar and noticed him. When I got there, he was still in the plane with half a dozen people holding on to it. While he remained in the cockpit (a stupid idea to be sure) the group of us walked the plane forward then lifted it up over the fence (a short fence, long before the words “airport” and “security” had ever been uttered in the same sentence) and onto the airport proper. We tied it down on the cable there before my brother got out.
It ends up, Ken never got my warnings about the wind because his radio quit working. When he got back to the airport and couldn’t see the runway, he decided to land along a perpendicular tiedown strip which was outside the main mass of blowing sand. Boy was that a dumb plan. You can’t land crosswind in those conditions.
The saving grace was that he picked a touchdown point and stuck to it. So, as he blew downwind, he ended up rotating into the wind. Hence the vertical approach to the street 100 yards east.
He had flown up to Bishop and back that day, but the radio wasn’t his only problem. When I asked how high he got, he said he got up to 27,000 feet passing Inyokern on his way north, but every time he checked the altimeter after that it still showed 27,000!
Mike Koerner