Bonding

Posted on September 6, 2019 by admin

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.

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.

Airplane voyeurs

Posted on August 23, 2019 by admin

Overhead, the distinctive oscillating whine of an airplane engine. I close my book, drop it into my lap, and cast my vision to the heavens—searching. My eyes sweep back and forth, up and down, pausing briefly to take in each segment of the sky in the direction of the engine’s throbbing drone. There! A flash of white. High, high, high up in the azure sky, far above the earth. My soul shoots out of body and rockets into the atmosphere above to join the pilots in the cockpit. My eyes, left behind, remain locked onto the plane.

And I’m not alone. We pilots can’t help ourselves. An airplane flying overhead, like a powerful magnet, never fails to draw our eyes upward. We stop what we’re doing to watch it pass. At home. At work. Out at the lake, on a hike, or even at the Walmart parking lot.

Image: Amazon

Out at the airport it’s worse, of course. All activity and all conversation stop as we watch planes land. When Lisa and Rio hear a radio call on our scanner, they spring out of the hangar like a twin-headed jack-in-the-box to watch the show. Luckily, that’s a somewhat rare occurrence at our sleepy little airport, but at busy airports, two pilots can spend the whole day together, get nothing done, and never say more than seventeen words to each other between sunrise and sunset.

We pilots also watch planes takeoff, of course. And we watch them taxi. Heck, we even stare at them refueling, or just parked on the ramp. It’s more than professional interest. It’s vaguely voyeuristic. Watching planes makes us happy. Some pilots, ones who don’t fly much themselves and have gotten dangerously rusty, even seem to like watching planes more than actually flying them.

I’ll bet that’s why some smart entrepreneur—whose name is lost to the mists of time—opened the first airport restaurant. It wasn’t to feed the traveling public waiting on their flights. It was to take advantage of a group of people who loved airplanes too much to go home for lunch. No advertising required. Just set up some chairs at a window facing the runway and light up the grill. Build it and they will come.

Back on my porch, the high-flying airplane is disappearing over the far side of the dome of the sky, the heartbeat drone of the engine fading away into the distance. My spirit flutters back down from the sky like an autumn leaf, and returns to my body. I sigh, and pick up my book again.

Yeah. Watching airplanes. We pilots can’t help ourselves.

Worth changing your flight plan to visit

Posted on July 5, 2019 by admin

I parked in the deserted lot in front of Doc’s peekaboo hangar, walked up, and pressed my nose against the glass to get a better look.

I wasn’t the only one to have done so. The towering glass windows were pristine above the seven-foot level; but below that, to the left and to the right—for seventy feet in either direction—were smudges, fingerprints, and handprints on the dark glass.

Cupping my hands into a scuba mask-like oval around my eyes to block out the glare and the reflection, being careful this time to get as close to the glass as possible without touching it, I took a second look. In the dying light of the day, the lovingly restored World War II bomber was a beautiful thing. Not a machine of war; rather, a pristine, polished, gleaming work of modern art.

Then, back in my car again, I slowly drove on up Airport Road, checking out the signs of the various businesses. Large hangars displayed the logos of Beechcraft, Cessna, Hawker, Textron. Signature Flight Support had an outlet, as did Rockwell. Flight Safety International had a campus. I was cruising around the neighborhood of Wichita’s Eisenhower National Airport. It’s quite the healthy aviation ecosystem.

But, of course, Wichita is supposed to be the air capital of the world.

Then, as I passed Ylingling Aviation’s block-long building, a sign caught my eye. A graphic of an orange wind sock at half-mast and the words: The Aviator’s Attic. And below that: Gifts and Pilot Supplies.A pilot shop! I slammed on the brakes.

I love pilot shops. I quickly parked and dashed inside to check it out. Although excited at my unexpected find, I was cautiously pessimistic. Why? Well, I don’t know how many pilot shops you’ve been to, but frankly, most are the retail equivalent of a ratty flight school trainer that’s been on a ramp a decade too long. They are dirty, disorganized, and inventory-wise tend to be limited to ASA training books, overpriced headsets, local charts, remove-before-flight keychains, and the occasional aviation-themed wine bottle stopper.

Imagine my delight to find a long, skinny store with dazzling collection of flying merchandise from floor to model-airplane-bedecked ceiling, with the best mix of practical and impractical aviation stuff I’ve ever seen under one roof. Sure, there were charts, and headsets, and flight bags, and training materials. But so too, there were whiskey glasses with aircraft instruments printed on them, and teddy bears with flight jackets, and jewelry, and art, and T-shirts, and metal signs, and hundreds of aviation-themed refrigerator magnets.

And beyond this mouth-watering inventory, the shop was just plane beautiful. Oh. Sorry, I meant to say plain beautiful. Well, it’s both. The lighting is perfect. The merchandise is arranged creatively and attractively, and the floor is so clean you could probably perform surgery on it.

It’s aviation Nirvana. Valhalla. Heaven. Take your pick.

Now, you probably didn’t know this, but in addition to being a certified pilot and ground instructor, I’m also a certified aviation shopaholic. Yes, I’ve logged thousands of hours collecting cool aviation stuff from eBay, Amazon, Sporty’s, the Wright Collection, and more. If it exists, I probably own it. Or if I don’t own it, I either didn’t like it, or more likely, I couldn’t afford it. I only confess to this so you’ll have perspective when I tell you that I didn’t see anything new in the Aviator’s Attic. But I saw everything that’s worth seeing from in any aviation catalog or website on the planet. It’s a remarkable collection, and of course even the slickest website or catalog is a poor substitute for holding an object of desire in your hands. Feeling the heft, turning it over and over to view it from every angle.

Although there really wasn’t anything in the shop I needed, I picked up some more adult beverage glasses for the Plane Tales Hangar, and I bought a few gifts for pilot friends and family—on the theory that it’s important to support any business that’s trying so hard, and succeeding so brilliantly.

The Aviator’s Attic is so infused with a love of aviation that I assumed it was run by a pilot. Not so. The shop is run by non-pilot Heather Cochran, who somehow has tapped into the pulse of pilots, and is clearly a woman of imbecilically good taste and marketing savvy. And I was sure glad she was open late.

It would have been a shame to leave nose prints on her store’s windows.