Marc's Public Blog

Flight Out Group trip to Yellowstone, Glacier Park and Portland

One of the CFIs at our flight club, Dan Dyer, organizes occasional flights and small trips and this time it was at trip to Yellowstone and Glacier Park (with a stop around Portland on the way back to cut the trip up a little bit). It's a nice little treck, about 2000 miles/3300 km total, see the map at runwayfinder.

Here's the complete track of our trip, including the park visits and scenic flights:

Flight to West Yellowstone

Initially I had planned to do the flight by myself with Jennifer, but when prompted taking an experienced CFI along would be a good oportunity to fly lower in Canyons and learn a few things that I just wouldn't have done by myself where I just keep a bigger safety envelope due to limited experience closer to the peaks. This made it a good learning trip in addition to it being a great sightseeing trip.

We left a little bit later than the rest of the group so that I could have a chance to get enough sleep not to be useless as a pilot, although that still meant a before 06:00 wakeup, but we made up for the time with a non stop flight thanks to the 182's good payload capacity and full fuel takeoff with our limited weighs.

Trip Planning before departure

Jason Miller, keeping me out of trouble and teaching me new things

Runways there are simple, you just spray paint white corners on the ground :)

ILS approach to yellowstone with Voyager

KWYS, West Yellowstone

The flight to Yellowstone was nice and uneventful, even if it was a bit long. However, the weather wasn't ideal when we arrived, so we couldn't go overfly Yellowstone due to clouds and fairly high windws.

Yellowstone Park

As soon as we landed in Yellowstone, we got our rental car and went to the park to get a chance to see as much of it as possible before the day would be over. Jennifer had done a lot of research on the park and knew what to see in the time we had.

Old Faithful

Yellowstone Day 2: Mountain Flying and tour of the Park

Most of us went mountain flying the next morning. While had already gotten 2 mountain checkouts, I figured getting some more practise couldn't hurt. We flew in some canyons, did some practise short radius turns, got pushed around by the wind and turbulence a fair amount before we headed for a Yellowstone overflight.

Jason and Scott in their trusty 172SP

Ok, that wasn't part of our group :)

Grand Prismatic Spring

The old faithful settlement

Mammoth Hot Springs

Practise low radius Canyon turns

After a nice overflight of yellowstone, we went back to the ground and drove to the park to tour it the other way. Unfortunately, they had a stupid roadblock that only opened for 5mn every hour. We got there a couple minutes late and had to wait 30mn. Then, I made the critical mistake of letting the cars go so that we wouldn't get stuck in a long line of cars, but this turned out to be a mistake as they closed the road as soon as the continuous flow of cars stopped, just in front of us, and we got stuck another 30mn.
Oh well, we eventually got through and were able to do the loop the other way while stopping at all the relevant locations. We even ended up having just enough time to finish the loop the other way and get back to our hotel.

The 'Yellowstone Grand Canyon'

A lot of bisons in the park

but they sometimes drive on the wrong side of the road :)

bridge to south entrance

Day 3: Glacier National Park

The next morning, we tried to take off early to beat some brewing bad weather, lowering ceilings and incoming thunderstorms, and we did manage to get off on time towards better weather in Glacier National Park, which we reached by 11:00, in time for doing a nice visit of the park.

a little brewing bad weather

but we thankfully got out of it before it got bad

After a nice picnic by Lake McDonald, we went up to Logan Pass. By sheer luck, the Going to the Sun road had just opened a day earlier, and gave us a chance to reach the peak, along with some other people who had brought their skis and snowboards to ride the little bit of snow left at the top :)

Glacier Park's Lake McDonald

the long road up that had just opened

weeping wall

those two were cute

People got excited to ski/board a few feet of glacier :)

It wasn't that much, really :)

Virginia Falls by Mary's Lake

We had enough time to reach the other side of the mountain range, and do some hiking by Mary's lake to Mary's and Virginia Falls, and then did the long drive back to our hotel.

Day 4: Glacier Park Overfly and Spruce Goose at the Air and Space Museum in Mc Minnville by Portland

The next morning we did an overfly of Glacier Park and headed for south of Portland to see Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose at the Air and Space Museum.
Flying Glacier Park at peak's height was impressive, even in nice weather and low winds.

KGPI / Glacier Park

KGPI

Nice Little Runway

Logan Pass

that's lower than I would fly :)

We then went south to fly Clearwater Canyon for a while, and took a more direct route to Portland.

Clearwater River Canyon

Those are not the missile silos you are looking for :)

Crossing traffic

The Minnville Air and Space Museum was actually better than what we were hoping for. Quite a collection of planes, and of course the one and only monster wooden plane.

the Spruce Goose

Damn, those aren't flaps, those are barn doors :)

With this you can become #1 on final if you were #5 :)

The Spruce Goose's rudder is bigger than most planes' wings

SR-71

We then still had enough time to fly back to Palo Alto, as we didn't have much to do in Portland that we could think of, and were happy with the prospect of a nice night at home. Mt Sashta was on the way, so we flew right by it on the way down.

Mt Sashta

its ski slopes are in the wrong place though :(

home, sweet home :)

While it was a bit short and packed compared to what there was to see and do, it was a great trip. Too bad we didn't have more time to hang out and socialize as a result.
Thanks to the people who helped organize it.

You can see pictures about:

Next, I used a long range Spektrum DX7 transmitter with dual channel and dual receiver AR7000 (giving 4 antennas and chances to receive the signal). This isn't park flying anymore, at those distances you want guaranteed control of the plane, it would suck that you can't make it turn back and come back to you. While my plane is reasonably slow speed and all foam and very unlikely to cause any personal harm or property damage due to the low kinetic energy, but you just don't want to take the chance.

Camera angle: obviously, it's important :) In my case I tried a few placements (see previous blog post)

Sometimes video looks like it was shot by a drunk person, but that's really because the video wasn't shot per se, I tried to fly the plane over the target the best I could from a fair distance.
The problems were twofold: first from a distance, it's hard to tell whether you're anywhere above your target, not not. Then, from a greater distance with a smallish plane, it quickly gets hard to know which way your plane is pointing. I even lost it in the sky a couple of times at Rancho when I was pushing distances.
First, I always made sure to have a full battery to start with, and a flight timed to only be half my battery capacity due to how I have to push the motor a lot more to sustain the extra weight, and also keep plenty of altitude so that I could make errors or have a chance to glide somewhere somewhat useful should I lose power (I hadn't quite planned for losing the prop like in the first Google/Shoreline video, but that one worked out quite well :)

Then, when I start to lose the plane and can't even tell which way it's pointing, I do gentle turns to raise a wing, making the plane more visible and the turn then shows me which wing is raised and which way the nose is pointing :)
(needless to say that this is somewhat pushing it a little bit, this may not work for you and you may just lose your plane into the horizon ;)

Now, given all this, it'll make more sense when I explain that given those conditions, and non live video (recorded onto SD and downloaded after landing), it is very hard to film something on purpose, so don't be too critical if you think videos were shot badly: that's because they mostly weren't shot :)

Now that this all out of the way, here are the videos and a few frames I hand picked:
First, flights around the Rancho San Antonio park:

Then, flights around Google and the Shoreline Amphitheatre:

This just pissed me off, they actually said it was mandated by california, they had no say or leeway in it, and that the state I'm paying tax to, to make sure roads are in driveable condition then leaves huge potholes in some of them, causing damage to my rims due to low profile tires and lightweight aluminum rims, and then they mandate that such claims must be the driver's fault.
The other thing is that a point is a point, whether you rolled a $200,000 car, hit 3 more, one of them drove off a cliff and another one caught fire, whether you slightly damaged someone's bumper in a parking lot and the damage is $800, or whether you "collided with a pothole on the road".

Grr...

For now I told them to stuff it and I'll pay for the damage myself, but that's just wrong.

Anyway, I came back a few days later with another phone (an already damaged one just in case), and got a reasonable GPS track and so so video (video from the top of the plane pointing down isn't actually so great).

very professional attachment

looks pretty streamlined, except for adding a *lot* of weight :)

seemed lke the natural place to put the GoPro camera, but it picked up the prop

this was actually a better place thanks to the extra clearance I got from the big wheels

Some people bring nice planes

A gyro plane

Ok, some have better collections than me :)

this one is quite nice

I felt a bit weird that the wing of a high G 3D plane come in 2 pieces

but a good gluing surface and carbon spar for strength helped

I thought the parkmaster was small, it's actually bigger than my minimag

maiden flight

Unfortunately, on my first video'ed flight, in high wind, I found out my DX7 just wasn't programmed properly for the plane: in dual rate mode, a stick throw gave so much deflection and authority that the plane turned all the way left, and then right, and then crashed :)

maiden flight video

The other remarkable portion of that flight was that I went in a Mooney Acclaim (fastest piston plane on the market).

The for hire Moffett Blimp advertising the UP movie

Most of the time I spent there was used to empty moving boxes filled with pens, pencils, permanent markers, dry markers, post-its, paper clips, push pins, staples, and more. It was "fun" to sort them down to the last paper clip :)

Then, came mouse untangling and cleaning, and our time was over.

Now, because I had close to zero trust in comcast, I looked at their customer agreement, and got it amended where it was unclear and changed a few things I didn't like. In the end, this is what I got in the contract I signed:

Now, my SLA actually says I'm getting 22Mbit / 5Mbit (without powerboost), but I seem to be getting a bit more right now (of real sustained speed after protocol overheads).

The downsides:

Now, you have to be careful with speed tests and general speeds from comcast due to speedboost that temporarily gives you fake speeds.

Here are real speeds that I measured with sustained TCP speeds over an ssh connection:

One thing about LS, is that it's a pretty track

the favourite corkscrew

After goofing around a few times too many on the track and hitting kind of a plateau, I figured it was about time for me to get some proper track training, so I signed up for the skip barber formula 2000 3 day class (there was the option of doing to do the same with miatas, likely for those interested in spec miata racing, but I was more interested in trying formula cars).

the formula ford 2000 car

you can see my camera on the 47 number

The tradeoff with that is that it takes a little while to get the hang of the formula cars. The sequential shifting is actually pretty cool, although the heel and toe for downshifting was harder for me with my wide feet (my foot would often push on the gas while braking, which caused me a few issues).

with wide feet, it can be hard not to push brake and gas at the same time

The good news is that outside of going straight off track in 11 due to not braking enough (click for vid) as I mis-pushed the gas with the brakes, filling the car with pebbles in the process :), I actually stayed on track the entire time: I never spun out or otherwise went off track due to trying to get in too hot (the only spinout was a self induced one on the AutoX pad as we were encouraged to push the cars and go a bit past their limits to see where said limits were).

one of the mechanics vacuuming the pebbles I put in the car :)

Many other folks did get greedy and spun out though :)

That's a little bit too sideways :)

another customer :)

The Skip Barber curriculum was good. They went through the car's basics, from braking to heel and toe (which is really left side of the foot/right side of the foot) shifting, threshold braking, lane toss exercises (for passing), passing theory (although that one would take a lot of practise to exercise), and in the last 2 sessions we got to put it all together: race start, passing, threshold braking for laptimes, and of course heel and toe for each downshifting turn.

side by side race start practise

Threshold braking exercise

The last session was a great way to finish the day with a little bit of (good) excitement for me: I passed 4 cars, including one that spun out right in front of me and getting very close to 2 bumpers. You can see the video of the last lap of the last session

Now, in a real race situation where drivers defend their spot, I probably wouldn't have been able to pass more than 1 or 2 cars, but eh, I'll still celebrate the minor achievement with my arguably still meager lap times of 1:50 (vs 1:38 when done by a professional). Speeds were 100mph tops, much less than what I do at thunderhill, but 100mph is actually plenty fast when you're on a rollcage with wheels with your butt inches from the ground :)

Either way, it was a crapload of fun :) I wasn't the best one in the group, but probably ranked 3rd or 4th, which provided a nice mix of little victories and humility :)

You can see some of the videos I took below (click the more info tab for each video to get offsets to juicy bits where relevant)

The only downside, was that I felt I had just learned enough in 3 days to apply my skills and hone them on a 4th day, but there was no such 4th day. They are however happy to sell you another advanced class for 2 more days :)

During the 3 days, I got to see Jennifer on day #2 when we came for a car control class, and also found out that the track staff had had the same idea than me: that the track was a fine place to fly RC planes :)

I wasn't the only person who thought that a track was a perfect place to fly RC planes :)