Grandkids and airplanes are a lot of fun. Put them together and great things can happen, as Mark Fay found out in this picture. As he says about flying his first granddaughter on her first flight in his Cessna 182RG: “Every reason I became a pilot came to life over these two days.”
I was flying with one eye watching for landing sites – the only way I fly the Rockies in a single engine piston. (It seems there is always someplace to go near the airways – hope I never have to prove it!) I managed to stop my ground scan long enough to take this picture. You can see the ski runs above Mountain Village in the distance. Beautiful place to live and fly.
Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.” Most who live by those words are fliers, in one way or another. Try to think of an avocation, a passion, an adventure, that doesn’t involve the release of a person or object from gravity’s surly bonds. They know the moment of flight where the daring adventure of life is attained.
After the winds have been tamed, after the distance traveled; after you have set aside the weather maps and navigational charts and flying’s fears. After you have arrived… it’s a moment so sublime, there is no other feeling like it. Joy and pride and relief and excitement drenched in the smell of hot oil and the sound of happy strangers and friends who know exactly how you feel – because they have felt it, too.
Night. Rain. Extremely high surface winds. Low visibility. Mountains. Less gas then I would have liked. Now I couldn’t get the lights to the runway at Martin Campbell Field (1A3) to come on. “This is how people kill themselves in small planes,” I thought to myself as I passed the final approach fix and decided to go missed. I thought back to the start of the trip, The Hunter and The Door.
I realized flying has made it all my hometown. My neighborhood now stretches from sea to shining sea; I am a part of all of it. I thought of a trip from Chicago to Texas where a storm system left me options through Kansas or through Georgia. Either one would work. As easy as picking a bank branch on one of two corners, my choice for convenience now can cross a thousand miles.
In this beautiful and heartbreaking article, Mark Fay shares the story of an emotional day. It involved plenty of flying, from a night IFR takeoff to a gusty landing. But the real lessons have a lot more to do with family, grief and decision-making under stressful circumstances. It’s a reminder of the unique perspective flying can give you on life and loss.
I am so lucky. Every flight, I am accompanied by nine extraordinary pilots, looking over my shoulder and whispering in my ear. They have made my flying safer, more enjoyable and less expensive. They’ll go with you, too. All you have to do is ask.
I was flying as well as I ever had, and even though fatigue was at work I was happy. Then the unexpected happened. After fitting into a four-plane pattern at home base, on short final I realized the pilot was unconscious! Relax. I was perfectly alert and awake. My loss of consciousness might even have been a good thing. Allow me to explain.
If you are serious about moving you and your loved ones around by air, here are 10 things I have learned that I never read anywhere else. It is more rewarding and more fun than I ever imagined. It’s a lot of other things, too, nearly all of them good.
Last September I broke something important to me. The cause was more an abundance of caution than of carelessness, and I took comfort in that. Still, I wished I could fix it. Sitting at the kitchen counter one morning in June I thought I saw a way to make it right.
My pilot buddies and much of what I read tell of the virtues of the more dramatic times: thundering takeoffs, a perfectly executed crosswind landing, the intense concentration requirements of low approaches. While I admit that each of those aspects have their charms, I am smitten beyond relief to the time when the altimeter is slowing unwinding.
“So how hard is it to fly an airplane?” my good friend Mike asked as he settled into the right seat. It was the first time he had been in a plane smaller than a regional jet and I sensed he was apprehensive. “It’s simple, like riding a bike.”
False bravado in the left seat can get you killed. The trust that you carry has to be inviolate: a certainty that you know what to do, how to do it and when. For me, that trust has been an off-and-on thing.
Sometimes you learn things that you didn’t expect while looking through airplane windows. I noticed this when I first started to fly and it has become the most beneficial part of the experience. It doesn’t happen on every flight. But it happened again recently.
If you have read many aviation stories, you will suffer no harm by ignoring this one. It is an Old Story that happened yesterday. I’m sure you have heard it all before. I would find it only mildly interesting were I not the protagonist, the antagonist and the jester.
A long time client in Leavenworth, Kansas, has invited you to a meeting to show your newest product. The key decision-makers are only available from 11 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. You scheduled a flight in your Cessna Turbo 182RG, equipped with a Stormscope, XM weather and S-TEC 55 autopilot.