Thomas B. Haines flies a lot more than he fishes. It's particularly rare that he actually catches anything.
Good morning from seat 25F, America West Flight 80 to Phoenix. Our destination today is San José del Cabo at the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico, with a brief stop in Phoenix. The durado, mahimahi, dolphinfish, or whatever you like to call them are calling me to the Sea of Cortez.
It's already 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix, where the local time is 4:30 a.m. Baltimore is behind us. Clouds obscure the mountains of West Virginia below us. I could perhaps give you a bit more detailed description of our current position if it weren't for the greasy forehead print on the window beside me.
Such atrocities are not strictly the purview of airliners. Recently I took a friend up for a flight in my airplane. "What's the name of that lake over there?" he asked, pointing at the blue outline on the Garmin GNS 530's display.
"Are you touching that screen?" I asked.
"This screen?" he queried, tapping the glass with his fingertip. "Yes, I am. Is that a problem?" he continued, knowing full well that it was.
"You've earned the right to clean it now," I remarked, tossing him a handkerchief.
Second offenders, I remind him, will be asked to step outside.
Meanwhile, back in seat 25F, the passenger next to me has fired up his Compaq iPaq personal digital assistant and I wonder what it might be doing to the airliner's nav and communications equipment. Oh sure, the captain has cleared us to use our electronic devices (thus these words being written), but I'm particularly suspicious of handheld computers after a recent experience in my airplane.
We were bound for Florida on what was fortunately a clear day. My copilot was getting to know the Garmin, while in the very backseat of the Beechcraft A36 Bonanza a passenger was busy working away, enjoying the utility of a general aviation airplane. Soon yellow blotches began showing up on the bottom left corner of the Garmin's display. The lightning strike counter in the upper right corner began ratcheting up like some telethon tote board. The Stormscope WX-500 was throwing strikes faster than a major league pitcher at a Little League game. Either a super cell just appeared out of thin air behind us or something was interfering with our electronics. I hit the Clear button, but strikes almost instantly appeared again in the same spot. We looked back at the passenger who was innocently tapping away on a handheld organizer.
"Hey, Harvey, how about shutting that off for a minute?" I asked. He did, and I hit the Clear button again. The strikes didn't return. When he turned it back on again, the death and destruction zone in our back left quadrant showed up again. The Stormscope's antenna is on the belly just aft of where he was sitting and the cable from the antenna to the display probably runs just under his seat. Now I know where to look if interference shows up again.
Here on the Airbus A320, I catch silent glimpses of the movie Chicago playing on LCDs that cleverly flip down from the overheads like something out of a Star Trek episode. On a recent flight in a brand-new A320, we were treated to live DirecTV television on LCDs planted in the seat backs ahead of each passenger. Most interesting for pilots was a moving map showing the airplane's speed, altitude, and position over a map of the United States.
The cabin crew teased the passengers with a few minutes of free television until we leveled off in cruise. Then the screens went blank. To watch the 20-some channels for the rest of the flight, one had to swipe a credit card in the slot next to the screen. Five dollars for the flight, not a bad deal on a long journey. But it somehow seemed a violation of the tumultuous sanctity of an airline flight — a place where normally you can escape into your own little world for a few hours, even with a stranger sharing the same armrest; a place where at 8 a.m. people will pay $5 for a can of beer. Now, Katie Couric talks to you from just 18 inches away.
When I got off the flight, I looked back at the Airbus from the big windows in the terminal. A large hump on top of the fuselage concealed the sophisticated antenna that allows the reception of satellite television while tooling along at 450 knots or so.
I recently bummed a ride on a Gulfstream IV, my first flight on one of the big business jets. It too was equipped with a live television system. While the airliner version offered a host of channels to satisfy any taste, the business jet featured such channels as the Bloomberg network, CNN, and other news and financial channels. Obviously, the CEOs didn't spend a lot of time watching the soaps. The Gulfstream was also equipped with a Honeywell wireless network in the cabin, allowing notebook computers at any seat to connect with a server buried somewhere in the airplane. The server tied into the satellite link to send and receive e-mail and connect to the Internet.
At first you might think that such amenities are a bit ostentatious. But if you're important enough to justify the use of a $40 million airplane, you probably need to earn your keep at all times. If the airplane belongs to some Fortune 500 company that I own stock in, I want that highly paid CEO working his tail off wherever he is. Forget the sanctity and get that deal negotiated.
The private airplane certainly allows him to be a lot more productive than a CEO who has to stand in line at the airline terminal. The ability to continue communicating while in flight is just another tool and one that seems to work quite well.
As the Airbus to Phoenix passes over the Midwest, I begin to think about other times that I have made this deep-sea fishing trip to Baja. The previous two trips were made in GA airplanes, flying a Mooney from Van Nuys, California, to Hotel Punta Pescadero, a small inn with its own runway located near the southern tip of Baja. For those on the West Coast of the United States, it's a practical trip by any high-performance GA airplane. For those of us on the East Coast, a GA trip to southern Baja would be a fun way to spend a week, but not exactly a practical alternative to a one-stop airline flight to San José del Cabo and then a 90-minute drive over rock-strewn roads to the hotel.
Flying GA in Mexico is a whole different experience than in the United States. At least in Baja at places such as Loreto, for example, the term self-fueling takes on a whole new meaning. You fill the tanks yourself not to save money, but because if you don't it won't get done. When it's time to pay for the fuel, you step up to the window and report how many liters you pumped (you can convert liters to gallons to know how much you just took on, can't you?). The friendly fellow inside punches many, many keys on a calculator converting liters to gallons and pesos to dollars and finally hands you a receipt that you can't read. He then asks for the cash (you didn't think you were going to get the AOPA FBO rebate with your credit card here, did you?). You hand over mounds of it because avgas here is even more expensive than in the states; jet fuel is cheap, though. Next you make myriad visits to various offices to get numerous carbon-paper forms typed, stamped, and copied. A couple of greenbacks placed on each desk keep the process moving along at a tolerable pace. Soon you've cleared customs and immigration, filed your flight plan, and are ready for the next leg of your journey down the peninsula.
Red rock cliffs guard the coast of the Sea of Cortez, which separates Baja from the Mexican mainland. It's a spectacular view for hundreds of miles and well worth the trip, even if it means spending eight hours in seat 25F to get there.
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