Radiation fog + schedule = Arrgh!

No flight lesson today due to radiation/ground/tule fog, whatever you want to call it. This was supposed to have been lesson #5.  The weather forecast for Palo Alto (KPAO) was for fair weather today, but unfortunately, when I got to the airport just before 10am visibility was poor.  The thing that drives you crazy about this kind of fog is that usually if you look straight up, you see blue sky.  The fog is only a couple hundred feet thick but the straight ahead visibility is really low. 

My instructor and I settled for 1.5 hours of ground instruction instead, mostly on pitot-static and gyro instruments and engine systems.  By about 11:45, the weather had improved to where it was looking good for flying, but I only had 669TW reserved until 1pm and it was booked afterward. No other 172SP's were available, so we scrubbed today's flight.

 

We wandered over to the neighboring pilot shop and loooked around. After a few minutes, he left me to browse. A couple minutes later he came back and suggested we go try to get a tour of the tower. The tower guys turned out to be very accommodating and let us in for a tour. I got to see the mix of high and low tech that keeps everyone apart. The radar display looked surprisingly like your average computer screen – a beige background with grey outlines for local airspace limits and ground reference points. Planes showed up as green rectangles. The ground controller used the low-tech grease pencil on a plastic puck to write tail numbers of aircraft requesting taxi and takeoff clearances. The ground controller moves the puck to the local controller's station and he takes it from there. We probably spent about 15 minutes in the tower, not wanting to overstay our welcome. Besides, it's not that big of a place.

After the tour, we spent a few minutes out at the edge of the taxiway watching a few takeoffs and landings. There was a little crosswind, so we got to see some good and not so good landing examples.

Overall, it was still a pretty good day at the airport, even if I didn't get to fly. Here's hoping there's no fog tomorrow, since I have the same plane and time-slot booked again.