A trip to remember

This past holiday weekend, Dani Rhoda and her husband flew in their 182 from KRNO - KCCR. Here’s her account of the trip:

The first thing that made the trip exciting was of course the weather. Reno was nice, but KCCR (Concord, California) was marginal VFR and breezy. We knew the weather was supposed to improve, and there were airports along the way we could land at to wait if the weather hadn’t improved sufficiently. So, with our alternate airports identified, we made the decision to go.

Looking south to Lake Tahoe, just west of Truckee

On our way down, the weather improved though we ended up slightly altering course to avoid some clouds. The trip down overall was nice with Renoesque winds in Concord (16 gusting 23).

The channel of no clouds we ended up following into KCCR.

I love technology - our flight track from Flight Aware. Notice the jog close to KCCR where we followed the "channel” into the airport.

We landed, picked up our friend O. who used to be an A&P, and headed north towards KCIC, Chico for lunch.

Northern California farmland between Concord and Chico

This is when the trip started getting exciting - our alternator stopped working. In the past, it’s come back after a few minutes (yes we’ve talked to our A&P ). So we waited a few minutes, but it didn’t come back on. We decided to return to KCCR (rather than potentially be stranded KCIC) and notified ATC of our change in plans. We always use flight following. ATC is good, they responded to our notification that we were returning to Concord with, “So…..did you change your mind or is something going on?” We explained and they asked if we wanted to declare an emergency, which we declined. After a few pass off’s, we had the airport in sight when we lost our Garmin 430. I had my stratux up, so we could still had some info, but it was odd not seeing the 430 on. We were able to contact the airport and get clearance to land and notified them that we were on battery power, we’d lost our 430, and that if they stopped hearing back from us, it was probably because we lost coms. Tower also wanted to know if we were declaring an emergency, which we again declined. The plane was working fine, other than the loss of our alternator and our battery draining…. neither of which is necessary to fly the plane. Just after we landed and were handed off from the tower to ground, we lost our coms. But…. dun dun duuuun! We had a handheld radio. I contacted ground via our handheld to get our taxi instructions. Side note - using a handheld radio in an airplane without a headset is loud and difficult. If we were to buy another handheld, it will have a headset jack.

No GPS Navigation anymore…but we had the airport in sight and my stratux.

We parked and the guys (did I mention our friend O used to be an A&P?), popped the cowling off, and found the alternator belt was not where it was supposed to be.

Unfortunately it was 4th of July weekend and nobody was at the shop, but the office gal called the owner and voila, we had a mechanic. As in, the owner came out to take care of us. TWO thumbs up for Sterling Aviation at KCCR! They took excellent care of us and had Pokey (our 182) buttoned up and ready to go Sunday morning.

The folks at Sterling Aviation at KCCR were great! The owner working on our alternator belt.

With our plane grounded, we went to lunch and called some other friends who live 5 minutes from the airport and stayed the night with them. Sunday morning weather was again a factor, but by 2pm we could see plenty of blue skies and headed home. The flight home was 100% uneventful.

While we didn’t have an emergency, the flight was certainly a departure (ba bum bum) from a normal flight with our battery giving us every last bit of energy it had left. It was really comforting knowing that we had a handheld radio and stratux for backup. We have the stratux because for a while I was flying planes that didn’t have receivers. Then we found that our GTX345 has a limited number of bluetooth connections. Why is this a problem? Because when you’re flying with multiple pilots in the plane, every last one of them wants to be connected! Pilots, a group of semi control freaks. Who knew??

Overall, a great trip where we got to fly, visit friends, eat, drink, and be merry.

The best part was being at lunch with co-workers today and telling this story and the two gentlemen at the next table leaned over and said, “Hey, we usually have to have lunch at the airport to hear airplane stories!!”