On Thursday 1^st August 2024, after two days flying in the mountains out of Denver and two days flying out of Milwaukee, I had my fifth day of flight training in the US. Brett Silvester and I flew an SR20 along the coast of California accompanied by an instructor. We’d scheduled a one-day stopover in LA on our way back to Brisbane and, given how easy it’d been to arrange a flight with Pilotsmith at Milwaukee the previous week, we decided to attempt something similar in LA. At first, I’d thought of arranging a flight in a High Wing Sling, as I’d been impressed with the one I’d seen in Oshkosh, and they have a training school in LA. However, there wouldn’t be a high wing available that week, and Brett was keen to fly a Cirrus again, so I hunted around on the internet for a Cirrus flight school instead. I found Calair, who are based at Hawthorne airport, only about 10 minutes by taxi from LAX and when I emailed them they said there’d be no problem arranging a flight with an instructor that day. So we were set.

Brett and I stayed overnight in a hotel in Hawthorne and turned up at 9am for our flight with Dana, a young, keen as mustard instructor, who was only too keen to let us take her for a flight up the coast. As with the other instructors in the US, we’d let Dana do the radios and we’d focus on flying the plane. We discussed our options for a flight plan and agreed to fly up the coast past Santa Monica, Malibu and Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. 

It was a fine day with blue skies as we taxied out to the runway, which is in the middle of suburbia, jammed between a road and a line of office buildings and warehouses.

I flew the outbound leg, Dana instructing me to climb out of Hawthorne Airport and turn left, heading south west until we reached 4500ft. Once at that altitude we were above the controlled airspace over LAX so could turn and head north, passing right over the top of it.

Unfortunately, the coast and most of LAX were covered in sea fog so we didn’t get much of a view of the activity on the ground there.

The fog continued up the coast further on, blanketing Santa Monica and Malibu so they were almost invisible but we had great views of the Malibu hills. We also glimpsed some islands off in the distance poking out of the clouds.

Further out the fog burned off so we had great views of Ventura and Santa Barbara.

It took us about one hour until we started our descent into San Luis Obispa.

We pulled up on the apron and wandered past a few slightly larger planes on our way to the impressive FBO.

After checking out the FBO facilities I climbed into the back seat and Brett climbed into the front for the return flight. The fog had cleared by that time so we had good views, for example of Santa Maria below.

Dana asked whether we’d like to fly past downtown LA so we did so, at 1500ft, before passing under the jets approaching into LAX and landing back at Hawthorne. 

Hamburgers at the airport bar with a view of landing aircraft were followed by a short walk down the street to SpaceX, who apparently launch their rockets not far from San Luis Obispo, before we caught an Uber to the BIG airport. Our US adventure was over.