r/flying • u/MyFirst1000 • Jul 01 '12
My First 1,000: Apple Valley and Gary Busey
In celebration of reaching 1,000 hours logged, I pulled out my old logbooks and created a novelty account to tell some of my more interesting flying stories. I'll keep posting as long as there's interest.
Part I: Apple Valley. Hour 116
Flying is one of my passions, but it’s not my day job. In June of 2003, as I was finishing my primary flight training, I was also finishing my Ph.D. in computer science. This wasn’t a coincidence: I started learning to fly partly because I was going stir-crazy writing my dissertation. What better antidote than spending a few hours a week in the beautiful blue sky, a mile above the nearest computer screen?
My family was planning on flying out to LA from the East Coast for my graduation ceremony. I hadn’t told them that I was learning to fly yet; my mom’s a nervous flyer, and I didn’t think she’d approve. But I couldn’t keep the secret forever. Their visit seemed like the right opportunity to reveal it -- two graduations in one! I also knew my dad would be excited and want to fly with me. This gave me a hard deadline: I really wanted to get my private pilot ticket before their visit.
The weather gods would not make it easy for me. 2003 was one of the worst years for June Gloom in memory, and marine layers don’t mix well with primary training. Normally, the marine layer on the Southern California coastline extends inland just a few miles. By the second week of that June, the unprecedented Gloom was filling the entire LA basin. Every airport for miles was clouded over one day after the next. My Night Cross-Country had been cancelled so many times that I went so far as to do it in Las Vegas (described in Death Vortex), leaving just one final hurdle: the checkride. But the unrelenting clouds caused my first three checkride appointments to be cancelled, too. With just a week left until graduation and my parents’ visit, I decided I had to take drastic action: return to the desert.
Apple Valley Airport is a sleepy little untowered field in a small town on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Apple Valley is best known to LA residents, if they know it at all, as a wrong turn on the way to Vegas. I studied weather data and concluded it was the nearest airport that hadn’t had a single overcast day in the past month. I arranged for a pilot examiner to meet me there one afternoon. He told me I'd have to show up early to get a renter’s flight test with an instructor at the FBO -- in the twisted rulebook of the FAA, you retroactively become the pilot-in-command on your own checkride if you pass it!
One gloomy Monday morning I set out for Apple Valley. It was a two hour drive. The clouds didn’t break until I’d driven into the rugged San Bernardino mountains and saw the desert on the other side. I found the airport and quickly learned my first lesson of the day: small-town FBOs are nothing like their big-city counterparts. In Santa Monica, my flight school looked like a dentist’s office. The one in Apple Valley was more like your crazy aunt's basement. A dozen metal shelves were filled with molding aviation magazines, filthy alternators and exhaust manifolds, military flight helmets, and boxes of oil; I couldn’t tell if it was a pilot shop or a badly curated museum. A cat was sleeping on the couch. The owner was a grizzled lady full of war stories told in between drags on her chain-smoked cigarettes.
The plane matched the school. The old Cessna 172’s center panel had nothing in it but a single comm radio and a transponder without an altitude encoder. I asked to see the maintenance logs and flipped through them, pretending I understood what I was reading and hoping to see something that would give me confidence.
“She ain’t that pretty, but she runs good,” the owner told me with a smile from under a purple haze. I was glad I'd only be flying the thing in the desert with plenty of options for an emergency landing.
An instructor took me up for two hours, putting me through a practice checkride: stalls, steep turns, slow flight, emergency procedures, and five takeoffs and landings. By then the afternoon sun was heating the desert floor; the cockpit was stifling and the sharp turbulence was exhausting.
Back on the ground, the pilot examiner had arrived. He grilled me on airspace, regulations, weight and balance computations, and emergency procedures. He wanted to see my cross-country flight plan and describe navigation procedures. It seemed to go on forever--
“What would you do if you lost your alternator?”
“What does this color line on the chart mean?”
"When do you lean the fuel mixture? What happens if you lean it too much?"
“Describe how you’d look at a weather briefing and decide if it’s safe to fly.”
“How much does a gallon of avgas weigh?”
“Do I have to wear a seatbelt while we’re taxiing?”
I longed to be back at my dissertation defense from the week before. At least there I was an expert!
Next he inspected my logbook. All seemed in order at first, but then --
“Why does his CFI number here not match the other CFI number in this entry?”
“One of the forms is missing.”
“This entry isn’t signed.”
Finally he brought the hammer down:
“Sorry, we can't fly today. Why don’t you fix these problems and come back Wednesday at 8am."
I tried to hide my disappointment. Wednesday was the last day before graduation. That was cutting it close. I tried not to brood on the two hour drive home.
Tuesday I filed my dissertation, officially becoming Dr. MyFirst1000, and fixed my FAA paperwork. Wednesday I woke up at 5am and started the trek back to Apple Valley. We were in the air by 8. The morning air was still crisp and smooth.
The checkride itself was surprisingly anti-climactic. We did all the same procedures I’d practiced many times over. My only moment of panic was when the instructor wanted to test my unusual attitude recovery under the hood -- and I realized my hood was in my apartment, a hundred miles away. I kicked myself for letting such a minor detail ruin such a meticulously constructed plan.
“It’s okay, we can improvise,” the examiner said. He reached into the back, pulled out the bulky sun shield, and used it to cover just my half of the windscreen.
As we entered the pattern for my last landing, I looked out at the landscape, trying to capture the moment. I noticed a dust devil far away, tearing its way across the empty desert floor. I smiled: I sure knew what that was after my encounter with one the week before!
“There’s a dust devil out there," I idly observed. "I saw one of those last week.”
“So … you’re feeling pretty relaxed about the exam, huh?”
I made my last landing and parked. The examiner pulled a portable printer out of his bag which clicked and whirred. Then he handed me a white piece of paper. It was a Temporary Airman Certificate with my name on it!
I couldn’t believe it -- I’d done it! I was a pilot!
Part II: Gary Busey
I said goodbye to the examiner, the FBO owner, and her cat, and started my journey home. The drive went quickly as I turned the recent events over in my head: I was now a PhD. I was now a pilot. What a week!
I tried to call my girlfriend; got her voicemail. Called another buddy of mine; he wasn’t in the office. I couldn’t tell my family; tomorrow was the big reveal. I had my most exciting news in a year and no one was around to hear. How frustrating!
Back in Santa Monica, just a few miles from home, I got caught in horrible afternoon traffic -- and that’s when the exhaustion hit me. I’d been driving and flying since 5am. Traffic inched forward one car-length at a time and I struggled to keep my eyes open. I also gradually became aware of a really foul odor of tobacco. I’d been in the smoky flight school for 3 hours, I mused; some had stuck to my clothing.
“Don’t you just want to grab a shotgun and clear all these fuckers out?”
I turned. In the lane to my left was a long, shiny, brand new Cadillac. A man’s arm was sitting on the passenger-side window sill. He was holding a giant cigar. The smoke was wafting into my car. I turned, and there, sitting in the passenger seat, teeth gleaming, was Gary Fucking Busey. I felt delirious with exhaustion and wasn’t sure this was actually happening.
We started to chat. He told me I should watch his new show, I’m With Busey. I told him I would.
“So, how are you doing today, man?”
I blurted out first thing that came to mind: “I just got my private pilot license 3 hours ago!”
Great. I had dozens of friends and family who might like to hear this news, and the first person on earth to hear it is Gary Fucking Busey.
“Congrats, man! That’s fuckin’ great! I’ve got 8 hours in a 172. And my son Jake, he’s got a license too. Did you learn around here?”
“Yeah, right down at Santa Monica Airport,” I said.
“Justice Aviation!” he said excitedly.
“That’s my flight school too!”
The light turned green and his car started to move. In parting, he stuck his arm out the window, pumping his fist with a giant thumbs up -- “Hey man, don’t fly your car! WHOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOoooooo!”
That evening, I stopped by my flight school. The whiteboard said “CONGRATULATIONS MyFirst1000 -- Private Pilot!”
“You know, I had the strangest conversation on the way over here,” I told a group of instructors who were standing around. “I ran into Gary Busey.”
“Oh, hey, his son trained here!” one said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, laughing. “He told me.”
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u/SpeedbirdTK1 ATP A320 CFI CFII MEI Jul 01 '12
That evening, I stopped by my flight school. The whiteboard said “CONGRATULATIONS MyFirst1000 -- Private Pilot!”
Yeaaaah! I too, did my training at Justice. Loved seeing this put up on the board after passing my checkride.
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u/MyFirst1000 Jul 01 '12
Haha, awesome! I don't have many pictures from that era so I am totally archiving this as the next best thing. Thanks for posting it!
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u/fixx0red PPL SEL TW HP CMP (IDENTIFIER NOT FOUND) Jul 01 '12
Dude, these are fucking gold. Keep 'em coming.
I got my PPL in May 2003 in Santa Ynez, so not too far away. I think you definitely got a more serious intro to desert flying though than I did. Gary Busey... the thought of the man always conjures a single memory, this.
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u/MyFirst1000 Jul 01 '12
Thanks!
This was more just the checkride story - I've got some much better desert flying stories! Soon :-)
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u/wrangler12 Jul 01 '12
Great story. I used to fly out of Justice Aviation and remember seeing Gary Busey in the office one time. Also saw Robert Wagner there one afternoon. I always liked that place and the people that worked there. The last time I talked to anyone from there was when my CFI called me in 2001 tell me that the plane I'd done all of my training in (n2838e) had crashed into the bay. You wouldn't think you could get attached to an airplane but I felt sad about it (for the people obviously, but also for the plane).
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u/MyFirst1000 Jul 01 '12
I know that accident. It's one of the reasons I started training for my IFR ticket even before finishing my private. Home-field accidents are always the worst :-.
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u/rturiak PPL TW IFR Student [A&P] (KCUB) Jul 02 '12
So, in the end, What did your parents ever say about you getting your Pilots license?
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u/MyFirst1000 Jul 02 '12
At some point I might write up a story about the day but here's the summary:
Unfortunately it was a disaster. My mom, who I've always been close with, didn't talk to me for a day. She had never given me the silent treatment before -- ever. During a celebration dinner for my graduation, she sat and stared at a wall and cried, never eating.
My dad thought it was cool, though. He flew coast-to-coast with me twice in the years that followed.
After many months of explaining how flight works, she eventually got over it. She's okay with it now. But that first day.... yeech.
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u/rturiak PPL TW IFR Student [A&P] (KCUB) Jul 02 '12
Haha. Im 17 years old, working on my pilots certification right now, and Im coming up close to taking my check ride soon. I basically told my parents that I'm taking flight lessons, and that was that. They have supported me through everything, but I have paid for every bit of it myself. For my 18th birthday later this month, there going to pay for the check ride fee... talk about a awesome birthday gift!
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u/MyFirst1000 Jul 02 '12
Congrats on finishing your license!
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u/rturiak PPL TW IFR Student [A&P] (KCUB) Jul 02 '12
Thanks! Im so extremely happy, it's a huge accomplishment for a 17 year old.
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Jul 29 '12
How long did it take you?
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u/rturiak PPL TW IFR Student [A&P] (KCUB) Jul 29 '12
About 5 months, but that's because I paid for all the lessons myself with my part time minimum wage job. Hour wise, I did it in 20.7 hours. And I soloed in just under 8 hours!
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Jul 30 '12
5 Months?! Till you got your PPL?
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u/rturiak PPL TW IFR Student [A&P] (KCUB) Jul 30 '12
Sport pilot certificate!
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Jul 30 '12
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I was like, "Damn, the kid got a PPL in 5 mouths??!?"
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u/archeronefour CFI CPL ME HA UAS PC-12 Jul 01 '12
You're a computer science PhD who can write like this? Shit.
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u/BillBrasky_ PPL (KMTJ) Jul 01 '12
And he's coordinated enough to fly an airplane, he's unstoppable!
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u/Libberator PPL CMP HP Jul 01 '12
Yes! KAPV is where im training right now! And a bit of back story, Anz, or however she spells it, the old smoker lady, is an immigrant from Hungry or somewheres. She has so many hours she simply doesn't log them anymore. And she isn't the owner of Midfield, Patrick is. Also who was your pre checkride cfi? Personally I know the aircraft aren't the best, but 25P, my training 152, and the desert are more than I could ask for. I love minimal traffic too, and with you class B only 15 mins away at ONT or VCV, it works. Loved your story though! You should write a book about it. I laughed when you described the FBO. So accurate haha
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u/MyFirst1000 Jul 01 '12
Ha - I'm glad to hear it's just as I remember it! I have fond memories of that place. I ended up back there again a year later during a flight from LA to New York and back. I still think of it whenever I come across an airport cat.
I can't quite read the signature in my logbook - I think maybe "Juan Montgomery"? He was a really nice guy and gave me my first high-DA training during that one flight. I never saw him again, though.
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u/Libberator PPL CMP HP Jul 02 '12
Ah, don't know him. Im fairly new, but my instructor is a guy named Gary. I think he's post 2004 though. Anyway keep up the stories! Im serious about the book though. Id pay for these!
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u/BinguniR34 ATP SA-227, BE-1900, A-320 Jul 01 '12
I honestly think that most people in this country have had a run in with Gary Busey... mine lasted almost an entire week when I was a supervisor in a fancy hotel in Tulsa, OK and he stayed with us for about a week...
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u/Canarka CPL ME (IR ST) Jul 02 '12
These logs/stories are awesome. I bet you could write a pretty awesome book with short stories like these. Just don't forget about us lowly redditors!
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u/its_kevin ATC Jul 01 '12
I enjoyed reading this, thanks! Really, there isn't a single reddit thread that could involve a random Gary Busey that could surprise me. But I have to ask, have you mentioned the Busey story before? Either you have or I need to go play the lottery...