I usually fly five days a week from the Pickleweed Place picnic spot at Baylands, but sometimes you gotta leave home.

On Friday, Doug, Mike, Bruce and I visited Rancho San Antonio, another excellent local flying venue.

I’ve written before about RSA and about the challenge of changing perspectives (Doug and I crashed into trees when we were displaced to the Meadowlands picnic area by the park lawn mower test track), but Friday I was again reminded of how much we depend on familiar cues when we fly.

Backyard Flyer. A week or so before, we visited our friends Pam and Dave in Carmel Valley. The back of their beautiful house looks out on a downhill slope with a backdrop of hills in the distance. Between the house and the beginning of the decline lies a 22-foot-wide stretch of manicured grass.

“I can fly here,” I thought, looking at the grass. “Plenty of room for the Starfighter!”

My flight was a series of disasters. First I landed on the roof of their house. Then, twice, I fell short of the edge of the grass by about 10 or 15 feet, plowing into the hillside.

Finally, on my fourth try, I plopped the Starfighter onto the grass, but with so much velocity that it nearly hit the house.

It looked like a simple challenge, but I couldn’t work out the geometry.

A Balmy Day. At RSA, the day was perfect: sunny and balmy, a bit warm as the sun gained strength, but ideal for flying.

Like Baylands, RSA is a public park with airplane-friendly management and a dedicated coterie of regular flyers.

At Baylands, we face north when we fly. At RSA, pilots face west-southwest. At midmorning, visibility is fine, but afternoon flying looks like a bad idea.

The View from Here. A hundred feet or so in front of the RSA flight line runs a gully which drops down about 30 feet. Beyond the gully lie woodlands and, in the distance, hills and powerlines.

Just behind the RSA flight line is a parking lot. There’s no buffering space, so you always fly in front of yourself.

Because the airfield is hard packed dirt, most planes use wheels to taxi to and from their pilots.

At Baylands, the thick grass defeats most small wheels. The meadow is sticky when wet, and its clumps and bare spots snag wheels and regularly cause planes to flip over when they land.

So we remove our landing gear and belly flop our landings. Our taxiing skills atrophy.

Built to Skid. At RSA I launch my little blue Starfighter, built by Ron Fikes, who flies regularly at RSA and greets us on Friday. He equipped it with a nose skid for the RSA hard-pack. “Welcome Home,” I think.

After one ungainly takeoff — new field jitters on my part — I replace the broken prop and ask Bruce to launch for me. The ensuing flight is good, but I discipline myself to keep the plane close. I don’t want to trek into the woods.

I land and watch Doug demonstrate some 3D maneuvers. He flies brilliantly, but when he executes a blender, he lets the plane drop a bit too low. It disappears into the gully and he can’t bring it back in sight.

Always in Sight. At Baylands we can always see our planes, unless we’re foolish enough to fly behind ourselves into the Back Trees or fly too far in front of ourselves into the far-distant Front Trees.

Fortunately, Doug knows his plane perfectly. He cuts the throttle and gives it full up elevator and it drops gently to the ground, even though he can’t see it.

Doug hikes down into the gully and retrieves his undamaged plane.

No Shelter. There’s no shade at RSA and it’s getting hot, so we decide to return to Baylands, where grass and trees mitigate the heat.

But when we arrive, we find Pickleweed Place packed with picnickers, so we move down a spot to Owl Burrow at the end of the Great Meadow.

Peter Rasmussen is flying his Easy Glider, a plane he flies well and often. As I watch, he crashes into a tree 200 feet in front of him.

“I thought I was over that tree,” he says as he brings his plane back to the picnic table. “The view here fools you.”

Visual Cues. Peter is right. Just as Doug dipped below the horizon because he wasn’t used to RSA, we all depend on cues to tell us where we are. After a while, we fool ourselves into thinking that we can judge distance, altitude, speed, but we rely on lots of visual placemarks to tell us where we are.

When I was learning to fly, Ray Smith, my instructor, talked me through the cues at his field in Monterey.

A tree marked the beginning of the landing turn. A slot in the brush marked the line for the final landing approach. At his instruction, I watched for a shadow under the plane to confirm that I was over the field, and not behind a bush or a tree.

Here at the end of the Great Meadow, we haven’t learned the cues.

Regular Flyer. A while later, Mehmet arrives with his pretty Funtana, which he flies every day at lunchtime. In less than a year, Mehmet has become one of the best flyers at Baylands.

I watch him loop and roll and swoop his plane around this corner of the Great Meadow.

Suddenly Whap! he crashes into the same miserable little tree that caught Peter’s plane. The Funtana is badly broken. Mehmet collects the pieces and returns to the picnic area.

Damn you, Owl Burrow!

I sit in the shade and watch, feeling lucky that I didn’t crash today.

Tags: Baylands, Crashes, Flying, Radio Control, Rancho San Antonio, Trees.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 9:13 am and is filed under Baylands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.