Inside the Whiteman Airport Tower

Whiteman Airport, Pacoima, Ca. A quick tower tour, with a banner tow pickups. This tower is sandwiched between Burbank the and towers Van Nuys airspace and the mountains to the north. These guys can get extremely busy in here, more and more piston aircraft in the San Fernando Valley fly out of here every year as VNY turns into a jet port. All controllers at WHP are retired FAA controllers, so they have alot of experience. I Didn't have my good camera with me, dang. Thanks to Brian and Peter for the stills.

Burger Run to Apple Valley

KAPV, Apple Valley Airport, Ca

 We took the Skylane to Apple Valley.  This was one of those rare days when it was actually 10 degrees cooler in the high desert than the San Fernando Valley. They now have a "SuperAWOS" on the unicom channel, so you can click 3 times to get the weather.  (didn't find out about this till we landed)  I was a little worried about the hills on both East and West sides of the airport (3,900' MSL) , as I haven't been here before, but it turns out they were no problem, and no confining at all (during the daytime of course).  Runway 18 was in use, and I joined the downwind from the south as I wanted to avoid the hills.   We ate at Skidmarks Cafe, yes.. Skidmarks!  The burger was very good, it's a small diner, and they close at 2pm, on Mondays they are not open at all.   We headed out for quick landing at the neighboring Victorville airport on the way home.

Flight Planning at SkyVector.com

Flying to Victorville

Firefighting Jumbos

Omega DC-10 Tanker

The Boneyard at Victorville

Drones at Grey Butte

KVCV Victorville Airport, Ca

   This is a neat airport.  It's the former George Air Force Base. and in1992, was changed to Southern California Logistics Airport.   There is a huge airliner boneyard here, and it's also home the the famous Tanker 910, firefighting airliner seen on the news dropping retardant on forest fires.   The tower (who sounded very bored and lonely) had me join the downwind for runway 21.   You are flying right towards a hill on the left downwind for this runway.   The runway is so long, we just did a 180 on the taxiway exit after landing and departed again using the rest of the runway.   Brian got some great shots of the boneyard on the right downwind of runway 21.
  Going home from here there were active Predator (Reaper) drones operating at the (private) Grey Butte and El Mirage airports just west of here.  You can see them on the runway if you look close at the pics.  The runway says in giant yellow letters "No trespassing, Unsafe for landing".