Pilot Stories and Photos

Pat Cormia's CA Flying Adventures

Pics from around CA over the years

We have a place up in Ashland, Oregon that we go to a lot. Neil (my hubby) and I started going up to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival back when we were in college and eventually bought a place there when 9/11 happened. We’d flown up in the Saratoga and got stuck when they grounded all aircraft. We take a picture of Shasta every time we fly by it!

This is a picture of the Socata Trinidad the we share with Bill S. and the four of us on a trip we took up to McMinnville to see the Spruce Goose at the Evergreen Museum.

These 2 are from a 99’s outing in 2019. I got to fly from the right seat and it was fantastic! Out over Angel Island, along the wharf area and then back along the Golden Gate and to Sausalito. He (dear, late friend of the 99s Jeroen) let me land!!

These are from our trips to Tahoe. Neil’s family has a cabin in Christmas Valley that we all helped build, back in the day. The last few were from when we flew up to celebrate his dad’s 90th birthday. My daughter Emma, a registered vet tech, worked for a veterinary opthomologist for several years and Toby, the blind chihuahua, is her first “foster fail”. The goggles are to protect his fake eyeballs when he’s out and about.

In 2017 Neil and I flew from our place in Ashland up to a little north of Madras to observe the total eclipse. There were a lot of aircraft just over Madras and we wanted to avoid the traffic while everyone’s attention was on the sun! It was very cool! We had to fly out over Klamath Falls first, to get above the smoke layer from the wildfires. When the eclipse was at its apex, the cabin of the plane got noticeably cooler, which we had not expected, and the GPS went into nighttime mode, which we had also not anticipated. It was amazing to watch the entire process from the air.