King City

King City (KIC, Mesa Del Rey Airport) is a popular first cross country destination from Reid Hillview, as it is just over 50 miles away. After King City you can cross over the hills to the coast and fly up to Monterey.

KIC is easy enough to get to by pilotage, just follow route 101. My favourite route is different. I planned to use dead reckoning and fly an almost straight line from RHV past South County Airport (Q99), and Hollister (3O7). After Hollister, the distinctive Pinnacles shape can be seen another 20 miles or so straight ahead. From a distance the Pinnacles look like a normal conical hill from whose top someone sliced out a wedge, leaving twin peaks with a cut between them.  The Pinnacles are at the center of the Pinnacles National Monument - for more information and pictures click here.

By aiming just east of the Pinnacles, you will follow the little valley East of the main Salinas Valley, and soon the pinnacles will be off your right wing and you should spot the private Pinnacles Ranch Airfield. This is a grass airstrip some 3000' long oriented directly North-South. Having good landmarks helps you double check your ground speed and wind correction angle.

Passing over the Pinnacles, and turning West towards King City, the airfield is soon in sight. No I am not diving at the field. The dark bit at top left is the right wing with a reflection of the runway on it.

I haven't yet seen any other traffic here, and this time was no different, so I overflew the field to check the wind, decided on Runway 29, which is usually the one, and proceeded to fly an uneventful left traffic pattern. Uneventful that is till it seemed the plane would just keep floating and floating forever. A quick glance at the windsock confirmed that we now had almost a perfect tailwind. Thankfully the runway is pretty long for a C172 and eventually we got down and turned off at the 2nd exit. When parked at the fuel pump I looked again and now it was once again pointing back towards the big white number 29!

There wasn't much to see here. A couple of cropduster byplanes seemed to be the only other aircraft on the field and there was not a soul in sight. I sauntered over to the Classic Aircraft building and discovered there a nice comfortable lounge with a bunch of magazines, a phone, restrooms and Coke machine. Some pretty interesting pictures on the walls too.

Classic Aircraft was owned and run by a wonderful husband and wife team, Fred and Valerie Turk. They have since retired and now the FBO is the home of Sean Tucker's School of Aerobatics.

Whether just for practice, to visit the Aerobatics School, or to take a short hike into King City, this is a nice airport to visit.

Having had a good chat, looked over the work in progress in the hangar and refueled, we took off again on runway 29. This time the wind was more predictable - the usual 90 degree crosswind.

From here, you can continue on to the Big Sur coast and Monterey.