At the beginning of my professional writing career I was a cub reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

Junior reporters in the City Room learned by writing obituaries, short local news items and the front page weather box, all based on simple templates.

The template for the Los Angeles weather box was (and perhaps still is):

Night and morning low clouds. Clearing midday. High today xx. Low tonight xx.

So the task was to find the weather forecast on the weather teletype, note the high and low temperatures, type the story and insert temperatures appropriately.

Of course it occasionally rains in Los Angeles, and sometimes there’s a Santa Ana wind and maybe coastal fog, but more than 90% of the time the template nails it.

So I typed “Night and morning low clouds…” day after day. “Night and morning low clouds…” “Night and morning low clouds…” “Night and morning low clouds…”

Time for a Change. About the 18th or 20th time I was assigned the weather box, I decided to do it differently.

The clouds were the problem, I decided.

If, instead, I wrote about when the sun was shining, I’d have an alternative approach.

Of course, I’d have to keep it as short as the original, or at least pretty close, but I’ve always loved the puzzle of compressing meaning in as few words as possible.

I wrote my New Version once, looked at it, spotted a phrase I could cut, wrote it again.

One or two more iterations and I had a perfect little weather box. Not a single superfluous word. And it didn’t mention clouds.

I turned it into Glen Binford, the night City Editor. Glen was a great editor and an early role model for me, but he was rushing to meet the press deadline. So he glanced at the story quickly, then sent it on to the copy desk.

An hour or two later, the first edition of the Los Angeles Times was delivered to the City Room, where we all sat.

For the next hour or so, a reporter’s job was to read the paper, looking for typos, unless the reporter was on deadline with a story.

I was flipping through the paper when suddenly Binford shouted my name.

“Johnson!” he said, “Do you realize you have the sun shining at night?”

Fast Forward. So now it’s 2007 and the wind is blowing in San Jose.

I dare to write about the weather now because I can’t repeat that mistake: the wind is blowing most of the time, though there’s an occasional lull early in the morning.

Despite the wind, I fly my planes. At least until the wind starts to gust to 20mph or more. Then it’s time to go home.

These days my favorite planes are my three smallest: the little wing (which I now think is a Scrappy from Wing Warrior), the Ron Fikes blue spacecraft and the 20-inch wingspan BP Hobbies Angel glider.

All can fly in wind, though I don’t know why. All weigh in at about 6 or 7 ounces with battery. They have plenty of power, but not much mass to even out air turbulence with momentum.

Until Tuesday, I didn’t think the small glider could fly in wind, but I had a nice flight as the wind was rising at Baylands.

It was my third our fourth flight with the glider, and my best. I recently decided that new planes are like new shoes: at first they don’t feel right. You have to break them in, which really means getting used to how they fly.

Getting Better. In the past couple of weeks I’ve realized a couple of things about my flying. I crash very rarely now, for one.

The other is more subtle. A week or so ago, I was flying my little wing. The sky was upholstered in clouds, with a few breaks of blue sky.

I was flying a distant big circle, avoiding some other flyers’ planes.

As the plane went to my right side, I lost it against the clouds. For two or three seconds I couldn’t see it in the glare of the sun, which was also to my right. Then I could.

I circled around. As it went to my far right, the same thing happened.

The third time it happened, a light bulb finally turned on: don’t fly to your far right!

That’s a breakthrough.

Up until recently, I’ve been so preoccupied with the details of flying that I haven’t been thinking much about how I fly.

But now I can, and it’s allowing me to become a better flyer.

I’ve just updated the 2007 Pictures pages with photos from a Slow Stick Combat event at Baylands.

Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Flying, Radio Control, Wind.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Baylands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.