ByMattOdenbrett

from In Flight USA July 2021

ByEdDowns

20 In Flight USA Celebrating 37 Years

FLYING THE BAJA 1000 RACE

By Matt Odenbrett

Flying for a family-owned business is not always about executive transport. I discovered this when I went to work for an agri-business in the southern California desert some years ago. Instead of wearing slacks and epaulettes I wore blue jeans, work boots, and field shirts. I did have a schedule, so I knew what to expect from day to day, but there was always something different to see and experience. I was often invited to come along and inspect fields of produce and/or harvesting operations. Since I grew up on a farm in the upper Midwest and I also had a Commercial Driver’s License and had hauled fresh produce, this was right up my alley.

I was a one-man flight department for my company. I operated the venerable Swiss-built turboprop, the Pilatus PC-12. Most operators of the Pilatus PC-12 understand that their airplanes are capable of operating in and out of short unimproved strips, but few will ever see anything other than asphalt or concrete runways. This was not the case for me. My area of operation was pretty much anywhere west of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, from the Canadian Border all the way down to central Mexico. This meant that I could pick up and/or drop someone at LAX, then continue to a crop duster strip in the San Joaquin valley of Central California. Other times I was landing at private dirt strips maintained by Ranchos or fishing villages in Baja California. Being a one-man flight department meant that my challenges were many and varied. I had to mix and mingle with airliners and large executive jets on one leg, then exercise my bush flying skills on the next – finding a dirt strip on a VFR flight and executing a landing with no radio aids to navigation, no runway lights, no VASI’s or PAPI’s. I was doing all this single-pilot.

I relished every challenge!

One of the unique parts of my operation was that my employer was an enthusiastic off-road desert racer. His idea of family fun was to race the Baja 1000 every year with his two grown boys and a team of volunteers. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started flying for them, but it was a thrill to be a part of a Trophy Truck Race Team. In the weeks prior to the race, I would bring members of the race team south with the Pilatus, along with loads of spare parts, which would be left for the support operations at various points along the race course. After the race had ended, I would retrieve the key personnel and return them to the USA so they could go back to earning enough money to pay for the next year’s race.

On my first race, I discovered that I was going to be a key part of the race team itself. My employer rented a Cessna 172 from an individual, and we outfitted the airplane with a commercial radio that was to be used by me to communicate directly with the Trophy Truck while it was on the course.

Baja is a fascinating place. Part of its charm is the undeveloped nature of the rural areas. However, it also means that this can be a rather lawless place. Many of the people who live along the race course do not see race cars but dollar signs zipping past them, and they want a piece of the action. Locals set boobytraps along the race course during the night prior to the race. This could be anything from logs laid across the course to a shallow ditch to piles of gravel dumped in the middle of the course – always right around a blind curve so the racers cannot see the booby trap until it is too late to avoid hitting it. When the wreckage came to a stop, the locals would descend upon the racer like Vultures – stripping the car of anything of value they could get before the racers got out of the car and chased them off.

My job on race day was to orbit in the C172 over the race course where it exited the city limits of Ensenada – the starting point of the race. When the Trophy Truck came out of the city, I would fly ahead of my team’s Trophy Truck and scout the course for the booby traps. Once I identified a booby trap, I would give warning by radio to the driver. It sounds straightforward, but I was just one of about two dozen airplanes and helicopters orbiting that race course, so we all had to keep our heads on a swivel Gallery photo of the PC-12 NGX. (Pilatus Aircraft) to avoid one another. Not only was I communicating with my racer on the ground, I was also monitoring Multi-com and listening to what the other scouts were saying. This made for a terribly busy cockpit.

By mutual agreement, the helicopters would orbit the course at 500 feet AGL and the fixed-wing airplanes at 1,000 feet AGL. It was easy to maintain separation outside the starting point at Ensenada (sea level) but as the racecourse went inland it traversed the mountainous interior of the peninsula, rising to over 4,000 feet elevation. So, as I continued to move inland along the course I had to not only keep my eye out for booby traps, I also had to watch out for the other airplanes and helicopters that were also rising in altitude to stay above the course.

After my team’s Trophy Truck had traversed the highlands, the racecourse descended into the Sonora Desert on the