The official term for a community like this is a
residential air park, basically a place where you
can live with your airplane and walk out the door and go
fly. My name is Joe Sobczak.
I live here at the Pine Mountain Lake Airport in
Groveland, California. Bought the house in 2017 for
$698,000.
Groveland, California, is about 26 miles from here to
the gates to Yosemite National Park.
It is pristine, a beautiful, quiet spot.
Anybody would love living up here.
It. I'm essentially on call as a test pilot, and I
almost always work out of San Francisco International
Airport. My commute to work is a 100 nautical mile
commute or about 150 miles driving by car.
So what I normally do is jump in in the airplane and
fly down to San Carlos.
It takes about 45 minutes to 55 minutes, depending on
the winds, weather and which airplane in flight
parked the airplane. Jump in a car that I keep out
there, my old airport car and drive up to SFO to go to
work. There's probably about 15 or 20 pilots who
fly to work either daily or as required.
There are a few other people who who have various
other non flying jobs or non pilot jobs that just use
their airplane to get to work. One of our neighbors
pointed out that she could buy an airplane, buy a
house, fly back and forth to Palo Alto, California,
where the same house that that costs a $500,000 a year
would cost $3 million a year.
And even after the cost of commuting come out way ahead
and as a bonus, live up here in the pristine
mountains of Pine Mountain Lake.
The airport here is owned by Tuolumne County, so it's a
county owned public use airport.
There are about 90 residences with hangars that
have direct access to the airport from the ground.
The beauty of general aviation is the regulations
are not nearly as stringent as they are for for
commercial aviation or military aviation.
This airport is uncontrolled, which means
there's no control tower.
So they don't really have to tell anybody.
If I'm going flying, I'll have to do is taxi out and
take off. As a courtesy for other pilots and as a safety
measure, the airport does have what we call a common
traffic advisory frequency.
27. And we use that frequency to broadcast our
position and our intentions. So any other
pilots that may be out there flying know we're out
there flying and they're able to coordinate with us
for for use of the runway.
It's never loud, but it's so quiet.
You can hear every little chirp or bark or or almost
almost anything going on around here.
So it's incredibly quiet and peaceful up here in the
mountains. So quiet, it's noisy.
It's just the two of us. My kids are grown up, so I
didn't need a big house.
And when I came up here looking for a place to live,
it was really all about the hangar.
And you can see the hangar, the hangar behind me, it's
about 3,600 square feet.
I moved in and darned if there wasn't a house
attached to it. In fact, it's above the hangar and
it's about 5,000 square feet of living space, which
is about 4,000 more than I than I need.
But it came with a hangar, so you know, what the heck.
The house does have an elevator. Technically a
dumbwaiter. Especially handy if you've got massive
camera equipment to carry up and down at one level to
the other. I could probably make about seven or eight
bedrooms out of the place if I wanted to make it a
guest house, but they cleverly made it a three
bedroom house by virtue of the fact that only three of
the bedrooms have a closet in them, I think is their
definition of a bedroom. There are seven bathrooms,
by the way, so no one has to wait.
I
have a partner in the airplane. He's a retired
American Airlines pilot.
He lives in Menlo Park.
So we keep the airplane occasionally down there at
San Carlos Airport where we have a hangar and and we
take turns flying the airplane. This one is a T-34
A model which was flown by the Air Force.
One of the big reasons that we bought this airplane is
when the airplanes were converted from military use
to civilian use. The T-34 A like this one, we're
certified as aerobatic airplanes.
As a general rule, it's about a dollar a gallon more
than auto fuel. Airplane burns fuel faster than my
car does, but I get there a lot quicker too.
It's two and one half to three hour drive in my car.
It's a 45 minute flight in the airplane.
The cost of fuel is really about the same, whether a
driver fly and then there's maintenance on the airplane.
And, you know, happily, I'm also a FAA certified A&P
mechanic airframe and powerplant mechanic.
So I do most of my maintenance myself.
So that saves a fair amount of money.
I know some people are concerned about the safety
aspects of flying, and I've heard general aviation
flying roughly equated to riding a motorcycle.
As far as the relative safety of doing it, a lot of
it falls on the pilot. If pilots are careful, they fly
the airplane carefully, the owners maintain their
airplane carefully. It's pretty darn safe.
The reason they feel safer in the airplane is because I
have total control of my environment as opposed to
driving the car where it's me and the 5,000 other cars
that pass me by on the way, say, to the Bay Area in the
airplane, it's all under my control.
There are people around here that come out to the
airport and having been here or owned a house here
for years, didn't even know there was an airport here,
much less a residential air park for pilots.
It's a great community just for flying, just being so
convenient to the airplanes and in the airport.
It's also a phenomenal social environment because
you have an immediate group of people that have common
interests. There's trade offs and it's certainly not
as convenient to go get a check up at the doctors or
go to the grocery store or things like that.
It's like any rural community. The services are
somewhat limited, but the trade off is is easily
offset by the by the serenity peacefulness.
And it's just a great place to live.
There are two reasons that people up here leave and
move away from Pine Mountain Lake.
One of them is health and the other is family.
And so if those are not obstacles, I would
absolutely recommend living up here if you enjoy the the
rural lifestyle.
I don't have any plans to leave at some point,
assuming I live long enough, I'll certainly not
be able to fly anymore. But there's a quite a social
community here of pilots and former pilots in their
eighties, but I plan on being here for quite a
while. I can live up here, fly airplanes, stay out of
the congestion of the Bay Area, read the Fresh Air,
take a trip to Yosemite in 30 minutes.
It's all the justification I need.