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IT’S UP TO YOU TO GET AWAY!
Cape Canaveral, Florida, and
the Kennedy Space Center
Flying aimlessly about your home airport is just great…especially if you want to take friends and relatives for a ride, and impress them with life aloft. Fly them to breakfast or lunch, zip them around your town at 2,000 feet, and provide them sights from the air they can’t imagine from the ground.
Your passengers will undoubtedly exclaim, “Wow! I never realized the number of swimming pools around here,” or “The amount of empty land is unbelievable!”
Suitably impressed with the scenery, they often turn and stare in wide-eyed admiration at their expert pilot, and ask, “What’s the farthest you’ve ever flown?”
“Uh. Umm. Well. There was this one time, see. Back when I was taking my lessons, I flew about an hour to… Yup. Then…ahem…went to this breakfast. It was a nice day, so we just kept on going for another half hour and ended up in…. Well, I’m not exactly sure how far, but quite a ways!” After your feet are put to the fire by questions, you may think to yourself, “Gee, I haven’t really flown the plane as far as I drove last weekend in my car.” Familiar? That’s how we all begin and you’re not alone. The difference is how you’ll continue to enjoy yourself, along with your family or friends.
If flying around your home field, in good weather, is all you want to do, fine. However, if you want to get the most from your pilot license, and use it as you probably intended when you rationalized the expensive lessons, stretch your imagination, and your flying abilities. It isn’t necessary to begin your flying adventures by planning a month long trip across the country…or taking off into weather that requires shooting approaches to strange airports at instrument minimums. That’s what is great about that license in your wallet or purse. You don’t have a schedule dictated by an airline reservation, or one you are unable to cancel if you are suddenly called to work, or the weather goes punk. It’s your choice of when to go.
It’s also important, and will make life much more enjoyable for you, if your wife, husband or significant other, enjoys it as well. That means they must be confident in your ability to get them safely there and back, wherever it is. If you have a great time traveling together this time, well, you can be sure they will want to do it again.
Take a look at your work schedule, or the “have-to-dos” that are coming up. Then begin planning a short trip of an hour or two each way, around your schedule, to a destination that looks interesting. It may be for only a day, or an overnight, but set it up. If weather doesn’t cooperate, cancel the hotel reservations and plan your flight for the following weekend. It’s really pretty simple, and nothing to get worked up about. It’s important, though, to choose a destination that allows you time to get out and explore…not just stop for lunch and head back home. It’s what you do with your time that makes it a memorable trip, and not the flight itself. Now, pull out your highway road maps, or look on the internet, for a place to go. Don’t use your sectional or low altitude charts. Those are for navigating, not planning!
One of our planned destinations was a place my wife had never been, and I hadn’t been in 20 years. It started when we opened the newspaper one morning, and read an article that the next space shuttle launch from Kennedy Space Center, near Cocoa Beach, Florida, was going up in just a couple of weeks. We had only watched shuttle launches on television. They seemed, of course, pretty exciting. Now, we might have an opportunity to actually see one close up! It could be interesting, it would be live, and it would be historical. We set it up.
First thing we always do is pull out the AOPA airport directory, along with our VFR sectional, and find the nearest airport to our destination. The closest airport to the Cape Canaveral area is Merritt Island (COI). It was near our destination and hotel, and easy to get to where we wanted to go from there. However, because it only has an NDB and a GPS approach, and we don’t have a certified GPS, we looked for another, reasonably close, airport with a precision approach, as well. We found that Space Coast Regional (TIX), in nearby Titusville is also pretty close. That airport had an ILS in the event weather became a factor. As it turned out, the weather was great on our arrival.
One of the great advantages of general aviation is the ability to fly into small airports that are often smack-dab next to where you’re planning to go! It usually is fine, but occasionally weather or some other problem arises (the possibility of a muddy sod runway at a smaller local airport, if it has rained hard lately). Our thinking is this, whenever we’re going into a small, local airport, with limited approaches, or a sod runway, we find the best nearby alternative, with a hard surface and precision approach. You can usually find one not far from your intended airport. That way, if the weather does change for the worse, or if other circumstances crop up, we have a place to land that’s still within easy driving distance, and the changes to our plans are only minor.
When it does occasionally happen, we have also found that some of the local pilots, or the FBO, are just great about driving us to our original destination, so we can pick up our rental car. As a matter of fact, if it’s reasonably close, the car rental company may come over and pick us up. We’ve found it’s just wise, and sometimes time-saving, to always have an alternate airport as convenient as possible.
After planning dates, we booked our hotel on-line, then rented a car for the 3 days we planned to spend exploring. Then, it was a matter of using the internet to research what we’d like to see and do in the area. The Cape Canaveral area, and Kennedy Space Center, offered lots more to do than we ever thought! For information, www.nasa.gov., is an excellent site to begin.
Cape Canaveral itself is an island off the east coast of Florida, separated from Merritt Island by the Banana River. It is the home of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, as well as the Kennedy Space Center which causes the entire area to be named the Florida Spacecoast.
Built from low lying marsh, the military and NASA facilities are a marvel, that began to take shape in the late 1940’s and early 50’s. The U. S. military needed a place to test newly developed missiles after World War 2. Some early missile launches were begun from a test facility in White Sands, New Mexico. That was quickly curtailed, though, when the military launched a V-2 rocket from White Sands, in 1947. That particular missile had a mind of its own. Instead of flying north along its projected path, the wayward missile decided to head south. Flying low over El Paso, Texas, the rocket crossed the Mexican border in a bid for freedom, and ended in a spectacular crash in the Tepeyac Cemetery, in Juarez, Mexico, blowing a 50’ wide by 30’ deep crater in the graveyard! The locals, and the Mexican government, decided that was more excitement than they needed. The U. S. Military decided they didn’t need another Alamo incident on their hands, and began looking for another location to fire their missiles.
The Cape Canaveral area began to be used for military missile launches. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and further development of the area continued. The launch operations center was re-named in 1963, in honor of the president who put America on the path to the moon. Since then, the Kennedy Spaceport has served as the launch and departure facility for every American manned mission, as well as hundreds of other spacecraft launches, from the Hubble Telescope to the ongoing missions to Mars.
On our flight, as we came from the north toward Merritt Island, we flew just outside the restricted area, which is also Victor 3/533 Airway. We were absolutely awed by the monstrous size of the rocket assembly building as we flew by. It was so huge that, even 10 miles away, it appeared to be just below us. We could also plainly see the runway where the shuttle typically lands. It’s on the charts, is 15,000 feet long, running north and south along the cape, and seemed to extend almost below our flight path!
After landing, we hopped in a rental car, checked into our hotel close by, and went for a driving tour of the area, having dinner nearby, that evening. The next day we drove to the Space Center, to take the tour through the facility, using tickets we had purchased on-line, ahead of time. Incidentally, buying tickets ahead, for many attractions, can save you many minutes or hours waiting in line on your arrival. We would recommend it whenever possible.
The tour of the Kennedy Space Center is fantastic! We arrived, spent hours in the museum looking at displays, and taking a simulated shuttle ride...then took the bus tour around the entire spaceport (it’s the only way you are allowed around the launch areas), driving right past the shuttle Atlantis, being prepared for launch the next day. I’m always impressed with well organized events and operations, and the spaceport facility, and tour, is certainly organized. One of the most amazing displays was the assembly area, where portions of the space station are actually being built and assembled. We were able to see, from within a few feet, the components of the space station being put together for future flights of the shuttle, to be attached to the space station by astronauts. It’s was difficult for us to comprehend that they would be so visible, and visually accessible, to the public.
The space launch facility at Cape Canaveral is such a historic place. Where the Apollo missions to the moon were launched, the Hubble telescope was assembled and sent into space, but more importantly, it’s where much of our future is being prepared at this moment, in an amazing, interesting facility. It’s a place you shouldn’t miss. If you can possibly do it, bring your children, or grandchildren, as well, if you have them.
The following day, we watched in awe, from a distance away, as the shuttle Atlantis roared, exactly on time, from its pad and sped skyward. You may believe you have a ringside seat watching a launch on television, but the gut wrenching, thunderous sounds, the vibration, and the sight of the huge rocket and shuttle, enveloped in flame, as it races toward space, is a sensation you’ll never forget. It goes into our photo album and scrapbook as one of our true life highlights.
We left the Cocoa Beach area, and Merritt Island Airport, our heads filled with a treasure of impressions, all of them good. The great Florida weather cooperated as we flew along the coast toward home, already planning our next trip.
John Bouck lives in upstate Auburn, N. Y. He is a commercial and industrial real estate broker, licensed in New York and Florida. John flies a Cessna 210, as well as a Cessna 180 on amphibious floats. With over 2,000 hours of flight time, he holds a commercial license, with instrument rating, as well as seaplane rating, and is a CFI. He can be reached at: jcbouck@verizon.net. |
