It was a fabulous weekend with fabulous weather. On Saturday we took full advantage and went on a flying adventure to Fayette County airport just outside La Grange, Texas. (For those wishing to get their bearings, La Grange is about 2/3 of the way from Houston to Austin. It’d be a 2 hour drive, but was less than an hour’s flight in a small plane.) Every so often, the airport hosts a fly-in and BBQ. Lots of people fly there so you can admire a variety of airplanes, and $7 gets you a plate of BBQ and sides that was actually pretty darn tasty!
Takeoff from Polly Ranch
Jose had reserved one of the aero club planes that had been “down for maintenance” all week. (The front passenger seat needed to be fixed.) It was supposed to be fixed by Friday, but of course it wasn’t, so on Friday afternoon we were without a plane. So instead of Jose flying us there, we both rode along with his flight instructor, Jeff, and Jeff’s wife. They have a cool Cessna 205, a six-seat airplane that is both larger and faster than the planes Jose flies. It was a really comfortable ride!
Jeff’s plane
They live in a neighborhood called Polly Ranch. It’s a fly-in community — there are 30-40 hours lining either side of a small runway! I knew it was there, but had never seen it until Saturday. The houses all look normal from the street, but if you peek between them, you notice some very large garages behind each house. Of course it’s not actually a garage — it’s a hangar!
Approaching Polly Ranch — see the houses on either side of the tiny runway?
Jeff takes very good care of his airplanes, and the windows are very clear with a minimum of scratches (unlike most of the aero club airplanes). This made for much better pictures, since I didn’t have to shoot through dinged-up windows!
Pearland Airport
Polly Ranch is very close to the Pearland airport where we usually take off from, so I was able to get this nice shot of Pearland as we passed by on our way to the bbq.
There’s a cluster of VERY tall radio towers just east of Sugar Land. We were probably flying at around 2000 feet when I took this photo, and you can see that the towers are even higher than that. You can tell this since the top of the tower is above the horizon. When you’re flying, the general rule is that anything below the horizon is below you, and anything above is above you! If you see another plane near the horizon, you better keep an eye on it because they’re at the same altitude that you are! (FYI — I just looked it up, and those towers are 2049 feet tall. Or, as Becca put it, “plane-destroying tall.”)
We eventually climbed all the way up to 5500 feet, which might be higher than I’ve ever been in a small plane like this. (When we go flying just in the general Clear Lake area, it doesn’t make sense to waste the gas to climb that high.) It sounds obvious, but being up higher really does make a difference. I could see for miles since there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was hazy, but not nearly as bad as the usual summertime haze.
If you’ve ever taken the I10-to-Highway-71 route to Austin (which is how I usually go), you might recognize this big power plant. It’s just off Highway 71 near La Grange. I had never seen it from the air, but there it is! You can even see the highway in the foreground.
Can you spot the airplane in this picture? (And no, I don’t mean the wing strut of the plane I was in.) In the middle almost 1/3 of the way up from the bottom is a tiny white airplane. That’s where Becca, Jason and Debbie were! They took off ahead of us (and from a different airport) because they were in a slower plane, but we caught up to them right as we got to Fayette County. They passed underneath us as a half-dozen planes started maneuvering to get into the landing pattern. It was kind of hectic! These small airports don’t have air traffic control towers, so it’s up to the pilots themselves to keep track of where everyone is and space themselves out accordingly.
We ate lunch and admired the planes. Here’s Jose with Debby Rihn-Harvey‘s aerobatic airplane. She’s a three-time US aerobatic champion who lives here in Houston!
She took off and flew an impromptu airshow for us after lunch. That was pretty cool, to put it mildly. Wish I’d had my telephoto lens!
It was a little less hazy when we started descending on our way back to Houston after the fly-in, and Jose snapped this nice picture of downtown in the distance. I’m not entirely sure, but I think that’s I-10 that you can trace all the way into the city.
Here’s the full set of pictures from the day!
Wow, I didn’t know some planes don’t have air traffic control.
By planes I mean airports.
Only the mid-to-large airports have towers. Most of the small general aviation runways are uncontrolled. There’s one frequency specified for the airport, and anyone coming or going just talks on that frequency to report where they are and what they intend to do. It’s cool, but can definitely get hectic if there are a lot of planes in the pattern or in the area!