benweir.com

For Father's Day I wanted to go take Dad to see the Nevada City Classic bike race. The race was being held for its 49th year but this year was extra special because Lance Armstrong and a couple of his Astana teammates Levi Leipheimer and Chris Horner would be competing.

The plan was for Aaron, Susanne, and me to fly from Palo Alto to Elk Grove, pick Dad up, and then continue to Nevada City. The flight to Elk Grove was pretty typical. I climbed to 2000 feet and leveled off until passing east of I-880 before climbing again to 3500. There was a lot of thermal activity and we got bumped around quite a bit. I didn't want to climb higher because the headwind was supposed to be stronger and it's a pretty short leg (67 miles).

We were flying N26WG which is a retractable gear Cessna 177 Cardinal. I hadn't flown it since going to Truckee in January but it seemed familiar enough. I followed the checklists and everything went fine.

So we picked up Dad and said hi to Mom. Then taxiing to the runway the left main wheel was making a pretty loud clunking noise and we could feel it vibrating too. I shutdown the plane and examined things vaguely remembering that another pilot had squawked something about the gear wobbling. Eventually I determined the cause to be the tire itself which had so many flat spots that it was no longer round. Thankfully the problem was not the landing gear itself.

Taking off from Elk Grove took up a lot of runway. Not only did we have an extra person which put us pretty close to gross (2800 lbs) but there was a slight tailwind. At Elk Grove you can only land on runway 29 and takeoff on runway 11 due to buildings on north end hence taking off with a tailwind.

Once airborne we stayed south of Grant Line road to avoid Mather field class D airspace. Then once I hit the McClellan VOR 116 radial I made a slight left turn to get on course. Our route took us right over Folsom Lake, Auburn, and a little private airstrip called Alta Sierra. We entered a left pattern for runway 25 at Nevada County, landed, and taxied to parking.

We had a good time watching the bike race. Eventually it was time to fly home though which was just the reverse of the flight there. It was around 8:14pm when we took off from Nevada County and we got to watch the sunset from the air. Nevada County airport is at 3152' and after takeoff I initially climbed up to 5500 and leveled off there briefly before starting a 300-400 fpm descent. At 150-160 knots ground speed this took us at a nice constant gradient right down to Elk Grove. We dropped off Dad and then flew back to Palo Alto and landed around 9:40pm.

I later found out that some people had driven back to the Bay Area and ran into a massive construction related traffic jam on I-80. They didn't get home until midnight so I was especially glad to have flown!

Total hours E27 to GOO: 1.5
Total hours GOO to E27: 1.3 (1.0 day and 0.3 night)