The Great Basin Bidet has a new paint job. The San Judas Vortex was unaffected.
SANTA NOETA — October 17, 2026
The Santa Noeta Municipal Water and Surge Tower — known to virtually no one by that name — received a fresh coat of paint last week as part of the airport’s ongoing infrastructure update under the FlyForward initiative. The new geometric pattern in teal and orange replaced a weathered version of the same teal and orange, a distinction that has not stopped anyone from having a very strong opinion about it.
“It looks exactly the same,” said Hector Villanueva, a cargo handler at STQ who has worked the tarmac for nineteen years. “Which is to say it looks like a fever dream someone had about a beach ball. The pilots love it.”
The pilots do love it. The tower — perched on the ridge above the San Judas Pass two miles east of Runway 26 — serves as the primary visual reference for the airport’s signature crosswind approach, in which aircraft must aim their nose directly at the structure to compensate for the rotor streaming effects produced by the Pass. The brighter the tower, the easier it is to locate in reduced visibility, dust haze, or the particular quality of late-afternoon light that settles over the valley in October and makes everything look approximately the same color as everything else.
The tower’s unofficial name — the Great Basin Bidet — dates to at least the late 1990s and refers specifically to the thermal updraft it produces at short final, a jolting vertical bump that veteran pilots describe as reliable, survivable, and deeply unwelcome. The name has appeared in regional aviation briefings, online pilot forums, and at least one episode of a podcast about unusual airports that STQ management discovered three years ago and would prefer not to discuss.
Among international crews — particularly the Australian long-haul operators who occasionally route through STQ on transpacific positioning runs — the approach has acquired additional lore. Senior pilots on flights arriving from Sydney or Brisbane have a documented tradition of handing Runway 26 to a first officer without extensive advance warning, timed to coincide with short final. This practice, known informally as the G’day Bidet, has been described by first officers who have experienced it as “character-building” and by captains who administer it as “a rite of passage.”
STQ management’s 2023 proposal to replace the tower with an automated laser-guidance array was withdrawn after a period of community feedback that airport director Renata Ochoa described at the time as “unexpectedly spirited.” The tower, in its new paint, will continue to stand.
“You don’t tear down a landmark,” said Villanueva. “You repaint it and let it keep doing its job.”
The repainting was completed on schedule and within budget. The San Judas Vortex was unaffected.