It isn’t likely there will be any signs appearing at the Kernville Airport such as are seen at the Kern River. After all, piloting small aircraft is hazardous, fraught with many pitfalls for those that do not pay strict attention to being on task and pilots are expected to know the hazards of flying. Earning a pilot’s license is a formidable task; so formidable that the great majority of those attempting to do so “wash out.” Like the Camp Perry Matches where you won’t find any weekend plinkers, flying demands a high degree of skill and knowledge.

My friend Mike Turner was going to drop by today, but said he may not make it due to this: The Kern River Valley has made the national news again due to a tragedy, a plane crash that has claimed six lives including an infant. According to the L. A. Times the plane had departed Santa Monica and the family had planned a camping trip here. One witness said it appeared the plane crashed nose first into the ground just short of the Kernville Airport.

Mike is the Captain for our local Citizen’s Service Unit (CSU) comprised of volunteers that lend a helping hand to the Kern County Sheriff’s Department. He called me yesterday afternoon when the crash happened, then sent me a follow up email. It’s a stark simple statement: “I don’t know about tomorrow. I have to go in at midnight with another guy and baby sit that crashed aircraft until NTSB shows up in the morning. The coroner is there now and they are asking for some big lights to be brought in so they can see. They may need to tear the aircraft apart to get the rest of the bodies out. The Sgt. told me there are body parts all over the place. He said it looked like the aircraft went into the ground nose first.”

That is a pretty typical description of airplane crashes where things happen at a very great speed, tearing airplanes and people apart as anyone who has seen such a thing knows. As I write there is no information on what caused this tragic crash; but my familiarity with flying and this particular airport allows me some qualified speculation, especially my personal experience and knowledge of what often leads to the majority of such tragedies: Pilot Error.

While the Kern River has gained notoriety as the “Killer Kern,” the Kernville Airport poses its own dangers and many accidents have occurred here, oftentimes because a pilot may have forgotten the maxim of bewaring “Hot, high, and humid,” this sometimes fatal condition for the unwary pilot. Then there is the “ground effect” due to the close proximity of the lake to the airstrip that can catch a pilot off guard in an instant. I am very familiar with this at the Kernville Airport.

I first started flying out of Torrance Airport in 1957 in an old J-3 Cub with an “armstrong” starter. That was real flying. For those of us with a passion for the Wide (and oftentimes wild) Blue Yonder, the truism that “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots” was quickly established in the Cub.

But for learning to fly in high wind conditions, there is nothing like the Mojave Desert as those at Edwards will affirm. Lancaster and Rosamond experience these high winds, and I recall one fellow coming into the coffee shop at Fox that told me he had taken off from Rosamond and encountered an updraft so strong he had the stick of his bird all the way forward and was still ascending better than 400 fpm! Walking out to his plane, he showed me the cigarette ashes pasted to the roof of the cockpit as proof. There were times when the wind blew so hard at Fox all I would have to do was loosen the tie downs to get instrument time in my plane. I had just taken off at Fox on one occasion and had no sooner reached field pattern altitude and suddenly it felt like a giant hand had closed tightly over the bird, squeezing it and literally freezing the controls! However, far too many pilots do not spend much time gaining experience in high wind conditions such as those in the Mojave Desert and sometimes encountered here in Kernville. And this lack of experience with such winds sometimes proves fatal.

While living in Lancaster, I bought into an Alon that was a real kiddy car to fly. I had also acquired a venerable Stinson Voyager; a heavy but solid old tail-dragger you really had to fly point-to-point. One of my buddies would often accompany me, but on this particular day I decided to take the Alon rather than the Stinson and fly up to Kernville. It was a bright sunshiny day, but a little breezy.

However, though I had checked for “winds aloft” before leaving Fox when we arrived over the lake the wind was really whistling up the canyon where the strip was laid out. As I came along the downwind, we must have been doing 180 knots groundspeed. Turning base to final, we were much too high. Kissing off that approach, I tried again. The tricky part was the fact that the canyon narrows quickly on the approach, and you really have to crank the bird around in a hurry if the wind is blowing hard. But, once more, I came in too high. Not only was the bird being hurled down the canyon at a dizzying speed on approach, despite my attempts it was being kept high on final by the very strong wind.

Since we had done a lot of sight seeing over Kelso Valley and the Piutes on the way, fuel was running low and with the high winds I did not want to take the risk of going over to Inyokern, my alternate. It was sweaty palms and white-knuckle time. I told my buddy “I’m going to have to get this thing down!” He was holding his breath too tightly to reply.

Having failed to make the landing on the first two approaches, I realized I would have to come up low, ignoring the field pattern altitude, and wrench the bird hard over on base. Actually, a base leg as such was out of the question; what I really had to do was make a gut-wrenching U-turn.

It seemed I had to point the nose of the craft right at the ground on final because of the excessively high wind. With the yoke far forward and the nose seeming to point straight down, the runway was instantly there, and sweat-drenched I managed to pull up at just the right instant to land safely.

But the fun was not over. With airplanes, not only does what go up must come down, what is down, must go up again. We still had the takeoff to look forward to. A few cups of coffee later, we were fortified to face the inevitable. The wind had not abated; only gotten worse. The strip was laid out in such a way that you took off toward the lake. With the wind howling toward us we were literally hurled up in an instant, no finessing.

Now if you have ever piloted a small aircraft, you know how the various types of geography create what is called ground effect. You also know that as you pass over bare ground and hit a body of water (the lake) it can sometimes have a dramatic impact on wind conditions. Sure enough, the fun was not over. As we passed over the edge of the lake and I began my turn, a huge fist (turbulence) hit the underside of the left wing so suddenly and violently that I struck the side of the canopy with my head hard enough to nearly knock me unconscious. Fortunately, it didn’t.

Little airplanes are fun, but I well recall “Pappy” Boyington’s definition of flying: “Hours and hours of dull monotony sprinkled with moments of stark terror!”