HIDDEN IN PLANE SIGHT
“Something deeply hidden had to be behind things”
First time I soared from Crystal to Big Bear, the outbound leg went so quickly I never bothered to look down, so on the way home I stopped, determined to go no further until identifying Hesperia airport. I loitered over the wide city bleeding altitude, scanning everywhere left and right more than once, and could find no open spaces even big enough for an airport. Glad it wasn’t a snake. Finally, anxious to move on, I looked straight down, and there it was directly below — still hard to recognize! (Secret: it’s just beyond the eastern terminus of the same aqueduct that flows past Crystal.)
Had a similar seek’n’hide my first time crossing the Banning Pass to Mt. San Jacinto. Again, getting there was a snap, but I assumed too much in what was then an unfamiliar area, and inevitably it got more ‘interesting’. After two hours massaging rocks on both sides of the pass, the day was starting to shut down. Getting all the way home looked sketchy, but we had to go somewhere soon. Banning airport was right there below, plus other airports within easy range, obscured by haze and too far from home for an aero retrieve that evening. Our best bet was to crawl back up in the desert (less height AGL, but closer to home) and hope for a miracle. Worst case we could land at Yucca Valley, another place I’d not yet seen from the air.
The whole town was visible ahead, but not its airport, yet. With only minutes of gliding time left we could not afford to waste any of it going the wrong direction. Worried it might lie miles beyond the town (like Barstow Daggett), I grabbed for the laminated chart – and couldn’t find that either. It had sneaked under my seat pan, where I could never reach until after landing. A darting search for landout options revealed no farm fields anywhere, only a sea of hazards, and for the first time in twenty years the captain of my ship tasted desperation.
I tried to call home, but we were too low now, with the highest mountains in southern California between us and our base radio. Fortunately my student had one of those newfangled cell phones and called our office number, handing it back to me. Mortified by embarrassment, I asked them to quickly consult the wall chart and tell us which direction from downtown Yucca Valley we should look for the airport.
Turns out it’s right where we were headed, downtown, already in sight but perfectly concealed by the variegated landscape. I’d been looking straight at it from a mile away for several seconds before I could believe that’s what it was. Cue the anticlimax, a retrieve tow eighty-five miles into the setting sun, yada yada.
For good measure here’s one more, also within easy soaring range of Crystal. When you leave here to fly north up the Sierras, Rosamond Airpark is a very useful alternate, but remains quite invisible until you arrive. It’s right at the north edge of town, but appears to be just another street until you’re passing by it and sight down the runway itself. If you don’t happen to look at just that moment you may never see it…
These three examples are but a local sampler! In each one the strip lies parallel with other linear features while also surrounded by urban camouflage of many kinds. This has always been a problem for aviators, but now we have an easy solution. Before soaring somewhere you’ve never been, why not go on GoogleEarth and scope out certain important details from different perspectives, in 3D and in color, so you’ll really know what to look for? Who knows, it might save more than a frantic phone call.