by Glenn Daly

What do you do on Thanksgiving mornings? Do you roll over in bed, smacking your lips with fat-laden dreams of avian comestibles - of cranberry sauce and poached pearl onions, with corned bread stuffing and giblet gravy dribbling down your chins?

Me? At 05:30, Thursday, November 28, 1996, I'd just turned onto the dreaded San Diego Freeway at the El Toro 'Y', en route to Long Beach Airport. A bright full moon and a brilliant morning star - Saturn - blinded me as I hunted for hints of dawn in the eastern sky - no luck. Traffic? For the first time in my fourteen years in the land of La, it was not a factor. In the Thanksgiving pre-dawn, LA was finally at rest - something to remember, sometime, when you're out here communing w/Mickey Mouse and wanting a misery-free freeway frolic.

"Why?" you ask, would a nominally sane San Diegan be on the 405 in the early morn of Gobbler Day? Simple: I was going to fly with the only single pilot, IFR, Cessna 152, air charter in the country. Was I nuts? For other reasons, maybe - for this, nah. Hank Surface, senior pilot and flight instructor with Long Beach Air Charter, had asked me to accompany him on his daily appointed rounds - LGB to MYF to VNY and back - transporting bio-medical specimens for a Southland laboratory which believes that aviation is a practical, worthwhile transportation solution, both time and cost effective.

"But, why Thanksgiving morning?" you ask. There were samples to be analyzed, lives, perhaps, might be saved if specimens could be tested and the results promptly disseminated. Aviation and commerce had combined to do good, and I wanted to write about it - which made my 03:30 wake-up a tad less offensive.

"Well, okay, but why 152's?" you say. They're economical to operate, weight and bulk are not factors, time between sampling centers and lab are critical and the sampling centers are scattered randomly beneath SoCal Skies: LA, San Diego, Lake Poway, Palm Springs, Palomar, others. As Hank says, "We have a contract to do this with the laboratories and we do it as a Part 135 operation, so, all of our pilots are specially trained for 135 requirements." And every weekday morning, rain or shine, windy or calm, Hank Surface and his colleagues climb into their 152's and deliver.

The sun cracked the jagged horizon as we departed Runway 30 at Long Beach, and turned southeastward on our first leg to OCN VOR. Santa Ana winds had ripped through the LA basin a day earlier - at Ontario, a cargo jet's pilot found himself sideways in a 98 mph crosswind, requiring all his skill and some luck to right the aircraft and divert. This brilliant morning the winds had become but an unpleasant memory; what lingered was a cerulean sky scrubbed spotless of the usual scum: the LA basin had unfolded below and behind me, the mountains encircling the city etched as sharply and clearly as they must have been before the first combustion engine spewed exhaust. Catalina and San Clemente Island sparkled in the blue Pacific and clung to our starboard wing, touchable - 26 miles seemed like 6 - as lofty two digit visibilities were reported.

As we neared our destination, La Jolla, Mission Bay and Pt. Loma beckoned, then Hank banked eastward over Mt Soledad, slid onto final and greased 28L at Montgomery Field, just past 7 a.m. We waited for the lab tech to deliver specimens, kept in a cooler for the ride, waited for fuel (things at Crown Air had assumed a holiday pace), and we didn't launch again until nearly 08:30.

In under two hours with the winds gone, smog had quickly begun to foul LA's sky, the mountains still visible, but lacking the hard-edged clarity of dawn. Hank had requested Flight Following to stalk our trip - a fine habit to develop in the congestion that is the LA airspace. As we shot through the VFR corridor oer'top LAX, I snapped pix of a Delta 757 on short final, directly below. The Sepulveda Pass and the new Art Center didn't seem nearly as impressive from a couple thousand feet - but the conspicous consumption compounds of the movie-rich denizens of Bel Air and Beverly Hills offered an opportunity for some interesting aerial voyeurism. Hank greased another landing on 34L at Van Nuys, and we commenced to wait. The courier was late, lost, dizzy?, and breakfast at the Skytel lingered longer than it should have.

Hank, whose wife Carol is an award winning watercolor artist, harbors no airline aspirations. He's flies these trips every weekday morning and he's happy with his teaching gig. He's chief flight instructor for Long Beach Flying Club and, as he tells it, his first student was nearly his last.

"He was a European student with an American license and he wanted to check out in an airplane - he had four/five hundred hours. So we went out to do the normal check out and I asked him about stalls and he said, 'Oh, yes ... he'd done stalls.' So I said, 'Okay, we'll do a take off and departure stall - slow the airplane down to rotation speed, apply full power and pull the yoke back until it stalls.' So, he pulled straight back to go into the stall, but he was going a little too fast and applied full power. We stalled just after we went over the top of a half a loop ...," he said with a chuckle, "... before I could get the airplane back under control." Since airshow aerobatics are frowned upon in most 172's, it was, as Hank says, a, "Pretty strange, harrowing experience ... I almost gave up teaching, then."

Mike Ford, another of LBAC's pilots who had flown one of the 152's to Palm Springs, arrived, followed, finally, by the courier who had suddenly discovered that Van Nuys Airport did, in fact, exist. Mike, who lives in Yorba Linda, said, "We have 3 Cessna 152's on the line and their specific purpose is to haul around the laboratory specimens and freight, and I don't think there's anybody else in the US that does that."

He's been flying the trips for, "Going on six months. And it's a lot of fun. It's some of the most challenging flying I've done. We deal with Santa Ana's, we fly in the rain, we fly IFR, all kinds of stuff. We draw the line when conditions are a little too rough, but ... it's great.

"One of the guys has already gotten a job with Mesa Airlines," said Mike. "When he interviewed, they said, 'What kind of equipment are you flying?' And he said, 'One fifty two's.' They didn't laugh at him - they were actually impressed: flying in the LA air space, in all weather conditions, single pilot IFR, in a 152. Guys are going from this to the airlines." An aspiration that, no doubt, a lot of guys would like.

Hank and I departed 16R at VNY and tracked southbound toward LAX, an A340 passing overhead on its initial approach. The air had degenerated into typical LA crud - brownish at the edges, soot gray everywhere else - while the mountains had become surrealistic, shimmering phantasms floating above a distant and blurred horizon. Flight Watch crackled with traffic alerts as airborne Angelenos headed over the river and over the woods to grandmother's house. We touched down, taxied to LBAC's terminal and unloaded after 2.5 hours on the Hobbes. (We had flown a Cherokee as a concession to me - and, perhaps, weight and CG requirements. Normally, said Hank, the trip takes 3 hours when he's flying one of the 152's.)

Hank's only charter excitement came last March, as he recalls it, on Victor 23, somewhere above the high terrain near Camp Pendleton. (See, "The Quality of Mercy," for an account of another not-so-happy occurrence at Camp Pendleton.) Hank says, "I was north of Oceanside, and experienced a rough running engine and then was unable to maintain altitude. I asked for lower, and the engine coughed and sputtered a little bit, and kind of surged. I went to carb heat, of course, and it didn't seem to help much and pretty soon I was unable to maintain altitude and just had a steady rate of decent of about three hundred feet a minute. I declared an emergency, got vectors up to where I had to make a decision to go into El Toro or John Wayne. About that time I broke out of the overcast at two thousand feet and told them I would turn towards John Wayne - and then the engine started running again. So, I made the landing at John Wayne, had the mechanic come down and pick up the airplane, and I had them bring me a different airplane - I transferred the cargo and continued to fly."

Asked when his pucker factor had approached red line, Hank said, "After I got on the ground I was nervous for about twenty minutes, but as soon as I took back off it all went away. You only can be scared for so long, and then you gotta take off again." He was highly complimentary to FAA and all those involved in the emergency. "Everybody was great," he said. "Never had to file a report - I guess if nothing happens they don't bother you. The emergency crews on the ground at John Wayne were very helpful - fire engines lining the runway, chasing me down the runway," he said with a laugh. "Everybody said, 'Nice landing.' And it was all over that quick - they asked if there was anything they could do for me. I said, 'I need a cup of coffee and a telephone.' And, they went on."

When the mechanics looked over the airplane, said Hank, "They found all the lower plugs in each cyllinder were totally fouled ... but I still should have had the power - we're unable to this day to determine what caused it. But they replaced the spark plugs and got everything running and we haven't had that problem since." He chuckled again, smiled, then said, "First and only declared emergency ... hope I never have another one."

And odds are that he won't. And, next time someone cracks wise about Cessna 152's, mention Hank Surface and Mike Ford and the others who fly all-weather, single-pilot, Part 135, IFR for Long Beach Air Charter. Then get out of his way as he scrambles for a phone.

Long Beach Air Charter
4310 Donald Douglas Drive
Suite A
Long Beach, CA 90808
(310)425-3774

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