Any ideas why this shows a straight line track with a hook at the end and no altitude record (when the actual route of flight was the typical IFR meandering)?
The tracklog show why the track is so straight; no position messages for nearly 3 hours.
The positions at the end appear to have come in reverse order; that is quite strange.
It is also less than a 2 hour flight, so a 3 hour track log makes no sense.
Did you make a short VFR or IFR flight north afterward? We never received an arrival or cancellation message for that flight, so the system added on the positions received later in the afternoon to that track.
It was an IFR flight SNS to SMO (terminating in a landing at SMO, a towered field), followed by a VFR return trip with no flight plan an hour later.
Did you taxi back to the nw after landing?
Why would you fly an hour and half one way IFR and then VFR with no flight plan back? 
Why not?
The typical weather pattern for N. California in the summer is to have a coastal marine layer (aka fog) in the evening and morning which burns off by some time between 10 am and noon. This was an AngelFlight which required flights between airports with fog in the morning, but it had all burned off for the return trip in the afternoon. In addition, I usually like to fly IFR into Los Angeles area airports because it is usually very hazy from smog, there is a lot of air traffic crowded into a small space and it is hard to see some of the small airports packed into dense metropolitan areas.
VFR flight plans are optional and don’t serve much purpose when you have VFR flight following from ATC.
So what else don’t you do? Reset transponder to 1200?
Not sure if you are asking a real question or not, but as a matter of fact the answer is no, I didn’t reset the transponder to 1200 as ATC gives you a discrete transponder code for flight following even though VFR.
I don’t understand why you wouldn’t file a flight plan on a long trip across a variety of terrain or a rocky cliff coast line over the OCEAN. I do wonder what else you have discarded from your training? It seems that most pilots of GA planes that I hear about crashing on cross country flights have not filed a flight plan. Although that is not a cause of a crash, pilot error and forgetting something simple from private pilot training usually is the cause.
What happens if you are flying through busy California air space and the controller can’t assist you right away or cannot offer flight following for a variety of reasons? It seems it is more prudent, safe and responsible to just file a flight plan.
Regarding the topic… is there a chance you were on your old xpdr code on that northwest hook before receiving flight following or being picked up by departure on your new code?
Haven’t discarded anything from my training. A VFR flight plan provides no value except in the event of a crash so they know where to start looking. Since there is a long lag between expected time of landing and the time that they start a search, it can be many hours. With flight following, ATC knows immediately if you don’t check in and can start a search much sooner. Frankly, I don’t know many experienced pilots who normally file VFR flight plans.
I fly this route regularly and have never had a problem getting flight following the entire way.
No, I got a different code for each leg of the flight (3 legs total).
I’ve only filed about 2 VFR flight plans since I was a student pilot.
Both were when I lived in Utah and I was going on long flights over hostile terrain. (Moab, Canyonlands, Arches, Lake Powell, Grand Canyon…think Aron Ralston territory)