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.

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