There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times not too long ago that bemoaned the advent of GPS technology for cars, because it was going to spoil all the fun of wandering around and getting lost on road trips. The man should have talked to me. I could have assured him with great confidence that it is possible to still get quite turned around or lost with not only a working GPS, but even with a radio, map, and an eye-in-the-sky perspective at your disposal. It just takes a little more talent, that's all.
Take, for example, the flight I took with my buddy Jeff the other day. It was almost Los Angeles-grade hazy and, even though we waited until mid-afternoon, fog was still blocking the entire central valley and North Bay. So we just headed southeast from Palo Alto to a small, uncontrolled field south of San Jose, where I practiced landings until the sun began to sink into the hazy layers of dusk.
South County airport lies a grand and mighty distance of 35 nautical miles from Palo Alto. And Jeff learned to fly here, for goodness' sake. So you'd think we could find our way home without incident, especially with a Garmin GPS sitting brightly on the glareshield.
Right. So did we.
But as we skirted the San Jose airspace to the southwest, we found ourselves looking north into a darkening, gray murkiness that afforded a decent view of the western sky, horizon, and mountain peaks sticking up out of the haze, but completely shrouded the landmarks below with a moist curtain of steel tones. This, of course, is where a GPS supposedly comes in handy. So I glanced at the Garmin, saw the airport marking, and steered us toward it. The rest would become clear by the time we needed it to. At eight miles out, I contacted the tower and was cleared, number one, for landing.
Jeff, however, was beginning to frown. "I think you need to correct to the right," he said.
"No," I answered. I'm heading straight for the airport. Look." I gestured to the GPS. Jeff looked at the airport symbol I was indicating.
"Lane, that's San Carlos, not Palo Alto," he said.
Whoops. San Carlos lies just a few miles north of Palo Alto, situated almost identically along the San Francisco Bay. And I would bet good money that I'm far from the first pilot to ever mistake the two.
"Just turn and head toward the water," Jeff said, gesturing at a vague line I could just make out in the murk. With the normal landmarks obscured and having gotten off course, everything looked odd. I was still looking out the window trying to sort it out when the tower called and asked if we had the airport in sight.
"I do," Jeff answered confidently, so I told the tower we did.
Half a minute later, the tower controller called back. "Are you sure you have the runway?" he asked. Note to self: When a controller asks you for a second time if you really see the runway, chances are pretty good that you're not where you think you are.
Just as I pressed the mic to answer, I looked down and saw the bright white tent-tops of the Shoreline Amphitheater, just in front of my right wing. But if that was the amphitheater, that meant that Palo Alto's runway must be …
I looked left, and saw the runway right where it should be, but completely not where we thought it was, at our 10 o'clock position, about a mile away. "Uh … that's affirmative," I answered sheepishly. Of course, the runway looked a tad smaller than usual, because in my distracting efforts to sort out landmarks and my GPS error, we'd ended up a tad higher than we should have been. By, like, a thousand feet.
Now what? We were, by a stroke of luck, the only plane in the pattern. So I chopped the power, pulled the nose up to slow into flap speed, looked right, and then, the coast clear, banked that way to give myself a little more maneuvering room.
"Niner-four-uniform, where are you going?" came the tower controller's exasperated voice through the headsets. I can only imagine what he was thinking at that point. Fortunately, I will probably never have to know.
