Page 27 - May 20 TNT

peculiarity of an older Lear. The baggage is stowed behind the back seat, with a seatback release device seemingly stolen from a 1950s vintage Chevy. All very awkward. We run the start checklist and get the little jet going. I call the tower for our clearance, only to be told they have nothing on file for us. This occasionally happens at this airport because it is a contract tower without direct access to the FAA’s computer system. Plus, it is technically within Victoria’s airspace being just 10 miles from the Canadian border. We ask them to call Victoria departure control and see if our clearance got stuck in the Canadian system. They do so and come back saying they have nothing for us either, then suggest we call flight service by cellphone. My co-pilot, Josh, dials the number only to get an eternal hold. With the engines burning over 100 gallons per hour while just parked on the ramp, we need to get going. So, with Josh still on hold, I call flight service on their local frequency. They say there is nothing for us in the system, so I start filing a flight plan with them the old fashioned way, one item at a time over the radio. In the meantime, Josh gives up on the phone, calls the ground controller, gets a taxi clearance out to the runway, and starts the airplane rolling that direction running the taxi checklist by himself. Flight plan now filed, we call ground control and they still do not have a clearance, so we decide rather than burn more fuel sitting on the ground, we will depart VFR and deal with the problem with Victoria once airborne. As you might have predicted, shortly after takeoff, we find the departure controller’s frequency jammed up with airline traffic coming out of Vancouver and cannot get a word in edgewise. With the Lear’s climb rate, we really have to power back to stay below FL180 just three minutes after leaving the runway. And traveling at 250 knots we are rapidly reaching the end of Victoria departures airspace and entering that of Whidbey, the naval air station just to the south. Finally giving up on Victoria, we call the Navy controller, who appears to have been waiting for us and immediately reads our clearance to Palm Springs, gets us to change to Seattle Center, then clears us to FL410. Ten minutes later, we are finally up there and getting some decent fuel economy out of this thirsty and short-legged little airplane. The sun sets as we cross the Oregon/Nevada border about 45 minutes into the trip. A half-hour later, we can see the lights of Las Vegas off to our left, with that narrow vertical shaft of white light that comes off the roof of one of the hotels. Now about a half-hour from landing, we find we have “made fuel” en route and have about 1.5 hours re- maining despite our long ground delay prior to departure. The ATIS comes up 10 minutes later stating KTRM is clear with 10 miles visibility and the winds calm. We request radar vectors to a visual approach, and about four miles out, say goodbye to the radar controller and switch to Uni- com. Two miles out, we think we can see a red rotating beacon, motionless and about a third of the way down the runway. After a couple calls on Unicom, we discover the beacon belongs to a Cessna 182 that is just stopped there in between making night currency landings and takeoffs. Stopping an airplane on an active runway, at night, faced aft to the incoming traffic at a non-towered airport is a very bad idea. But after explaining what he was up to, the pilot says he will get on the roll. We are too professional to say anything critical and just reply that we are less than a minute from landing. The 182 breaks ground just as we get the 50-foot call out and we land without any problem. We taxi to the Lear’s lo- cal hangar, only to find another 182 out of its hangar with pilots pre-flighting the aircraft. As our noisy TFE 731’s wind down, they start to walk over in typical pilot-friendly fashion. After asking where we had flown in from, we reply Seattle, and they promptly stop dead in their tracks and ask, “Isn’t there a lot of that coronavirus up there?” At the time, a nursing home in Kirkland had the highest rate of corona deaths in the country, and it was making the headline TV news every night, so we reply, “Not that bad, except in nurs- ing homes” and added, “But, we are OK.” You can almost hear them thinking, “Yeah, sure,” as they make immediate 180-degree turns and head back to their aircraft, all Learjet curiosity displaced by fear of the virus. We hook up the Lear to the tug as fast as we can to allow our virus-avoiding 182 drivers taxi past, which they do with all their landing and taxi lights shining in our faces – maybe to sterilize the air. Finally, having put the little jet away for the night, we get in the crew car and make our way into Palm Springs proper. We check into the hotel then go out for dinner at a nearby restaurant serving Jewish food. The place is almost always full, but tonight it is nearly empty. Nevertheless, we choose an isolated booth and take care not to tell the waitress we just flew in from Seattle. As it turns out, the owner wanted the Lear to stay in Thermal for the days he and his family were there, so arrangements are made to send the crew (us) back via airline. This happens frequently to executive jet pilots, and the reasons are primarily economical. If we stayed in Palm Desert, we would charge layover fees, which for two pilots amount to $1,500 per day plus expenses. If we flew May 2020 / TWIN & TURBINE • 25