We are still waiting for the winds to drop and come from the east or at least, nil wind. Today they were averaging 19 knots headwind on the track to Hawaii.
I found a neat site which gives 84 hour pictorial projections of wind direction and speed off the west coast and another which shows cloud and height of cloud by satellite image for the Pacific between the west coast of USA and the east coast of Australia. From both I assume that there will not be a phone call until at least Sunday and I think beyond.
The take off is from Santa Maria airport to the ocean at Morro Bay.
I suspect that it has been chosen by someone because it is a long runway, the land ahead is flat (paddocks) so we have no problems with the slow rate of climb and there are no houses on the track, so in the event of something going amiss, there is no (as they say in the military) collateral damage.
From Morro Bay we head south west to pick up the commercial airway route (although at lower level of about 9000') from Santa Barbara to Hawaii. This takes us via the intersection waypoints for reporting purposes. Although we are not deviants, we do deviate a bit at both ends, because we are taking off and landing at different airports to those used by the large commercial aircraft.
Click on the photos to enlarge
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