Flying in Oregon

It's been a little while since my last post and that is consistent with the amount of adventures I had over that period. After the rain started in October, it's been much more difficult to motivate myself to get outside.

Contrary to how it should be, I've use the poor weather as an opportunity to get back into flying. I found a small airport just outside of Portland and contacted a flight instructor there. I needed to get checked out in a rental plane so that I could fly on my own out here. It's taken three flights over the course of three months to accomplish that, mostly because of weather. We've planned to fly at least half-a-dozen times and been rejected by the weather. At least twice, my instructor and I showed up at the airport expecting to fly, only to find that the depression that the airport sits in is socked in by fog or a low cloud layer.

Just yesterday, we had the first clear weekend day that I've been in town for in the past couple of months. We took advantage of the opportunity and had a nice leisurely flight in the area so that Mike could show me the landmarks (on our previous flights, we'd been dodging low clouds at only about 1,500' AGL, so I couldn't get a sense of the area). The sky was incredibly clear and from our vantage point at 4,500', we could see out to the coast to the west and all of the nearby volcanoes to the east, some a couple hundred miles away.

One of the reasons it took three flights to get checked out was because of the unusual traffic pattern at our local airport. It's a small airport, with a short, 2,400 ft sloped runway. Normal procedure at Twin Oaks Airpark is to take off downhill on runway 20 and land uphill on runway 02 (different ends of the same runway, for those not familiar with runway nomenclature). As you can imagine, this can create some very interesting situations. It apparently doesn't happen too often, but on my first flight there, as I was on short final for 02, my instructor noticed a plane beginning its takeoff roll on 20, heading straight for us. We immediately pushed the power in and went around, narrowly escaping what would have been a certain collision.

The departing  plane had not been making radio calls, and even after our go around, was completely oblivious to our presence. Needless to say, I'm much more vigilant of other traffic now.