Dane Spearing wrote:
In a couple of weeks, I'll be flying from SNA (Santa Ana/John Wayne, CA) up to
the Bay Area (Palo Alto, CA), and was wondering if there is any way to plan
or know in advance which departure SoCal is likely to give me.

Since nobody's biting, I'll give you my 2 cents. Its been a while (18
months or so) since I last flew between those airports IFR. I don't
recall the exact details, but I think I filed and they took me via Van
Nuys, Gorman and Avenal or something like that. I don't recall flying
a particular SID, just that we departed effectively on a right 45 (off
of rwy 19R) then they took us to a wide right downwind during vectors
to VNY. But the route you propose sounds decent enough to me. I've
taken V485 plenty of times and that works well for getting to PAO.

So what's up with John Wayne departure control? I seem to remember
having to talk to them for a bit between John Wayne tower and SOCAL
approach/departure control (on a different flight, though, seem to
remember being VFR then). Are they running a mini-approach control
from within the tower there? Is that the future of the system: after
consolidating all the TRACONs into big super-approach controls, small
individual approach controls will sprout up again from each tower?

Peter