Let me tell you all about my Reno Air race experience. I'll set up the scene.
I had gotten my licence that year. I had skipped ground school for just learning the book. That's ok except you miss a lot of air socializing which tend to be a bunch of anecdotal stories where you learn quite a bit of practical knowledge.
I failed my first written test over a bunch of non-consequetial questions that don't have much flying value. To make sure that I didn't fail it again I memorized the answers (a,b,c,or d) to hundreds of questions multiple choices. I learned to fly out of Palomar airport where the radio world wasn't complicated.
It took me 45 hrs flying time or so to pass the flying test...and I had my license. and I prolly had 80 hrs by the time I decided to fly to the Reno Air races. I got a couple buddies to go with me to defray expenses of airplane rental.
So I guess, I'm trying to tell you how little experience I had, but like most of these types of thing, I didn't know what I didn't know what I didn't know till later.
The Plane was a Piper Archer 180hp. that's a good 4 place plane, but it won't haul 4 guys with full tanks and some luggage. So I was loaded about right with 3 guys and light luggage. With a full load, weight wise, that planes good for about 9 tp 10 thousand ft above sea level.
There are lots of mountains between here and Reno much higher than that. LOL
Something I didn't know was that Reno airport had an 'Approach Control' radio frequency. You make an initial contact of the assigned airport frequency, and they hand you off to AP. And Reno has 2 runways side by side that I didn't know about either.
So the plan was to get off work, take the airplane to Kernville and spend the night camped off the end of the runway somewhere. Little did I know that the Kernrville airport is a half dozen miles from town where we could get something to eat. I'd never been to Kernville before. There was no Google maps back in 1980 to look at to see where things were.
So all went fairly well. We got to Kernville, and I bounce the plane in way to fast to make a competent landing, but I got it down. We did camp off to the far side of the airport in the tule bushes. We ate candy bars and snacks for dinner.
Ok, we got off the ground by eight in the morning with maybe 250 miles to go. That's only a couple hours of flying time. As I remember we crossed the mtns somewhere between Garnerville and Carson. The highest mountains under us were prolly 8500ft and we were at a little over 9000ft.
That's all very cool on a calm day, but over those mtns it was not calm. That little plane was trying to do barrel rolls for about 75 miles of that crossing. And I'm a seasick kind of guy. I was worried about getting sick. That's when I found out that if you're scared shitless, you don't get airsick.
Then the winds were over. I had about 45 minutes to calm down and get into Reno. That should be simple. When the guy wanted me to switch the radio over to Approach Control, I realized that things were going to be different from anything I had done before....and Approach was telling me to come into runway 180 right. What the hell was that, 'Right' crap. Oh, I see 2 strips down there now. Ok, I can do this. Hummm...where the hell am I going to park the plane, was the next question.
But I got it onto the ground and got it parked, and we went to the airshow, which was quite a show as I remember. Remember that wind that was tossing me around, well, it was a 15 or 20mph crosswind at the airshow. It was giving them fits as the show goes generally up and down in the runway direction, and the performers were having to do all their maneuvers in a crab so as to keep from flying over the grandstands.
Flying wasn't so much trouble as was the taxiing. A P51 was blown over while taxying on the ground. So if one guy lost it, then, for sure, they were all fighting the wind while on the ground.
So the show came and went. We spent the night somewhere, and were at the airport early to get home on Sunday. I got with 'Departure Control', and he instructed me to take a heading and climb to 3000 ft, at ground level, and then I boogied on home....except that I needed to stop at Mamouth to get some gas.
How tough can that be? Well, it isn't so tough but the airport is kind east and west where I assumed it would be north/south along the road. I got confused and landed on the outgoing runway. Infact, I saw an airplane come off as I was lining up to go in. I was on the ground before I had realized my fo pah. It wasn't a 'controlled airport' so there was no tower to answer to for doing this, but there was an airport rat in the building that commented, "Nice trick".
I felt pretty low after that trip, but even after doing all that dumb stuff, I had survived. That trip had a lot to do with me adopting the 'Luck Beats Good' adage about life. LOL
