So my friend Ted Faber has a pilot's license and a plane. When he found out I was moving to Switzerland, he kindly offered to take me flying. Like any sane person would, I jumped at the chance.
We picked a Saturday a few weeks out - the 16th of February, and hoped the weather would be good. We were lucky; it was a gorgeous day with good visibility (it's LA, so there's smog, but visibility was about 10 miles, which I was tickled pink over).
I managed to snap pictures of some pretty cool things including Long Beach Harbor, Disneyland, The Rose Bowl, and the Getty. Check out the whole trip below.
We took off from SMO (Santa Monica airport), and headed south, crossing over LAX (in what's known as the LAX "corridor" because it's a strip airspace through the middle of the LAX airspace where non-LAX traffic is allowed to cross). We went over Torrance, and followed the coastline to Long Beach.
So the first pictures I took are of the Long Beach Harbor - it's more complicated looking than you think:
From Long Beach we headed east, passed Disneyland. These picture show Disneyland coming up. In the first picture, it's the white bits in the middle of the picture. In the other two pictures, you can make out space mountain.
After crossing over Disneyland, we turned north towards Chino, and then turned west back towards Santa Monica. Here we have several pictures as we traveled west from Chino towards Santa Monica. The views are gorgeous - I'm not sure I did them justice.
Here, still on the same westbound path, we pass the infamous Rose Bowl.
And then more views including the Hollywood Sign.
We kept going west until we passed over the Getty, which was really cool to see from the air - a really amazing complex. That's what these pictures are of. From here, we turned to head north(west) towards Camarillo.
And some more scenery shots on the last leg of the trip to Camarillo.
We landed at CMA (Camarillo airport) and had lunch at the restaurant in the airport. There's some really cool planes at this airport, so we watched and talked about those. There was also some really amazing cars parked at the restaurant. Post food and admiring, we headed back to Santa Monica airport.
At this point we would have landed but SMO was coordinating lots of take-offs and landings, so we head to head out towards Century City and turn around and come back while we waited for landing clearance. This was particular cool for me because we took a swing around the twin towers I used to work at in Century City. Given we were at low altitude and low speed just putting around waiting for landing clearance, we were much closer to the buildings than you would be in ordinary flight. You can see how close we were here. This, to me, was really cool!
Here's another picture as we descended toward the runway.
And here's the plane I was in. It's a 1970s Cherokee, and it was awesome!
First of all, the trip was stellar. I can't say enough good things about it. Flying above everything and getting to look down and see it so much clearer than the tiny portal of a commercial jet was awesome. Being the technical person I am, I asked lots of questions about flying, planes, the rules, the instruments, etc., and as much as I wanted to learn to fly before, I want to a million times more now!
It was totally worth getting up way before any mortal should be awake on a weekend. In fact, I'd do it again, even if I had to get up earlier.
If you know someone with a plane and a license, do yourself a favor and ask them to take you up - you won't regret it, it's a really unique and amazing experience.
Finally, if you're interested in this stuff, be sure to watch the Aviation section of Ted's blog.