My 80th Christmas was a memorable one. I had been feeling guilty about all the time my poor airplane had been sitting unloved in the hangar during the last months of 2024, and I decided that Christmas week would be a great time to do some serious flying.
I’d been invited by friends in South Florida to spend Christmas with them. It sounded like fun, but the thought of flying on the airlines during a major holiday was not of interest to me. On the other hand, flying from California to Florida in my Cessna 310 sounded like fun if the weather was cooperative. So, I remained non-committal while keeping an eye on the long-range prog charts.
By Wednesday, December 18th, I became satisfied that the flying weather in the southern half of the U.S. would be benign over the pre-Christmas weekend (December 21-22), and I told my friends in Florida that I was coming. They sounded delighted until I let them know that I’d be flying there in my own airplane. It seems there had been a bunch of GA accidents on the TV news recently, and they were not comfortable with the thought of me flying solo coast-to-coast at age 80. They tried their best to persuade me to take the airline instead. Obviously, they were unsuccessful.
Getting Ready
On Thursday, December 19th, I drove to my hangar to get the airplane ready for this trip. I topped the tanks, cleaned the windshield, checked the oil, and updated the navigation databases in my Garmin GNS 530, 430, GI-275s and yoke-mounted GPSMAP 696. Upon returning home, I started my flight planning in earnest.
I figured the round-trip would involve about 25 hours of flying, roughly 11 hours going eastbound and 14 hours going westbound. At about 14 GPH per engine (28 GPH total), that would require about 700 gallons of 100LL. Multiply that by six bucks a gallon and… Let’s just say that fuel price was going to play a major role in planning the route.
After ping-ponging between Foreflight (routing) and Airnav (fuel prices), I decided to make an initial fuel stop at Las Cruces, New Mexico (LRU) and then to stay overnight in Lufkin, Texas (LFK) at the extreme east edge of Texas just shy of the Louisiana border. Those two legs would take about 3+45 each and would get me about two-thirds of the way to my final destination—Pompano Beach, Florida (PMP)—on Saturday. I’d finish up the last one-third on Sunday; I could do that nonstop, but decided to land for cheap fuel at Mariana, Florida (MAI).
Off We Go…
To make it to LFK before nightfall and taking the two-hour time zone change into account, I needed to get an early start. The tower at Santa Maria Public Airport (SMX) opens at 0600 local, and my plan was to be their very first customer. I arrived at the airport at 0515 and used my access badge to open the security gate. It was pitch dark and there was not another person, vehicle or aircraft in sight. As usual, I paused after driving through the gate to ensure that no one was tailgating through behind me. Seeing nothing, I drove to my hangar.
I loaded my bags into the plane, towed it out of the hangar, locked up, climbed into the cockpit, started engines, and taxied to the runup area. While doing my pre-flight runup, SMX tower announced that it was open. I reported holding short of Runway 30 and asked for my IFR clearance to LRU. I copied and read back my clearance and was cleared for takeoff right on schedule. It was still pitch dark.
The flight to LRU and then LFK went smooth as silk, with CAVU weather, no turbulence and nice tailwinds. At almost exactly 1600 CST, I touched down on Runway 07 at LFK, taxied to the very nice FBO operated by Angelina County, and requested that all tanks be topped off with their bargain-priced $4.99/gallon 100LL. The airport is located about 7 miles from downtown Lufkin. When I asked what the best way was for me to get to my hotel, they handed me the keys to one of the FBO’s two courtesy cars. Nice!
I loaded my luggage and myself into the courtesy car, then pulled out my iPhone to help me navigate from the airport to the hotel. The phone indicated I’d missed a phone call while airborne, and the caller had left a lengthy voicemail which I dutifully played back.
Uh Oh! Busted!
The caller identified himself as Rollo, Operations Officer at SMX. “You were observed committing a gate violation,” he said, and went on to explain that when I used my badge to open and enter the access gate at 0515, the gate failed to close behind me, and I failed to detect and report the failure. A review of the security camera video by Rollo revealed that the gate remained open for a half-hour before the gate operator failure was detected and corrected by airport maintenance staff.
Of course, it was my responsibility to detect and report the stuck gate, and my failure to do so put me in violation of 49 CFR 1540.105 (“Security responsibilities of employees and other persons”). Fortunately for me, no one was observed entering or leaving the airport property through the stuck-open gate, otherwise I’d have been in a lot more trouble than I already was.
The voicemail explained that because of my violation, my airport access badge had been deactivated. Since the badge is required to activate the gate on both ingress and egress, I would not be able to open the gate to leave the airport when I returned from my trip. I would need to arrange to be escorted off the airport by an airport employee. I would then not be permitted to re-enter the airport to access my hangar until I had completed remedial security training at the airport office and paid a reinstatement fee.
This was not exactly the Christmas gift I had been hoping for. Sigh.
On Sunday, I flew to PMP with a quick fuel stop at MAI. My friends met me at the airport, and I spent a delightful Christmas week with them in South Florida, including a big party on Christmas Day and another on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas).
Return to the Crime Scene
On Saturday morning, December 28th, I departed PMP headed to Jackson, Tennessee (MKL) to visit with my friend Paul New A&P/IA, owner of Tennessee Aircraft Services and my podcast co-conspirator on “Ask the A&Ps.” Originally, I was going to just stop there for lunch and fuel before continuing westbound so I could arrive back home at SMX on Sunday. However, given my gate violation predicament, I figured it might be better to delay my return until Monday when it would be easier to arrange for an airport employee escort off the premises. So, I decided to stay overnight with Paul and his wife Helen, and then head west Sunday morning. That turned out to be a fortuitous plan, because a few hours after my arrival at MKL, a storm came through and dumped lots of rain and lightning bolts throughout the evening and into the early morning. By the time a departed MKL Sunday morning, the storm had passed, leaving only 25G35 surface winds that were easily manageable.
I’d filed for a fuel stop in Dumas (DUX) in the Texas panhandle. My cruising altitude was lower than usual—6000 feet—but nonetheless the headwinds were brutal. Approaching Tulsa, I realized that I would be passing just north of Ada where my good friend George Braly (of GAMI, LOP and G100UL fame) is based. I texted George and asked him if he had lunch plans. He didn’t, so I diverted and met him for lunch. I’ve always thought that one of the great joys of travelling via GA is the ability to visit friends along the way.
(Shortly after I landed, I got a text from Paul New: “I see you diverted. Is everything okay?” He’d been watching me on FlightAware.)
After a leisurely and fascinating lunch with George, I flew to DUX, arriving there in mid-afternoon. This was originally going to be a quick-turn fuel stop, but since my spontaneous lunch with George had put me behind schedule, I decided to RON in Dumas. Once again, I asked how to get into town and the FBO handed me keys to their courtesy car. Ya just gotta love these small-town GA airports!
I departed DUX at 0830 Monday morning, refueled at historic Lindburgh Field in Winslow, Arizona (INW), and with the time zone changes working in my favor this time, arrived home at SMX about 1400. I put the plane in the hangar, transferred my luggage and Christmas gifts from the plane to the car, and called the airport office to arrange for an escort through the security gate.
My escort turned out to be the airport maintenance foreman, and I had a long talk with him about how and why the gate failed to close when I entered nine days earlier at oh-dark-thirty. Turns out there’s an optical beam to prevent the gate from closing when a vehicle is crossing the transom, and condensation on the lens or a spider web can fool it. Who knew?
Remedial Training
The next morning at 0900, I presented myself at the Santa Maria Public Airport District Office for my remedial security training. Rollo was on vacation that week, so his boss Ric wound up being my instructor. He spend just over an hour with me, and it was a very educational and enjoyable hour indeed.
Ric made it clear to me that he hated all this security stuff as much as I did, but that he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Although SMX is overwhelmingly a GA airport, it does have limited airline service: exactly two flights a week to/from Las Vegas. Because of this very limited airline service, SMX is subject to the Draconian influence of the dreaded TSA—the same government entity that convinced me not to fly to Florida on the airlines.
(Does anyone know what TSA stands for? Totalitarian Subjugation Agency? Transparently Senseless Aggravation? Thousands Standing Around?)
Ric explained that despite its de minimis airline presence, TSA regularly sends tiger teams to audit SMX security, and it’s never enough to satisfy them. In addition to gates, badges, cameras and patrol cars, the feds would really like uniformed guards to be posted at each access gate 24/7. The airport has resisted this, arguing that highly responsible badge-carrying airport tenants (like me) provide adequate policing of the access gates. Which explains why when a tenant like me screws up (like I did), they must take it seriously.
After going over the various rules about badges, gates, movement versus non-movement areas, etc., Ric related a couple of eye-opening stories to help me understand just how little sense of humor TSA has about security violations at SMX. A transient pilot who landed at SMX used a folding bicycle to ride from the airport to a nearby restaurant for a bite to eat. Upon returning to the airport, he tailgated through one of the security gates behind a vehicle driven by an airport employee, then proceeded to load the bike in his airplane and depart. The airport was required to report the incident to TSA, who slapped the pilot with a $14,000 fine!
In another case, a pilot climbed over the fence and then opened a pedestrian gate from the inside to allow his passengers (a woman and kids) to enter. When this was reported to TSA, they started taking steps to scramble fighters to intercept the pilot but relented when they learned that women and children were aboard. Instead, a contingent of uniformed TSA personnel met the aircraft when it reached its destination, detained the pilot for hours, and fined him $25,000!
Like I said, these guys have absolutely no sense of humor.
Ric concluded our hour together with a five-question quiz. I answered all five questions correctly. I then was asked to pay a reinstatement fee of $100, which I considered eminently fair given the hour Ric had spent with me and the additional hour Rollo had previously spent reviewing security camera footage and notifying me of my violation. Ric reinstated my access badge with a few mouse clicks and told me I was good to go.
I got off easy because I was a first-time offender and because fortunately my gate violation did not result in any unauthorized entry to the airport. A second violation would result in me being locked out of the airport for at least a week, and a third would result in permanent revocation of my access privileges (and presumably my hangar lease).
Not to worry—it’s not going to happen again!