Closing the flight plan

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It wasn’t exactly crash and burn. It was a longer agony. A growing awareness. Like the gradual brightening of the grey mist before the lights of the airport blaze forth from the fog and haze on a low minimums instrument approach. Yes, it was slow in coming, but I finally faced up to the fact that my career was a wreck.

Just as glass panels replaced steam gauges, and GPS replaced the VOR, writing for a living is obsolete. We live in a time when the internet is awash with words—more words than at any point in history—so they have become a commodity, worth little. For decades I’ve been able to support my family with my pen, but that’s no longer true and, at an age most men contemplate retirement, I find that I have to start all over. Find a new career.

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Since August of 2014, I’ve posted a new tale here every Friday; but with new things to learn and new schedules to master, time will be at a premium. I’ll have less time to fly—if the frickin’ airplane ever gets fixed—and even less time to write about it. So is this the end? Am I closing the flight plan on Plane Tales for good?

Nah. I’d miss it too much. For me, the need to write is an addiction I’ll never be able to completely kick. Still, I’m going to need to scale back here at Plane Tales. Rather than continue to post weekly, I’ll post when I have a good story to share, some adventure to amuse with, some triumph to brag on, or something I think you’d want to know about.

But before I run the checklist, and drop the landing gear on this new chapter of Plane Tales, I just wanted to thank all of you for your support all these years. To paraphrase what I heard on an airliner recently: We know you have a choice of blogs. Thank you for flying with Plane Tales!

 

Bonding

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Lisa taxied up, shut down her engine, pulled off her headset, and stuck her head out the window. “Wanna fly today?” she called out.

Hell yeah.

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I started toward Warbler’s right wing, but Lisa unbuckled her seat belt, and slid over to the right hand side, making elaborate gestures that I should fly from the left. I reversed course around Warbie’s twin tails, mounted the left wing and stepped down into the cockpit.

I’ve now got enough time in Warbler that I’m starting to feel at home in his spartan cabin.

I buckled in, adjusted my oil-stained Hat in the Ring Society baseball cap, slid my headset over my ears, and pulled the engine-start checklist out from the side pocket. Warbler’s procedures are so simple that a checklist is hardly necessary—there are only a few items on it—but it’s important to maintain good habits, and to set a good example.

I reach under the instrument panel and open the main fuel valve. Then I reach back over the seat to turn on the master switch, which is in the luggage compartment. I push the throttle in a quarter of an inch. Push the mixture and carb heat knobs all the way forward. Switch the ignition to both, shout “Clear!”, and give a healthy pull on the starter.

Warbler rumbles to life, through my headset his engine sounding midway between a lawn mower and a Harley Davidson.

“It’s starting to get bumpy,” Lisa warns me. And sure enough, ten minutes later, 100 feet off the runway, Warbler hits the first pothole.Thump!  The seatbelt digs into my gut. Then his left wing wallows downward, followed by unexpected lift on the tail. The sky gremlins were toying with us as a bored cat with a trapped mouse. It’s hardly alligator-wresting turbulence, but it’s bumpy enough to make one second guess a pleasure flight. It’s not like we needed to get the plague serum to Nome or anything.

I briefly debate returning to the field and getting started on a gin and tonic, but instead, I head an unusual direction. To avoid crossing the town, Lisa normally practices her maneuvers south and east of SXU. My race practice course is north and east. For some reason, today I decide to overfly the city and head out to the southwest, in the general direction of Vaughn, the next community over, about 40 miles away. It has an un-maned airport—N17—with no services, not even a bathroom; but if you’re hungry and land there, you can call Penny’s Diner and they’ll send a busboy or hostess over to pick you up, and will return you to your plane later.

As we wing over the flatter terrain outside of town the turbulence settles down, then subsides. Santa Rosa sits snuggled down in a rift carved by the Pecos River. Wind racing across the arid land tumbles down into the rift then belches upwards again in the general vicinity of the airport. The disturbed flow reaches far beyond the town to the east on most days, and I had just come to accept it as the cost of doing businesses around here. I was amazed at how still the sky upwind of the city was.

We fly writers overuse the literary device “smooth as glass,” but that’s what it was.

Below me, a wide ranch road, a ribbon of white across the landscape, beckoning. I cross the road, bank left, turning a full 180 degrees to re-cross the road, then bank right to reverse the maneuver, then bank left again, then right. Like a quilter sewing two pieces of patchwork together, I stich up the two sides of the road from the sky.

Now the road below angles right, then left, then farther left. My S-turns bend and twist to match the snaking road below—my 180’s sometimes 240s and other times 120s. Warbler’s nose stays glued to the horizon as I bank his wings first right, then left, then right again. The maneuver is smooth. Unbroken. Graceful. Fluid. Joyful.

I’m no longer flying Warbler. He and I are flying as a unit. One organism.

We’ve bonded.

 

The keys

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“You need to practice your landings,” said Lisa dangling her airplane’s keys in front of my nose, “Here. Go fly.”

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Mind you, she wasn’t being snippy. She was being kind. And of course, she was right. For someone whose logbook nearly caught fire from the friction of logging so many flights a few years ago, my airtime has become worse that spartan. Oh, sure, I get up in the air about once a week on average—better than most GA Pilots—but that’s a mere shadow of better times for me.

And most of that’s not real flying, either.

Yeah, most of my airtime nowadays is more that of a glorified passenger, than pilot—often serving as safety for either Rio or Lisa while they hone their already considerable skills. Sure, at some point, either one of them will say, “Do you want to fly for a bit?” and I’ll take the controls and execute some half-hearted ground reference maneuver, or maybe a pair of back-to-back steep turns, cartwheeling through 120 degrees for a sip of g-force-induced adrenaline.

Don’t get me wrong, just being in a airplane, even one whose controls you don’t touch, still beats the heck out of sitting on the ground. Being airborne is always good for the soul. But Lisa was right: I was in danger of being rusty, and I hadn’t been alone in an airplane for a long, long time.

As I settled into Lisa’s pride and joy, I found it strange being in Warbler’s left seat. I’ve only flown him from that side a time or two. Usually I’m the legally required, but entirely unnecessary, safety pilot—half asleep, on the right hand side. And when I do “take the plane” for a while, again, it’s from the right. Stranger still was being in Warbie alone. Well, sort of alone. Lisa had strapped Beryl the Bear into the copilot seat. Beryl, named after the author-aviatrix Beryl Markham, is a well-traveled medium sized Teddy Bear that has accompanied many a member of the Rio Grande Del Norte Ninety-Nines on their flights over the years. Beryl may well have more flight time than I do, not bad for a bear too short to see over the instrument panel.

Lift off! Warbler’s spritelier with only me and the bear—who doesn’t even weigh half a pound—aboard. I’m up into the pattern. I choose Runway 26, the best spectator sport runway from our hangars, so that Lisa can watch my landing practice. Warbler is a heck of a good-looking airplane, but Lisa’s rarely had the pleasure of watching him fly from the ground.

She’s always in the cockpit.

Downwind. Midfield, pull the carb heat. Abeam the numbers, reduce the throttle to 1650 rpm. Trim for 80 mph. Roll base. Warbie and I drop from the heavens. Final. If I were in Tess, I’d be adding power. We look low. Beryl reminds me that Warbler glides shallower and longer than Tess. Still, as we cross the threshold I’m coming down out of the sky at a breath-taking 800 foot per minute. Right before the flare I goose the throttle to break the descent, ease back on the yoke, then settle feather-light onto the runway.

The tires don’t even chirp.

Sweet! Still, one landing is hardly practice. I push the carb heat in, throttle up, and lift off to go around and do it again.

And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

Normal Landing. Maximum angle climb out. Short field landing. Low-level air race takeoff. Refreshing my skills. Relishing the feel of the plane in my hands, I realize that the key to good takeoffs and landings is more than just practice. It’s the summoning the sight, sound, and feel of all your previous takeoffs and landings. For me, thousands over the decades.

Well, that, and having someone lend you the keys to their airplane.