Painted Into A Corner

Sometimes NOTAMS and reality find themselves at odds.

Yesterday, I fired up the Gray Gal for a quick lap around Atlanta. My buddy Rick had sent his Mooney (an M20F that I delivered years ago, from outside Ontario, CA) into the shop for an autopilot install.

While down for the install, things were hopping at the Griffin, GA airport where his avionics shop was located - but not the flying sort of activity. Crews had apparently repaved the only runway; the prolonged closure wrapped up, then a final NOTAM (The notices we get of things that aren’t as-published) announced the runway closure for another two days as crews were painting the stripes and markings.

When we fired up to pick up Rick’s plane yesterday, two NOTAMS remained in place: The AWOS was out of service, and two taxiways were closed: E2 and W3. The airport diagram didn’t have ANY labels for taxiways, so your guess is as good as mine which taxiways those might be, but I figured that almost any combination wouldn’t keep us from our destination at the avionics shop.

Taxiways E2 and W3 were closed. Maybe those are the two segments shadowed out and rocking Xs? Who knows… (Screen capture from Foreflight, obviously not for navigational use)

We landed without drama, and the pickup went smoothly enough. There was one little hiccup that the shop hopped right onto fixing for Rick, and with things seemingly under control, I fired up to taxi out. As I approached the parking ramp’s exit, I could see a work crew at a nearby taxiway intersection with the paint striping rig. A pickup truck came wheeling up and parked right in front of me, blocking my path to the runway. An older fella hopped out of the truck and made some hand gestures that I didn’t recognize, then he reached into his truck for a handheld radio and pointed to it energetically.

I keyed up my radio on the airport common frequency to greet the fella, and there was no response. Three tries later, I gave up. Trying to avoid some variation of the event where another pilot from a major airline in Atlanta was accused of using his airplane as a weapon against a figure of authority, I shut the airplane down and waved him over to the side window.

“Do you know what the UNICOM frequency is?” he asked. I told him. “Oh. That would have been helpful earlier.”

He proceeded to fill me in on all the things the NOTAM had failed to capture: The runway was open, but striping along the taxiways continued. They had just painted all the curved lines transitioning from the taxiway that paralleled the runway, to the taxiways that crossed the runway. They were about to start painting all the runway hold-short markings.

He didn’t want me taxiing through the wet paint, which makes sense.

In other words, they had very nearly painted me into a corner.

“I suppose you want to depart,” he said, and I nodded. “This paint takes about 45 minutes or more to dry at this temperature.” He looked up and down the taxiway. “But all we’ve painted is the 90-degree arcs. If you’ll turn right, and go past this first helicopter, you could cross the straight segment of the yellow line - we painted it yesterday. If you can keep your wheels between the yellow line and the edge of the taxiway without hitting the taxiway edge lights, you could get on out of here.”

The red line approximates my taxi path as a solution to the un-forecast threat of continued taxiway painting (yellow lines). Luckily the hold-short bars hadn’t been painted yet or I’d have been watching paint dry for some time yesterday.

I retracted the flaps to eliminate the lowest-hanging bits that cold catch a taxiway light, thanked him for the creative problem-solving, and went on my way.

Rick snapped a photo of the sexiest plane in the sky as the avionics crew finished up working a minor squawk on his plane.

Each time we go fly, pilots are responsible for reading the NOTAMS associated with their flight. Written in ALL CAPS TEXT IT IS REALLY DIFFICULT TO DISCERN ANY LEVEL OF PRIORITY ASSIGNED TO THE INFORMATION BEING CONVEYED. BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA, FOR EXAMPLE, HAS PAGES UPON PAGES OF NOTAMS FOR EACH OF ITS DEPARTURE PROCEDURES SPELLING OUT TREES AND OTHER OBSTACLES THAT HAVE YET TO BE CHARTED INTO ITS DEPARTURE PROCEDURES AND MIGHT HAVE SOME SINGLE LINE OF TEXT OF OH THE AIRPORT IS CLOSED TODAY BURIED IN THERE. AND DONT FORGET THE ADVISORY ABOUT MIGRATORY WATERFOWL. THAT ONE NEVER GETS OLD.

And, in focusing on those pages of often irrelevant messages, sometimes the folks in charge managed to completely fail to tell you about the important things, like a guy in a truck, whose work crew can effectively close the airport without notice, lacking the ability to even warn you about it on UNICOM, much less record a message to add to the AWOS weather broadcast, since that system was down for the count as well.

Keep your eyes open, and avoid getting painted into a corner. Even then, be receptive to outside ideas. It might be the difference in taking off as scheduled, or looking for a rental car for a long drive home.

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It’s been a minute since I’ve posted here. Things are going great - just busy. I left Plane & Pilot magazine in late summer, and have been writing freelance for a few publications. Also, a “friend” ratted me out to the new chief standards captain on our fleet back in the spring, and I’ve been editing our fleet newsletter, which has kept me rather occupied… I don’t enjoy dry subjects like the airline stuff often becomes, but I’m working hard to help produce material that is approachable and readable, and the bosses seem to think I’m doing that. It keeps the keyboard from cooling off, which was the whole point of this substack when my writing at P&P was interrupted a few editors ago.

We’ll still share some stories - I have plenty of drafts in the bin, but the schedule will be irregular at times. And rather than mull over this one and let it languish as a draft, I’m about to just hit send. Any typos are just the writing equivalent of “scruffy hospitality,” where you don’t spend the day cleaning up before company comes to visit your home.

In the meantime, huge congratulations to my buddies Matt and Nathan, who both passed milestone check rides this week. Matt is a freshly-minted CFI, and Nathan just finished the maneuvers check ride for upgrade to captain at his regional airline.

It’s always nice when you can wrap up with some good news.

Until next time!