New2view's Blog   Life on The Blue Marble

Not sure when I had noticed the (approximately) 1500′ unused roadway at Parksville beach park, right in the heart of the town of Parksville. It extended at right angle from an seemingly unused area of beach straight in toward town ending in to a wide ditch, no doubt purposely created to prevent driving from street or park to beach.

In any case it appeared to me to be as perfect a short field aircraft runway as a private pilot like me could ask for!

After visiting with aviator friends at the Parksville/Qualicum airport who had departed for a short trip to the sunshine coast in their Cessna 172 I was planning to rendezvous with them there.

But for some reason which I don’t recall now I had taken on board the father of one of those other pilot’s who’s home jut happened to be quite near the Parkville beach park. So as we quickly flew over Parksville, I rather impulsively decided to land on that unused roadway right in the park!

I turned towards the beach and landed on that roadway with no difficulty at all in my Mooney M20A holding the nose up and raising flaps in order to reduce landing speed and distance. I was always delighted to land on short runways anywhere, but this was clearly not an ‘approved’ landing site by any means!  Happily my mature elderly passenger was not traumatized by the sudden turn of events, and after an amicable goodbye, he was able to simply walk home from there, perhaps slightly shaking his head – as did his novice pilot son when he heard about that unusual landing!

This took place in the 70’s, and his son who is still with us will confirm this really took place on the testimony of his dad. For no particular reason other than the airplanes nearly silent gliding approach no one appeared to witness it either, even though there were quite a few people on the beach and in the park at the time, but safely away from my impromptu ‘landing strip’.. Of course my expeditious takeoff (before any public notoriety) was a lot more noisy than the landing, but then again there was no obvious beach activity.  And a slight on-shore breeze probably mitigated the noise somewhat.

Of course it wasn’t a wise decision to virtually land in downtown Parksville in the 1980’s, but it was done safely and without incident. To this day I  believe that isolated roadway could have served as a downtown Parksville airstrip for enlightened civic authorities.  In any case it was just one more flying experience for me…. hey I said in my bio I wouldn’t exclude my ‘bads’, so consider this one of them!