Club Lets Members Keep Their Heads in the Clouds : Anacapa View pilots and students combine socializing and improving their flying skills by meeting for lunch in out-of-the-way places.

Lisa Breuer knows that not everyone will want to join her recently formed lunch group in Camarillo.

For one thing, members are always choosing restaurants that are hundreds of miles away and take hours to get to.

And then there’s the tab.

“We call it the $200 hamburger,” Breuer laughs.

But for the handful of people who do show up, the investment of time and money are well worth it. This, after all, is no ordinary lunchtime crowd.

This is the Anacapa View Flying Club, based at the Camarillo Airport.

It’s made up of flight instructors, private pilots and student pilots, along with a sprinkling of spouses and children. Some of the pilots are working professionals, some are retired. A few own their planes, while others plunk down the cost of renting and fueling a Cessna for the day.

All, however, have one thing in common. The monthly jaunt the group makes to various restaurants throughout California--the most recent trip to a steakhouse along an otherwise barren stretch of Interstate 5--lets them do what they love most.

It gives them an excuse to fly.

LUNCHEON FLY-IN

It’s an overcast Sunday morning, and so far only a few cars are parked outside the small corner office that Lisa Breuer two months ago christened the Anacapa View Flying Club. Today, it is the gathering spot for a fly-in to the Harris Ranch near Coalinga. But on its non-lunching days, it’s a full-fledge flight school with three instructors. The school is just a stone’s throw from the airstrip, next to which sits row upon row of small planes.

Breuer, 32, didn’t start the school because of any dearth of them in the county--there are three others at Camarillo Airport, two at Oxnard, two at Santa Paula and one (for civilians with some military connection) at Point Mugu. Instead, she says, it was more of a way to test her own wings.

A top-rated air transport pilot with more than 5,000 flight hours logged, Breuer is licensed to teach other instructors as well as to fly for any major airline (a job she turned down). During the last eight years, she has also taught off and on--with a brief but disastrous interlude running her own air taxi company in Alaska--at three of the county’s airports.

Then, last year, she told her husband and former flight student, Jim Breuer, that she thought it was time to work for herself once again and teach full time.

“I’ve talked with other instructors who were pretty open about the fact that they were just trying to build time, to log enough flight hours so they could get an airline job,” Breuer says. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes a person in that frame of mind won’t give everything they can to a student. I love to fly, but I love teaching just as much.”

Beyond teaching, though, Breuer also pictured the kind of place where pilots and students could gather and socialize--an aviator’s country club of sorts. The only difference, of course, would be the absence of alcohol anywhere on the premises. With a “bottle to throttle” rule of at least eight hours, refreshments would include a perpetually filled coffee pot, cold sodas in the icebox and a bowl of popcorn free for the grabbing.

The school’s lunch club, she envisioned, would serve two more purposes. As an open, monthly invitation to the estimated 2,777 licensed and student pilots in the county, the fly-ins would give experienced pilots the chance to hook up with other like-minded folks who enjoy keeping their heads in the clouds. And for student pilots who still had doubts about the value of getting a license, it would show what spending all that time and money eventually would do for them.

You get to go places.

WEATHER WATCH

On this particular Sunday morning, however, the 15 people gathered on the patio outside the flying club don’t look as if they’re going anywhere. Even though a few more cars have arrived, the sky is still unchanged. The club’s American flag, attached to the side of the building, snaps in the wind.

Some members pull out and begin studying their aviation maps--multicolored ones with large circles that represent air miles around various airports, rectangles that show airstrips and dots that represent towers. Others gaze absently into the sky.

“You called the weather, didn’t you?” one woman asks a man as he emerges from the building and joins the group.

“Yeah--it’s supposed to break up at 1700 Zulu,” he says, squinting up into the hazy clouds. Then, to a non-aeronautical visitor, he translates: “Zulu time is standardized time for airline pilots who fly into different time zones. It’s the same as Greenwich mean time.”

Mean time is what other earthbound folks--who haven’t learned to cope with elements beyond their control--might consider this long wait just to get under way. But for the aviators, it’s apparently no more frustrating than for a surfer waiting for the waves to rise.

Even when 1700 Zulu--or 10 a.m.--comes and passes, and the clouds still have not lifted, the solution is merely to pour another cup of coffee.

“We’re slaves to the weather gods,” says student pilot John Lowe, shrugging his shoulders and smiling.

So far, Lowe, who has come for the luncheon fly-in with his wife, Deborah, says he’s chalked up about 50 hours of flying time. The FAA only requires a minimum of 40 flight hours to get a private pilot’s license--20 with an instructor and 20 flying solo--but Lowe says he isn’t ready to take the exam.

And since the FAA also prohibits student pilots from flying with anyone other than an instructor, he and his wife will be traveling as passengers in a four-seat Cessna 172 flown by private pilot John Rifkind.

“I just want to see how someone else flies,” Lowe says.

Lowe’s wife is clearly interested in the same thing, but for a somewhat different reason.

“I’m not interested in getting a license,” Deborah Lowe says. “I just minimally would like to know how to land the thing.” And then, turning to her husband and smiling sweetly: “You know, just in case.”

Another student pilot, Pablo Miliani of Newbury Park, plans to fly solo in a rented Cessna 152. At slightly over three hours round trip, the tab for the day will be about $135, not including gas--between $40 and $50--or the cost of lunch.

“I think that’s why it takes some people so long to take their exam,” Miliani says. “You need to save up for it.”

Like Lowe and Miliani, most of the pilots in the group--even those who already have their private licenses--aren’t instrument-rated. That designation is given to advanced pilots only after they have demonstrated an ability to fly “blind’ without any geographically visual cues. For anyone else, that means flying in overcast weather is out.

But shortly after 11, as if proof that the weather gods once again are beginning to smile, the clouds finally begin to lift. As patches of blue appear, the group on the patio begins gathering up belongings and heading toward the airstrip.

There’s Thousand Oaks legal assistant Anne Tanner, who got her license a year ago, and her student-pilot and physicist husband, David. The couple will be flying in their 1975 Cessna 172, along with the couple’s 11-year-old son and his friend.

“We got the plane a few months ago in Santa Paula,” Anne Tanner says. “We paid $34,000 for it, and our monthly payments are about $200. A lot of people think it’s not affordable (to have your own plane), but it really is.”

There’s Russ Eldeb, 48, who works for a Ventura prosthetics company and got his pilot’s license a year ago, despite a certain handicap. Eldeb--whose wife recently bought him a Cessna Cardinal 172 but still refuses to step inside it herself--has had a leg amputated.

“Some kids grow up wanting to be a fireman. I just always wanted to be a pilot,” Eldeb says. “Finally, when my kids grew up, my wife thought we had enough money and gave me flying lessons for my birthday. I just had to prove (to FAA examiners) that I could push on the rudder pedal.”

Two other pilots, flight instructor Steve Carolan and private pilot Jack Wismeyer, head for the Cessna 172 they will be flying in for the 1 1/2-hour trip into the Central Valley. Behind them walks Breuer, who will serve as a kind of taxi driver for two novice passengers.

Jim Breuer, who has his private license and will fly in a two-seat Cessna 152, is the only pilot who has to carry his co-pilot out onto the field on his hip, held by a firm arm.

“She points out the clouds,” he says as he lifts his 2-year-old daughter, Marliese, into a car seat that has been strapped into the plane.

“A few times, we’ve put her on our laps and let her have the yoke--the control--and she figured out what it did,” he says. “One time we were over Ventura, and she took the yoke and she banked and she pitched. She loved it.”

From the passenger seat, Marliese, clutching a small plastic Bullwinkle the Moose figure, waves goodby to her mother, who now is walking toward a nearby plane. Soon there is the sputtering sound of engines, which then rise into a chorus of high-pitched hums.

The planes take turns moving into place onto the airstrip. And then, one by one they lift, looking like just-fed mosquitoes rising heavily into the sky.

FLIGHT PATH

“Hey Juliet Yankee, you there?”

“I’m here,” crackles the answer.

“You there, Pablo?”

“I’m here,” crackles another.

A few minutes after takeoff, the planes are not visible to each other, except for Lisa Breuer’s and her husband’s, which initially fly side by side and give the aviator’s wave of tipping their wings at each other. But with the push of a button, the pilots can talk to each other through their headphones.

“Where are you at, Deborah and John?” Lisa Breuer asks.

“Halfway between Lake Casitas (and the Camarillo Airport). I’m at 79 and climbing,” Tanner answers, giving the numerical abbreviation for altitude in hundreds of feet.

“Where are you, Pablo?” Lisa Breuer asks of the student pilot flying solo.

“Uh, five miles north of Casitas at 82.”

“You’re north? “

“Uh, northwest.”

After the bantering slows down among the pilots, Lisa Breuer talks to her passengers about the flight path she has chosen to get to the steak house, a route that is different than the one the other non-instrument rated pilots will be taking. After passing over the Gibraltar Reservoir and the Santa Ynez Valley, she banks slightly to the right.

“A lot of them are heading up Highway 5,” she says. “There’s a thing called IFR, instrument flight rules. But in their case it also means ‘I Follow Roads.”’

The desire to follow easy-to-spot landmarks isn’t that hard to understand.

“When you’re flying, it feels like you’re heading north, but we’re really not,” Breuer says, checking her map and making an adjustment to the instruments. “California doesn’t really run north-south; it’s more like east-west. And a lot of student pilots have been known to get lost.

“One guy was doing his first solo cross-country, and he was trying to get to Paso Robles,” she says. “He was talking to other pilots over the common traffic advisory frequency, and he said he couldn’t find the airport. Finally, they talked him down, but he radioed that he’d need someone to help him clean up the plane when he got there. He was so scared he threw up.”

After a few more miles, it’s on to more cheerful subjects, like mechanical problems and emergency landings.

“Planes are generally much better maintained than cars, so usually that’s not what causes problems,” Lisa Breuer says, echoing the position of the FAA, which attributes many small plane accidents to pilot error.

“And as far as emergency landings are concerned, I just tell my students that it’s nothing more than a landing I wasn’t planning on making.”

Which is a subject Breuer happens to know something about. In 1988, she and her brother went to Cold Bay, Alaska, to set up an air taxi service for the 156 residents who depended on small planes for their supplies. Two months later, the two were out of business.

“I had oil temperature trouble and we crashed,” she says. She and her brother both suffered broken backs from the impact into the water, but were pulled out by nearby fishermen who heard the explosion.

“It kind of took the fun out of flying to Catalina,” she said, her fondness for flying over water obviously a thing of the past. “The good thing, though, was that the crash made Jim get serious (about their relationship). We’d been dating for years, but after that things changed.”

And when did they get married? “Good question,” she says. “Hey, Jim? When did we get married?” she asks over the radio.

“1990,” comes a static-filled reply. “Just like a woman not to know.”

Off to her left, in the middle of what looks like a vast expanse of faded, patchwork quilts, is Kettleman City. The steakhouse is now only minutes away.

“Now there’s karma down there,” she says. “Can you imagine: ‘Honey, we’re moving to Kettleman City’? Yeah, right. ‘Honey, where’s the gun?’ ”

A few minutes later, the object of the day’s trip comes into sight: a large, pale building and gas station right beside the northbound lane of Interstate 5. Before it, marked only by an orange wind sock, is a tiny airstrip. There is nothing else in sight.

Shortly after 1:30 p.m., Breuer approaches the airstrip, straightens the plane out and touches gently down, braking and turning into a parking lot reserved for small planes. Within the next half-hour, the rest of the group will follow: Jim Breuer and the couple’s young daughter; Anne and David Tanner with the two kids; John and Deborah Lowe, Pablo Miliani, and pilots Steve Carolan and Jack Wismeyer.

Inside the restaurant, not unexpectedly, the morning’s long wait is followed by another one--but this time, it’s not because of the weather. It’s tough making reservations when you don’t know when you will arrive.

“Did you see all those planes landing ahead of us?” one woman, who is not a member of Breuer’s group, asks a man standing next to her as they wait in line. “I couldn’t believe it. It was like LAX.”

COUNTING CHANGE

At close to 3 o’clock, as the group is seated at two adjoining tables, they open up their menus. For most of them, the excursion, in gas alone, has taken a bite out of their bank accounts. Now it’s time for a bit of frugality.

They pass on the steaks and order salads, sandwiches and burgers, talking in between about crosswinds, bumpy landings and which way they will head back.

It is only when the waitress taps one of them on the shoulder, her pen poised above her order pad and a quizzical look on her face, that they realize they haven’t yet answered her question.

“Separate checks, please,” they say in unison.