This brilliant sketch manages to encapsulate my daily life as a CFI in the wilting summer heat. At 8 a.m. I’m Dean Martin. By 8 p.m., I’m Foster Brooks.

Yes, it has quite a familiar ring to it, right down to the part about running an an hour and forty three minutes late for the next flight.

FAA Administrator Marion Blakey is fond of reiterating how controller staffing levels are sufficient.  Yet something tells me this guy might disagree with her.

It seems to me that anytime a controller tells a bunch of pilots “you guys really should come up here and see this”, things can’t be going too well.  Viva la JFK!

I see go-arounds all the time at John Wayne Airport.  And not just with general aviation aircraft. 

The big runway is only 5700 feet long, so there’s not much room for error, especially with some of the larger transport airplanes that fly into the airport.  For example, FedEx sends a fully loaded Airbus A300 jumbo into Orange County each day.  As far as I know, that is the largest airplane to land at SNA.

Anyway, the Southern California geography gives us a semi-permanent inversion layer, and it’s typically accompanied by a slight windshear at that altitude.

Of course, sometimes that shear is stronger than others, and a few days ago I watched 6 airliners go around in the space of 30 minutes.  One of them was a Southwest 737 which turned final about 1.5 miles out with what was probably a 50-55 degree bank.  He did his best to drop down to the runway, but was fighting a strong tailwind that didn’t abate until around 600′ AGL.

Those of us in the area were razzing him pretty badly.  Someone said “$5 he doesn’t make it”.  Another chimed in with “I’ll put ten on it” and I piled on with “count me in for fifteen bucks”.  Eventually he started the go-around, and I keyed the mike with one final shot:  “If he was a tailwheel pilot I’m sure he would have made it…”.

It was all in good fun.  I think Southwest got the final laugh, though.  A few minutes after his aborted landing, a different Southwest jet was slow to cross 19L and I had to do a go-around of my own.

Most corporate aircraft have no identifying marks on them at all because the company doesn’t want competitors knowing where their executives are going.  They even go so far as to have their N-number blocked from sites like FlightAware.

But not all companies are like that.  KFC, for example, used to have a corporate airplane at SNA.  I’m not sure if it was based here or just came into Orange County frequently, but it always seemed to be on the field.  This thing was a beauty, a Challenger 604 painted in red and white striping.

Unfortunately, the clean lines were marred by a giant Colonel Sanders logo on the tail.  Also, the 604 fuselage has a wide diameter, but it’s not very long.  So between the paint scheme and the logo on the tail, the airplane was essentially a giant KFC chicken bucket turned on its side.

One day, just for kicks, I walked up the airstair door, knocked on the side of the plane, and with the straightest possible face asked the pilot if I could get an bucket of Cajun chicken “to go”.

He got a kick out of that, laughing heartily for about 5 seconds before pointing at the airstair and telling me to get the hell off his airplane.  I descended toward the tarmac while uttering my parting shot:  “They warned me that the Colonel made a mean bird…”