Virtual Flyovers - San Joaquin Valley CA

Sanderson requested a flyover along the San Joaquin Valley in California flying from KBLF Meadows Bakersfield to KSAC Sacremento Executive airport in a crop duster or small plane. The distance is about 218 nautical miles (over 250 miles) as the crow flies.  Since that is a long flight in a crop duster I have limited the initial flight to crop dusting around Bakersfield.  I'll do more of the flightplan later.

https://s87.photobucket.com/user/vifc313/slideshow/Miscellaneous/San%20Joaquin%20Valley%20CA

OK here are some more.  Due to the length of the flight and size of the valley I took a fast commercial plane and zig-zagged (see purple line on map below) across the valley at altitudes up to 20,000 feet flying over Fresno and over toward San Jose before landing at Sacramento.  I then took the crop duster towards the south of Sacramento to visit a windmill farm.

MAP
 

SLIDESHOW
https://s87.photobucket.com/user/vifc313/slideshow/Miscellaneous/San%20Joaquin%20Valley%20CA/SJV%202

TD, Thank you so much. The first one, with the crop duster, was kind of scary showing the spraying of pesticides!! Time to build more SFG beds!!

The second one, Alaska commercial airlines was great. Flat Ag valley, sandwiched between low western coastal mountains (hills) and the tall eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. I wonder what year the scenery was recorded? One would think we had plenty of water! Especially near the delta where the northern and southern rivers converge and meander towards the SF bay and out to the Pacific Ocean. Rice fields when there is allocated water!

TD - Sanderson -

What are all these round looking things.  Looks like vegetative growth but they look perfectly round.  If it is vegetative growth, some of them look like part of it was harvested.  Some are green and some are yellowy looking.

yolos ... I believe the round crop fields are from center pivot irrigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation

trolleydriver wrote:yolos ... I believe the round crop fields are from center pivot irrigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation

Thanks TD, that looks like what I see in your pictures.  Pretty interesting.

And here I was going to answer that they are Alien crop circles.

I can remember years ago flying from Toronto to Chicago and then to Phoenix and seeing those circles as we flew over the USA. I also wondered what they were. I had never seen such things in Canada. 

BTW the return trip from Phoenix to Chicago was on a DC10.  Not long after that, a DC10 crashed just after take off from Chicago and all souls were lost.  I always wondered if that could have been the same plane I had been on.  I had another situation flying from St.Catharines Ontario to the Toronto Island airport in a small (maybe 10 seater) plane.  A couple of weeks later that very same plane crashed into Lake Ontario while attempting a landing at the Toronto Island Airport.  The copilot lost his life in that one.  Another close call was an aborted landing in thick fog at the Halifax, Nova Scotia airport. That one was scary as the pilot hit the engines with full power and pulled up very close to the ground. It was probably a routine well trained maneuver for the crew.  Then there was the flight out of Fort Myers Florida on a stormy afternoon.  During the climb out there was a terrific bang sound.  I wondered if we didn't get hit by lightening. All the kids on the plane started crying.  

I used to fly with my brother-in-law in his small two seater plane in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario.  On one trip we could not communicate with the tower at the airport where we were landing.  He chose a runway and put the plane down. That runway crossed over another runway and we found out after landing that the other runway was the active one.  Luckily no other planes were landing or taking off on it.

I just noticed that when I play the slideshow it presents the screen shots in the reverse order of the way they were taken (at least that is what I noticed for the last slideshow with Alaska Air).

I just changed the sort order in Photobucket so hopefully it will stay that way.


https://s87.photobucket.com/user/vifc313/slideshow/Miscellaneous/San%20Joaquin%20Valley%20CA/SJV%202

Very interesting.  A crop duster no less.

The only thing to keep in mind is that lakes and streams/rivers in the Valley are not full like these photos indicate. The Delta area has water but not the foothills and Valley. Forests that were still hanging on in 2014 are dying this summer. A lot more yellow. Oh, and black!

Just a reminder that the scenery in the flight simulator is not always accurate.  It is an approximation of the real world.  The main natural features (e.g., rivers, lakes) should be there as well as the main highways.  However, even those things are a shot in time and do not change in the simulator as time goes by.  I can pay for photoreal scenery which is like a photographic image but again it is an instant in time.  It also looks terrible from low flying altitudes because it has limited resolution.  From 10,000 it should almost look like the real thing but from 1,000 feet forget it. The software is a flight simulator with emphasis on flight but it can still be fun to fly over areas with which people are familiar.

TD, Thank you for further explanation. It's still fun to see.

Glad you like Sanderson.  I've been enjoying doing these flights in areas where SFGers live.  I have some photoreal scenery for New Hampshire and would gladly do a flight for anyone living in NH.

Sanderson, What are the circles, like in photo 16?
CC

trolleydriver wrote:yolos ... I believe the round crop fields are from center pivot irrigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation

Irrigation system.

sanderson wrote:And here I was going to answer that they are Alien crop circles.

Nah!  Alien crop circles are much prettier and more intricate.

TD, these are great! Anything in the Great Lakes region?

SR ... Sure I can do a flight in the Great Lakes region but it's a big area so I need to narrow it down to no more than say a couple of hundred miles.  I could take a flight from the small grass strip airport at Ada Ohio up to Lake Erie and along the shore to either Detroit or Cleveland.  If you have another area in mind around the Great Lakes just let me know.

Oh, my, TD, maybe a Lear from Findlay, up to Lake Erie and the islands? Put-In-Bay, or ?Kelleys? Hit Cedar Point/Sandusky? That would be cool! Where
I am is just rolling, corn, beans, boring.