August 27, 2019 The Last Day of Re-Flights

The Liberty Gazette

August 27, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: We had great fun filling the week with re-flights around Southern California. Flying select cross-country flights with Mike allowed me to share in his memories of his earliest days aviating.

He still has friends out there where he grew up, and one couple invited us to stay the night before we started our long flight home. They rounded up another friend Mike grew up with, and we all went to dinner together. Since we’re vegan, Asian restaurants make a good choice when we’re with a group of meat-eaters. Avocado rolls and edamame are always on the menu.

Mike’s buddies wanted to know what he was up to, what this trip west was all about. He’s writing a book of historic interest for pilots on the significant changes that have occurred in the way we fly, since he began his journey in flight training 44 years ago. For research, we took the same type of airplane he learned in, back to the same airspace, and retraced his chem trails, noting differences in FAA regulations, shape and size of controlled airspace, changes in the number and busyness of airports and air traffic control towers, and much more. Technology has changed much of the way we fly, too. Both in and outside the cockpit, technological advances have made flying easier, even in the crowded skies over Southern California.

On the way back from the Japanese sushi house, at a stoplight, we thought Leandro, whose big truck we were in, was messing with us, pumping hydraulics or brakes or something. The truck was a-rockin’! Randy, Nancy, and I were laughing at Leandro, saying, “Okay, that’s enough bouncing the truck.” But just then, Mike hollered, “Look at the traffic lights! He’s not doing it—it’s another earthquake!”

Only one day after my first quake, I had just experienced my second. It came from the same epicenter, but jostled us with more magnitude, 7.1 this time. To me, it was exciting. When we returned to our hosts’ home, their dining room chandelier and heavy window blinds were still swaying.

As we do when hurricanes threaten us here, everyone turns on the TV news to find out what they need to know. From the local news channels, I learned about Dr. Lucy Jones, an amazing expert from Cal Tech. She’s been at this a long time and reports what’s happening geologically. Somehow, she takes complex technical details and makes them easy for non-geologists to comprehend. No wonder she’s so popular.

Departing the next morning, we flew the rest of the day and overnighted in Las Cruces. Landing back home the following day, we tucked the Elyminator back in the nest, and tallied it all up: 10 days, 41.7 hours of flight time, 4,075 nautical miles, 32 landings, 21 pages of notes, 2 earthquakes, many good friends, and loads of memories.

Every day of this adventure was chock-full of fun. These past few articles have been teasers for Mike’s upcoming book. We’ll let you know when it’s out.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

August 20, 2019 Strawberries

The Liberty Gazette

August 20, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: Strawberries sold for $5 a flat back in the 1980s. A flat holds 12 pint-sized baskets and I could fit about a dozen flats in the nose of a Beech 99, a twin-engine turboprop, without crushing them.

When I flew freight for Cal Air back then, I’d hop around to all these cities in Southern California, at first collecting cancelled checks and later moving up to flying UPS feeder duty out of Ontario. One of the regular runs I flew had me laying over in Oxnard for the day. With some of the richest soil in all the country, it was a strawberry-growing place if I ever saw one.

Before leaving the airport in the morning, some of my fellow pilots would hand over a five and place their order for strawberries. After making my morning run and offloading cargo in Oxnard, I’d head out to fill those orders—strawberries fresh from a farmer’s field. I’d bring them back to all the pilots at our base, and I’d save some to bring back home to Mom.

Linda: He was probably hoping for homemade strawberry pie in appreciation for his efforts. His mom was a great cook.

During our re-flight of the early days of Mike’s first logbook, on approach into Oxnard, I wondered if all those rows of ground covered with big white plastic might be strawberry fields. But then, we had no room for a flat of strawberries. We were already near maximum gross weight with the camping gear and a week’s worth of stuff. Still, I could imagine the taste of fresh strawberries just then.

That reminds me of a side-story about strawberries. Humor me a random interlude. When I moved here to Liberty, my brother-in-law, Rusty Blue, was keeping a garden in my back yard. I wanted fresh strawberries, so I told him that would be a good thing to plant. Of course, he suggested if that was something I wanted, then I should do the planting. But I know my brother-in-law. All I had to do was go buy the tray of strawberry plants and place them by the garden. Sure enough, he stuck them in neat little mounds. They produced sweet berries!

But back to Oxnard. As we were on final for the runway, just over the highway, besides wondering if all those covered fields had juicy red fruit growing, I wondered if the people on the road below us could read the words on the bottom of the Elyminator – “Stuck In Traffic?” I’ve enjoyed having that sign on the bottom of the airplane ever since we put it there in 2012. It gets lots of laughs.

Mike: I rarely carried any cargo in the nose of that Beech 99 other than the strawberries. So, the evening flights back to Ontario during harvest season often meant the sweet scent wafted its way through the airplane during the thirty-minute flight. It also made that airplane the most popular and welcomed on the UPS ramp.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

August 13, 2019 Favorites of the Re-flight

The Liberty Gazette

August 13, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: When the person you love tells you stories of a time pre-us, you long to know what it was like. Flying the routes with Mike that he flew when he was a new pilot gave me an opportunity to explore today’s airspace in yesteryear’s flights. Of the many airports we landed at, I picked five favorites.

Kern Valley was one (my first earthquake). Others were Long Beach, Santa Barbara, Catalina Island, and in a way, El Monte. I wrote about those first three over the last couple of weeks.

A few years ago, we stayed a weekend at Avalon on Catalina Island. Unfortunately, this time, we couldn’t stay, but landing at the “Airport in the Sky” and spending thirty minutes at the restaurant/gift shop was nice. Avalon is romantic, so you can bet we’ll be back. Probably when the Zane Grey Hotel re-opens after remodeling.

Why El Monte? Because that’s where Mike learned to fly. This was where his story began. And it was my first time there. When the tower controller instructed me to fly over the Santa Fe dam and follow the water toward the runway, I couldn’t tell immediately where that was for all the congestion below. But Mike was taken back to a place long forgotten. From that moment on, the week of re-flights created its own special place in our hearts.

We dropped in on Burbank and visited one of Mike’s former co-workers still at Ameriflight (formerly California Air Charter – CalAir). Pete handed Mike his I.D. photo from 1985, in which he looked a bit different than today. The guys reminisced a while, then we took off to replicate the first leg of his first flight for CalAir. It was a short one, Burbank to Riverside, about 30 minutes. On October 1, 1985, young Mike carried 1,100 pounds of canceled checks and bank mail in a Piper Lance.

Approaching to land at Riverside, I laughed in appreciation of the “note” at the end of the runway. Painted in large white letters is, “Wheels,” a nice reminder for every pilot, every time, to check that their landing gear is down.

I cannot imagine what it felt like for Mike to revisit this flight, but it swirls in my heart. In the years since then, he’s been the chief pilot for an international corporation, flying all over the world, and people have come to him from around the globe for instruction in flying jets. To come back to Riverside, flying that first leg from Burbank, thinking about the freight he carried, must have brought a tidal wave of thoughts and emotions. He had to be on time in those days before electronic banking. In the Piper Lance, every minute it took to get his cargo to its destination meant thousands of dollars in interest. Later, when he flew canceled checks in a Learjet, he carried billions, with every minute being worth millions. That’s more than a flat of strawberries, which I’ll tell you about next week.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

August 6, 2019 Shaken, But Not Stirred

The Liberty Gazette

August 6, 2019

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: My first earthquake experience happened July 4 this year, as we prepared to depart our camp-by-your-airplane spot at Kern Valley Airport. What a feeling, the earth moving as we stuffed our gear into the baggage compartment! We didn’t know yet where the epicenter was, or the magnitude. The runway looked fine, so we took off, back over Lake Isabella and headed up the Owens Valley at 8,500’, part of a route Mike used to fly regularly. There’s so much history and geology there.

Mt. Whitney

With Lone Pine Airport off our right wing, and Mt. Whitney off our left, we were between the highest and lowest points in the Continental U.S.: Mt. Whitney is 14,491’, and just 88 miles away is Bad Water in Death Valley, elevation minus 282’!

Lone Pine Airport

We flew north, over the Alabama Hills. From the sky, it was just a little clump of hills, but this has been the most popular location for filming Westerns since the silent movie days of Tom Mix. Many scenes in John Wayne movies were shot there.

The perspective from the Elyminator above this grand valley is stunning, but not void of some sad history. We had a good view of Manzanar, the U.S. internment camp where Japanese people were held during World War II. The airstrip is still visible, as are the outlines of former campsites, now lined with dark clumps of trees across the road from the airstrip. There’s a museum there that tells the history. It was a time of panic in the U.S., and we did the best we knew in a time of fear. If you saw the movie or read the book, “Unbroken,” you know what we feared.

Manzanar

Flying over Manzanar on Independence Day had a sobering effect—oh, the wars we’ve fought. But the next town up the valley was, appropriately, Independence. We circled over Independence and flew back down the Owens Valley, past Mt. Whitney again, and headed to Inyokern to fuel up. That’s where we would learn more about the earthquake.

Approaching Inyokern, we tuned in their common traffic advisory frequency and heard the pilot of a TV news helicopter asking if she could get to the self-serve fuel pump or if there was a fuel truck. Aha! The news must be covering the quake! Mike figured we must be near the epicenter.

CHiP at Inyokern

The California Highway Patrol had landed for fuel in their Cessna 206, as did about four more TV news helicopters. We talked with the airport manager and his fiancé, and learned the epicenter was in the next town, Ridgecrest, only about 30 miles from where we had camped. Magnitude 6.4, with several aftershocks forecast.

Helicopters were transporting patients from the damaged Ridgecrest hospital to hospitals in Lancaster and Palmdale. Other buildings were damaged, too, but the CHP pilots said so far, the roads looked okay.

With fuel in the wing tanks, we took off for more destinations, a couple of which are on my “favorites” list. I’ll tell more next week.

TV News Helicopter at Inyokern

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com