July 16, 2019 Re-flights

The Liberty Gazette

July 16, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: El Monte, California was where it all began forty-four years ago, when I soloed in an airplane for the first time. There are many public airports in southern California and many flight schools. I picked El Monte Skyways because it was closest to my home. I didn’t have a car because all my money from after school jobs went to flying. I took the bus to school, work, and the airport.

I’ve wanted to go back, reconnect with old friends and re-fly several of my student flights, to see if things are different now. I’ve changed—I’m seasoned. The shape and volume of controlled and restricted airspace have also changed, as have means of navigation and FAA regulations. This was what I wanted to see, the changes flying in the complex and congested area around Los Angeles today.

As Linda flew the Elyminator, I listened to radio chatter and the stream of instructions issued by controllers. When the El Monte tower controller said to fly over the Santa Fe dam and follow the water toward the runway, memories clicked. I was taken back to a place long forgotten.

It was beyond that dam where, as a student, I practiced aerial maneuvers and flew patterns low over the ground. Sometimes, I did this in smoggy conditions. I’d get a special clearance to fly in low visibility. Then I’d follow the flood control channel from the dam’s spillway to a straight-in approach to the runway. The sky is still hazy some days, but it isn’t nearly as bad as I remember it.

Duplicating several cross-country flights from my first logbook, we landed as far south as San Diego Brown Field, only a mile from Mexico and as far north as Kern Valley in the Sierra Nevada, where we camped next to our airplane. We scooted through a special corridor over Los Angeles International to have lunch in Santa Barbara. We could do this more efficiently now, because we have GPS to navigate more directly. This equipment didn’t exist when I was a student.

As we flew between mountains, over deserts and along the sea, Linda took notes as I explained the differences from my new pilot days, such as several of the old airports that no longer exist. Due to politics and greed, houses and industrial parks have replaced them. In one instance, a replacement airport was built only to be threatened by further urban sprawl.

Further, redesigned airspace has added rules in convoluted layers in altitude, designating where one must have a clearance to fly. As a result, activity has increased on already overcrowded radio frequencies. We rarely had a break from the constant staccato of pilot-controller verbiage flowing through our headphones.

In this “going back” adventure, we put 41.7 hours of flight time on the Elyminator over 10 days, flew 4,075 nautical miles, made 34 landings, wrote 21 pages of notes, experienced 2 earthquakes, saw many friends, and made loads of memories. And I noted, so much has changed.

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