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DAY 1:
FIRST FLIGHT
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney Dayton Daily News
DATE: July 21, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C. - We had almost flown past First Flight Airport before I spotted it.
Ty Greenlees, my partner, saw it
first. I had trouble recognizing the plain gray strip of asphalt on this
heavily developed Outer Banks Island until I saw two small airplanes parked
at the south end. Tired, sweaty and thirsty, we were ready to land. Ready
to get out of a sky that had thrown up thunderstorms along our path,
creating detours that almost kept us from reaching our first destination on
a two-week trip across America. Keying the microphone, I
called out our position to any other aircraft that might be nearby and
banked my little orange Grumman AA-1B into the landing pattern. Angling
into a crosswind, we thumped down onto the 3,000 foot runway and rolled to
a stop. We had come
from Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright brothers
and the place where they invented the airplane, to Kill Devil Hills, the
place near Kitty Hawk where the brothers made their famous first flights.
Eight
hours earlier, our flying day began with great fanfare at the United States
Air and Trade Show. The sky was blue, the weather looked pleasant across
our route, and we lined up with the regular air show performers for an heroic send-off.
N9918L
-- One Eight Lima, I called it -- looked small and homely next to the big,
brightly painted Red Baron Stearman Squadron. Air
show pilot Sean D. Tucker, either taking pity on the plane's peeling paint
or spotting an opportunity for a free plug, slapped one of his stickers on
a wheel cover. We followed Bill Leff's shiny T-6
Texan Warbird, a World War II-era trainer, out to
the starting position and waited to take off while a B-17 bomber led a
parade of Warbirds right over our canopy. Then it
was our turn. We taxied into position, and the voice of Air Show Control
came through our headsets. `One Eight Lima,
cleared for take off.'
We
lumbered into the air, loaded to maximum gross weight, and the Dayton Air Traffic Control Center cleared us for our course
heading. It was an ideal day for our part of the country: a little hazy,
but surprisingly smooth, and with visibility better than 10 miles. Brown
and green squares of farmland spread out like a flat quilt across the
earth. We took turns flying.
As we
crossed into West Virginia near Pomoroy, we saw
plumes of yellowish smoke from the smokestacks of power plants rising up to
our altitude of about 5,500 feet, then flattening into a smear that put a
yellow stain across the sky. We flew through traces of the smoke and I
smelled sulfur and felt an acid taste in my mouth.
We
stopped for fuel and sandwiches at Greenbrier Valley Airport in Lewisburg, West Virginia, a small, busy airport with a
control tower where people sit on benches along the front of the terminal
building and watch business jets and small airliners come and go.
We had
hoped to stop at Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to refuel one more time
before reaching First Flight Airport. But the haze thickened and
clouds began building up overhead. We decided to land at a small field with
the important-sounding name of Emporia-Greensville Regional. On our chart,
it boasted three runways. It turned out to be a sad, little field with two
runways being overtaken by grass, tattered windsocks, a John Deere tractor
-- and no airplanes in sight.
We
hopped south to Tri-County Airport near Woodland, North Carolina. We got fuel, and sobering
weather news: thunderstorms lay everywhere to the east, and where it wasn't
storming, it was hazy. But an airport veteran suggested we try skirting the
bad weather by going north, east, then down the coastline. A series of
small airports lay that way, and he said several had motels close by in
case we got stuck.
We
headed north, and the sky did look lighter that way; we kept going, and the
weather kept improving. Finally we reached the outer banks, and found the
sky hazy, requiring a constant scan for the possibility of other air
traffic, but otherwise benign.
Reaching
First Flight was almost an anticlimax. We were too drained to feel any
sense of wonder or awe that in just a day's flying we had made a trip that
had taken Orville and Wilbur days by boat and train.
HISTORIAN
FOLLOWS WRIGHTS' PATH
* Visitors from around the world come to the North Carolina site.
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney Dayton Daily News
DATE: July 22, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
KILL
DEVIL HILLS, N.C. - Darryl Collins has been the
historian too long at the Wright Brothers National Memorial.
It's
gotten into his blood.
Born
and raised in Manteo, across the sound from this Outer Banks community,
Collins, 43, said he has worked at the National Park Service site for 18
years.
Less
than a century old, the site is steeped in history and rich in symbolic
importance for aviators and aviation enthusiasts. It's
where people, after envying the birds for thousands of years, finally gave
themselves wings.
Dominating
the 431-acre site is a high, grass-covered hill where a 60 foot granite
monument marks where Dayton brothers Orville and Wilbur
Wright flew gliders
to perfect their concept of a heavier-than-air flying machine. Nearby are a
series of stones marking the path of the world's first powered flights,
which the Wrights made on Dec. 17, 1903. A visitors' center contains
replicas of the Wrights' 1902 glider and the 1903 Flyer it led to.
Collins
speaks quietly in a soft North Carolina accent, but his pride in the
Wrights is obvious.
`This
is a true American dream, a dream these two men had, and they fulfilled the
dream at this site,' he says.
Visitors
come from around the world, up to 150,000 a month, he says.
Some
are just families on vacation. Others have a more serious interest.
`They
come to make the bond with the Wright brothers,' he says.
But
Collins has made his own bond. Over the years, he has felt the desire to
take wing himself, but time and money were always barriers.
Patiently,
he's following their path into the sky.
`I just
finished ground school,' he confides.
FOLLOWING A
FLYING RULE OF THUMB, PILOTS WEATHER STORMS ON GROUND
* `It's better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there
wishing
you were down here.'
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney Dayton Daily News
DATE: July 23, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
CORNELIA, Ga. - In this age of computers and
satellites, pilots have an enormous amount of
resources to help them judge the weather.
They
can call down satellite pictures of cloud cover, conjure up radar images of
rain showers, summon information from a nationwide
network of both attended and automatic weather observation stations.
But when it comes time to
decide whether to launch into the wild blue yonder or check into a motel,
the bottom line is a rule of thumb I learned years ago from Don Upp, one of my early flight instructors at Moraine
Airpark.
`Just
remember,' he said one day as we gazed wistfully at an overcast sky, `it's
better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you
were down here.'
Tuesday,
my partner Ty Greenlees and I are down here wishing we were up there
- and glad of it.
Up
there is a huge, swirling mass of clouds, rain and thunderstorms that used
to be Hurricane Danny. It moved north from the Gulf of Mexico at the beginning of the week
and planted itself over Birmingham, Ala., blocking our way west.
We had
hoped to make the third leg of our Spirit of Flight aerial odyssey from Greenville, S.C., to Dallas. Instead, our 850-mile voyage
turned into a 75-mile hop to Cornelia.
While Ty has an instrument rating and my orange Grumman AA-1B
is equipped to fly in clouds, our practice on this trip has been to fly
strictly under visual conditions - after all, sightseeing is one of the
pleasures of flying.
So we
buttoned up the plane and went to a motel, where we watched Danny's stormy
antics on The Weather Channel.
Wishing
we were up there?
In a
sequence of radar images, Danny churned counterclockwise as if it were
still a hurricane, throwing off lines of thunderstorms. `Look at that,' Ty said. `That's ugly, nasty stuff.'
Yeah, we wishing we
were up there - and wishing Danny was down here.
CAROLINA'S DENSE FOG PRODUCES
A FRIENDLY FACE
* 2 neighborly retirees pursue their love of flying with a cropdusting
service.
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney Dayton Daily News
DATE: July 23, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
GREENVILLE, S.C. - Droning through thick haze,
we were just three miles from Plymouth Airport in eastern North Carolina when we saw a small yellow
plane dart onto the approach path in front of us.
There
was no danger - the plane was about two miles ahead - but it annoyed us
that someone would ignore our radio announcements that we were about to
land. The yellow plane taxied quickly off the runway towards a hangar.
`I might just give him a
piece of my mind,' Ty said as we floated down to
the runway. I was thinking the same thing.
It was
a good thing we didn't, because the pilot, Wade Brabble,
was about to become our best friend.
Plymouth,
a small airport almost lost among a thick green carpet of trees just 65
west of Kitty Hawk, wasn't even on the schedule for our two-week flight
around America. We landed there because the weather was getting too bad to
fly.
We had
taken off from First Flight Airport, a simple airstrip at the
Wright Brothers National Memorial on the Outer Banks, filled up our fuel
tanks at Dare County Regional Airport on Manteo Island, then
lifted off again in hopes of finding better weather to the west.
We
didn't. The haze closed in like a gray glove, and we were soon flirting
with the minimum legal limits for visibility. We flew low and slow,
watching for other air traffic and checking landmarks carefully. When we
reached Plymouth, we didn't have to debate
whether to land.
The
yellow plane was a stubby monoplane built for agricultural use - a cropduster. It taxied to a hangar and stopped to load
its spraying tank while the propeller kept turning, then taxied back to the
runway. The pilot gave us a friendly wave as he passed.
We
climbed out of my plane and walked across the sandy soil towards the
hangar. Another man there walked up to meet us. `John Lilly,' he said in a
friendly North Carolina drawl.
He
explained that the pilot, Brabble, was testing
the spraying system with a load of water. Brabble
took off and flew a low, tight pattern around the field. We realized it was
the same thing he'd been doing when we first saw him. `That's a rare
plane,' Lilly said. It was a 1963 CallAir A-9,
built by Imco Inc. in Afton, Wyoming. We knew a little about ag planes, but neither of us had heard of this one.
Brabble returned, parked his plane in front of a hangar and
climbed out. A tall man with windblown gray hair, Brabble
wore a short-sleeve, plaid shirt, blue jeans, and gold wireframe
glasses. He smiled and shook our hands as if we were expected guests. Brabble went into his hangar to drag out a hose as we
admired the well-kept CallAir. I heard him
whistling `O Suzanna' as he worked. The
thickening haze apparently didn't bother him a bit.
`This
is just a hobby for us,' he explained later. Both men had retired from a
nearby paper plant and ran a part-time cropdusting
business, J&W Flying Service, as an excuse to fly.
`We've
been spraying (crops) for what, about 30 years?' Lilly said.
`We've
got 50 years between us,' said Brabble, who
surprised us when he said he was 63. With a laugh he added, `We're going to
stop at 70.'
We told
them we were flying across the country and sending stories about aviation
back to our readers in the birthplace of aviation, where the Wright
brothers invented the airplane.
You
don't have to tell many people who the Wright brothers were. We sure didn't
have to tell Brabble and Lilly. `For a couple of
bicycle makers, they were pretty good engineers,' Brabble
observed.
Looking
at the soupy North Carolina sky, we weren't sure how good
they were as airport planners. Lilly had to leave, but Brabble
stuck around. He led us to a plain office at the end of his hangar where we
could call for aviation weather information.
A
bulletin board in his office was covered with snapshots of various
airplanes, some new, some old, some on floats, some on wheels.
`I like
to be around airports. That's for sure. I like to be around airplanes,' he
said.
Ty called for weather information while Brabble spun flying stories. He told of flying float
planes far into northern Canada on fishing expeditions.
The
weather news wasn't good. Thunderstorm cells were boiling up to the west of
us. But we still weren't certain how threatening the situation really was.
`If you
need a picture of the weather, I have a friend who can get you one,' Brabble said. We piled into his pickup truck and he
drove us to the office of a friend who had a fancy computer terminal tapped
into an aviation weather service. It showed satellite pictures, radar
images, surface observation maps and forecasts for all regions of the nation.
Basically,
the local weather was lousy but slowly improving. The remains of Hurricane
Danny were churning up the sky to the southwest, but conditions seemed fair
directly west. If only we could get there.
Brabble drove us back to the airport. The sky over the airport
was darkening, and we heard thunder rumbling overhead. Soon rain lashed the
field. One Eight Lima, my little orange Grumman AA-1B, looked forlorn on
the parking apron under a driving rain.
Ty and I knew we weren't going anywhere soon. We were
hungry, and we didn't know when we would get a chance to eat.
`Can we
buy you lunch?' Ty asked Brabble.
Brabble smiled. He understood our predicament. `Well, I don't
usually eat much lunch,' he said, `but you boys might be here awhile.' He drove us into town, and we ordered sub
sandwiches at Mamma's Pizza. Brabble entertained
us with more flying and sailing stories.
Something
changed. Wordlessly, Ty and I turned and looked
out the restaurant's large front window. It was brighter outside. The sky
had lightened. The thunderstorms had swept past and the clouds were
lifting.
We paid
the bill, and Brabble drove us quickly back to
the airport. It was time to fly.
Brabble, the guy who had annoyed us that morning, had been a
patient host and helper for hours, without a hint of annoyance himself. `Give me a call if you come back,' he
said. `I've got a place down by the river where I can put you up if you
have to spend the night.' We
really didn't want to spend the night in Plymouth.
We wanted to head south and west. We had a lot of flying ahead of us.
|
RAIN STOPS,
FOR A BIT
* After hours of rain, an opening in the clouds only teased our intrepid
travelers.
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney Dayton Daily News
DATE: July 24, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
JASPER, Ga. - All day
Wednesday, we waited hour by hour at Habersham County Airport for the remains
of Hurricane Danny to drift past and finally leave us a clear path towards
Dallas. It rained so much we joked about giving lessons in an air boat that
sat on a trailer in front of the airport office.
The
ceiling lifted, and about 5 p.m. the sky parted to the west. Tall
piles of white cumulous clouds shined in the sun. It looked more than flyable; it
looked glorious.
We
checked my orange Grumman AA-1B, loaded our bags and took off. The hills
spread out before us. Wisps of fog rose from a few valleys, but the
visibility was the best we'd seen since leaving Dayton.
We headed
west along a track that would keep us near airports in case the weather got
bad. Pickens County Airport, near the tiny town of Jasper, was about 40 miles west.
A little
to the left of our course, the horizon disappeared in a blue-black wall of
rain. The high, flat edge of a thundercloud spread out high overhead, 10
miles above us. We steered away, towards the north, then
turned west as we got around it. The weather ahead still looked good.
Ahead, a
ridge rose to 3,800 feet above sea level. We climbed to 5,500 feet to clear
it with room to spare. But just as we crossed it, we hit a wall of thickening
haze and a horizon swelling with thunderstorm clouds. We would learn later
that their tops were reaching 55,000 feet.
This was
much worse than the weather briefing we had received before takeoff.
`We're
landing at Jasper,' I said.
`You
won't hear me arguing,' said Ty.
The haze
threatened to blind us, but the terrain was lower past the ridge. I pushed
the nose over into a 500-foot-per-minute descent to keep the ground in sight.
By this time we were just five miles from Pickens County Airport, and we spotted it ahead of us. Ahead
of loomed the towering, black mass of a thunderstorm. We flew a fast, tight
landing pattern, landed and tied down at Pickens County Airport.
We
weren't happy. But we had avoided a close encounter of the worst kind, the
last blast of Danny rotating back across our path. We knew we weren't flying
anywhere again this night.
The
airport was closed, but we found a pay phone outside and called a motel for a
room. We found some men in a hangar, working on a Cessna 182. One was ready
to quit for the day, and he gave us a ride into town.
We had
hoped to be eating Mexican food in El Paso tonight. Instead, we're going to
walk across the street from our room at the Budget Inn to a saloon-looking
place called the Blue Rodeo Cafe.
We hope
we won't be wishing we were back among the thunderstorms.
AN AIRPORT
THAT FEELS LIKE A COUNTRY STORE
* Where can a stranger fly in and borrow the flight instructor's car without
showing an ID?
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney Dayton Daily News
DATE: July 25, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
CORNELIA,
Ga. - Four men sat on a porch in
front of the Habersham County Airport office, feeding a black dog. The dog had wandered in from somewhere,
homeless and shy. It had hung around, keeping its distance, and people had
started leaving food for it. Now it seemed to be the official airport dog,
dividing its time between patrolling the line of small planes parked on the
ramp and bumming food from the men on the porch. Ty Greenlees and I felt a lot like that dog when we landed
at Habersham Tuesday morning in my little orange Grumman AA-1B. We had
wandered in from the cloudy sky, knowing nothing about this airport, what the
people would be like or how long bad weather might force us to depend on
their hospitality.
Showing
my city habits, I closed the canopy and locked it when we got out. The office
was a wood-paneled room with wide windows, linoleum floor tiles and Spartan
furniture with chrome frames and red or blue vinyl cushions. A white-haired
woman in her 60s worked on a word finder puzzle. Near her, a man of similar
age with a two-day beard and a battered Georgia Tech baseball cap busied
himself with a Reader's Digest. The only sounds were the tick of a clock set
to international time and the occasional voice of a pilot crackling over the
radio speaker.
Behind a
wooden counter in a corner of the room stood a potbellied man with a ring of
gray hair around his head. Wrinkles creased his face in cheerful patterns.
The counter was piled high with the black logbooks of student pilots, and a
wall facing it was covered with the shirt tails of student pilots who had
made their first solo flights. On every shirt tail, thick black letters noted
the student's name, the date of the solo and the name of the instructor,
James Tatum. Tatum was the man behind
the counter. He was Habersham's flight instructor,
charter pilot, aircraft mechanic and airport
manager. The white-haired woman turned out to be his wife, Marene. We
exchanged some friendly comments about the sky, which was growing thick with
clouds and haze. Without asking us who we were, where we were from or even
whether we were going to buy fuel, Tatum laid a set of car keys on the
counter. `You might want to go get
some breakfast,' he said in a gravelly voice. `I got a Buick you can take.
The transmission slips sometimes, but it usually gets you there.' In an age
of gated neighborhoods, car alarms and bank machines that scan your retina
for identification, flying into small airports like Habersham is like flying
back through decades of time.
This
feeling is partly evoked by the airplanes you find. Near us on the ramp stood
a half-century-old Luscombe,
its aluminum skin stripped for repainting. Cessnas
dating from the 1950s and '60s were tied down around the airport. Even my own
Grumman is an artifact from 1973. But
the country-store feeling of small airports comes mainly from the people who
work, fly or just hang around there. Mechanics and airplane owners tinker
with their machines in the hangars. Pilots and students sit in the office or
on the porch, hoping for flyable weather or just passing time by swapping
tales. And managers like Tatum oversee it all, knowing that pilots - private
pilots, anyway - spend more time at airports than in the air.
Transient
pilots usually fit right into the picture. Most people involved in aviation
share a common bond, the love of flight, and an appreciation for the
hardships fliers endure to pursue their passion.
So it
didn't seem to matter to Tatum who we were or why we had arrived. A pilot
himself, he could guess that we were on a cross-country flight to somewhere,
had skipped breakfast to get an early start, and had sought out his airport
as a refuge from deteriorating weather. And, now that we were there, he knew we had
no way to go anywhere or do anything without help.
We
borrowed Tatum's car. The man in the Georgia Tech cap, Richard Wallace, came
along to help us find a restaurant.
Wallace
wore a blue button-down shirt, blue jeans, and a silver belt buckle with a
Pratt and Whitney aircraft engine emblem on it. Over greasy omelettes and hash browns, Wallace told us he was a
retired aircraft mechanic from the giant Delta Airlines hub at Atlanta's Hartsfield International. The
airport was a lot smaller and Delta was still flying Douglas DC-3s when he
started there, he said.
`I've got
a small airplane I built myself,' he said. Back at the airport, he led us to
his hangar and slid back the wide steel door, exposing a pretty white Kelly
biplane with red stripes and tandem cockpits.
Wallace
showed us the plane the way a mechanic would, opening inspection planes and
cowling panels.
He smiled
as we admired his work. `Yeah, I'm sort of getting attached to the old bird,'
he said.
The
weather kept getting worse. We unloaded my plane, and Richard drove us to a
motel in his pickup truck.
We were
back Wednesday morning in a cab. Tatum was in the airport hangar, changing
the oil on the twin engines of a Cessna 340. It was raining, and the forecast
called for rain most of the day, but Tatum wasn't surprised to see us; he
knew pilots with nothing better to do hang out at airports.
And he
knew that to pilots, few things are better.
STORMS MAKE
AIRPORT BEAUTIFUL
* The late hour and grim weather make landing at Lordburg, N.M., essential
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney DAYTON DAILY NEWS
DATE: July 27, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
Lordsburg's runway was
just three miles west of us Friday evening when we entered the gray edge of
the rain shower.
The
raindrops hit the Plexiglas windshield with a loud sizzle. The wind blast
from the propeller smeared the rain across the bug-spattered windshield until
we could hardly see ahead. But off our left nose, Lordsburg Airport was clear of rain. In the evening
over the high desert, in a darkening sky laced with rain showers all around
and lightning flashes to the west and south, that simple, mile-long stretch
of pavement was a beautiful sight.
I'm not
used to flying in rain, and I worried about all that water being sucked into
the engine. But my little Grumman AA-1B chugged merrily along, and soon we
were turning out of the rain to line up with the runway.
A strong
wind was blowing as we parked, and rain started pelting us as we tied down
the plane and closed up the canopy. We had left Dallas in the morning in hopes of
reaching Tucson, Ariz., but we knew it was getting too
late to continue weaving around thunderstorms, as we had been doing all afternoon.
But my
partner, Ty Greenlees,
and I were finally making progress on our two-week flight around the United States. Back in Georgia, we had been nearly stalled for
two days by the remains of Hurricane Danny.
We waited
all of Thursday morning for the fog to lift at Pickens County Airport, a cheerless little airfield in
northeastern Georgia that smelled of a nearby chicken
farm.
When the
clouds finally parted, we roared off for Texas, two days behind schedule. We
flew steadily, refueling every couple of hours and watching the landscape
change as it slid under our wings.
The low
mountains and rolling hills of Georgia gave way to flat, forested land
in Alabama and swampy farmland in Mississippi. The Mississippi River was a sprawling tangle of green
channels where we passed over it. We saw a barge threading its way up the
river; it looked like a toy.
We made a
brief fuel stop at Hope, Ark., a big, old airfield which, the
manager told us, had been a training base for B-17 bomber crews during World
War II. We were slow to realize this was also President Clinton's old
neighborhood.
We
entered Texas just south of Texarkana. The Red River looked golden to us in the late
afternoon sun.
As we
approached Dallas, we stayed low and veered south
to avoid Dallas-Fort Worth International and its teeming airline traffic.
The sun
turned pink, then red, as we headed for Grand Prairie Airport south of Dallas. We touched down just as the sun
sank below the horizon.
For once,
we didn't have to worry about finding a motel and a ride into town. Katie
Braun is a flight instructor and former corporate pilot we met a couple of
years ago. We barely knew her, but when we contacted her to tell her we'd be
in her area, she immediately offered to help.
It was
almost 9 p.m. when we called her from the airport, but she and her
boyfriend, Dale McCombs, drove out to pick us up.
We had
run out of clean clothes days ago. We were groggy from hours in 90-degree
heat, parched from sitting in a blast of dry wind blowing through our partially
opened canopy, and we smelled from days of sweat.
But they
didn't flinch. They drove us to Dale's house, handed us towels and a laundry
basket and pointed us to showers. While we cleaned up, they grilled steaks
and made salad and mashed potatoes. We all ate dinner at midnight.
Friday
morning, I asked Katie if it's common for her to get called out of the blue
from people who say they're coming to town and want to be taken care of.
`Occasionally,
but more often I do that to other people,' she said.
Dale also
understood what it's like to be a pilot at the mercy of others. His father
was an Air Force pilot and Dale flew Phantoms for the Marine Corps. Now he
flies Boeing 727 airliners. But he also owns a little Piper Cub for pleasure
flying.
They
drove us back to Grand Prairie. We made a short hop to Arlington Airport, where we looked at Dale's Cub.
But it
was time to be on our way. For the first time on our trip, we had a clear
sky. We took off to the south and turned west along Interstate 20.
The landscape
quickly changed. Tree cover gave way to sparse prairie. We climbed steadily
with the terrain. Soon, we saw the white gridwork
of oil fields, white lines connecting white squares like modern geoglyphs. In the center of each square, the long, black
arm of an oil well pump slowly dipped and rose.
We passed
to the south of Abilene and Dyess
Air Force Base, steering clear of their controlled airspace. We could see a
dark row of B-1B Lancer bombers parked at Dyess,
and we heard Dyess Tower clear a pair of the big bombers
for takeoff. But we were well out of their path by then.
We were
getting into Big Sky country. The land seemed to widen, the sky to grow.
Instead of peering through dense haze, we could see for dozens of miles. Rocky buttes and low mountain ridges
added texture to the landscape. Isolated thunderstorm clouds fanned into the
sky on the horizons.
But the
distances between airports were also growing. We couldn't count on having an
airport in sight every five minutes. We had to pay attention to our fuel
consumption, the distance we were covering and our time in flight.
Our
flight guide listed Culberson Airport at Van Horn, west of Midland, as being attended 24 hours per
day. When we got there, the place was deserted. We walked into the silent,
stuffy office. We found a pay phone and a list of phone numbers to call for
gas.
At the
third number, we reached Larry Simpson at a Radio Shack and office supply
store. He showed up a few minutes later to fill our tanks.
Simpson,
it turned out, was Van Horn's airport manager, office supply store magnate
and weekly newspaper publisher. He flew helicopters in Vietnam and seemed to be trying to keep
the airport open as a public service.
The old
field didn't see a lot of business these days. One runway was closed and
overgrown by short grass and bushes. `You're the first airplane that's come
in here since Wednesday night,' Simpson said.
We took
off for El Paso. Afternoon thunderstorms were boiling up all along the
Texas-Mexico border. We veered around one just west of Van Horn, climbing
first to get over a line of jagged ridges.
The storm
cloud was a tall pillar of ivory cumulus clouds, but underneath its dark
shadow, a black shaft of rain drenched the desert. Lightning flashed through
the rain, and we could hear the electrical discharges crackle in our
headsets.
From El Paso we headed toward Tucson, but we planned our route airport
by airport, eyeing the thunderstorms and estimating the daylight we had left.
Thunderstorms
are dangerous to small planes, and we weaved carefully among widely scattered
cloudbursts. The black rain shafts with the lightning
stabbing down through the darkness was sobering, but we still saw
these thunderstorms as things of astonishing beauty. They were all around us,
but none was close enough to be a threat. We flew as if floating through a
great room filled with columns. Above us, ivory clouds spread across a deep
blue sky. Below, bands of rain deluged the parched earth.
Passing
over Deming, N.M., we saw more thunderstorms to the
south and west. One just to our south was particularly dark, fat, and full of
lightning. Worse, we could see the clouds around us churning up fresh storms.
We closed
up the plane and got inside the airport office just as a storm broke. Wind
and rain swept over the airport for half an hour, while lightning flashed in
a sky suddenly turned dark.
We knew
we were done flying for the day.
ALTITUDE
PUT BRIEF CHILL ON TRIP
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney DAYTON DAILY NEWS
DATE: July 29, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
Mother Nature gave us a
startling physics lesson Saturday. We were less than 100 miles from Tucson, climbing to 7,000 feet to clear
a jagged mountain ridge, when the engine of my Grumman AA-1B suddenly started
coughing. My partner, Ty Greenlees,
was flying the plane. He tried several remedies but nothing seemed to help.
Fortunately, we had just passed Cochise Airport near the town of Willcox, so we turned around and landed.
The culprit, it turned out, was ice. In many small airplane engines, cold air
rushing through an air inlet can turn to ice. * FLYING DOGS: Every airport seems to have its own
airport dog. At Lordsburg Airport in New Mexico, the airport dog was named Heidi.
Heidi had suspiciously short ears. Her owner, John Heemsbergen,
explained that Heidi tried to run under an airplane propeller, and it took
150 stitches to sew her up.
* JETS
FOR SALE: Gadsden Municipal Airport in Alabama is a civilian field, but when we
landed there Thursday it looked as if the air forces of Eastern Europe had arrived. It turned out to be
the home of a major broker of jet fighters and trainers that are available
for private ownership since the breakup of the Soviet Union. There was even a Russian MiG-21
on the ramp.
* GETTING
IT WRIGHT: Aviation hasn't forgotten its roots. Somewhere in any airport you
will find a picture of the plane the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C. One exception seemed to be in Pickens County, Ga. We didn't see a picture of it
anywhere. Until we went to the bathroom.
TRACTORS OF
THE SKY
* 'Cropdusting' is a throwback to earlier days, and
the industry has been
modernized.
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney DAYTON DAILY NEWS
DATE: July 29, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - With a throaty roar from its
radial engine, a fat yellow biplane flew low over a corn field, trailing
white mist from a row of nozzles under its wings.
The plane
banked sharply, reversed course and came across the field again, laying
another trail of mist. After a few passes it droned away across the wide,
flat fields, flying just high enough to avoid power lines. This is farming, Sacramento style.
The Sacramento Valley is flat and lush, blessed with
bright sunshine, flowing rivers and rich soil. Farming is a huge industry
here, and airplanes are as essential as tractors. In the case of rice, a
major crop in this area, airplanes are even more important - they seed the
flooded fields where tractors can't go.
My
partner, Ty Greenlees,
and I made an overnight stop here Sunday on our two-week flight around the
nation. We stayed with Ty's cousin, Tara Atkinson,
who works for the California Farm Bureau. She drove us to Riego
Field, a private airstrip and the home of Farm Air, an agricultural aviation
business.
Bill
Porter, a big, mustachioed man who co-owns Farm Air with John Warner, showed
us their four-plane fleet of yellow cropdusters -
and explained that `cropduster' is a misnomer for
their work.
`Most
people have no idea that ag aviation has anything
to do with anything besides spreading chemicals,' Porter said. `Seventy-five
percent of what we do is seeding.'
Farm Air
seeds about 35,000 acres in the Sacramento area with rice, clover, alfalfa
and a variety of grains. It uses liquid sprays to treat crops. Monday
morning, we watched one of Farm Air's Grumman Ag Cats treat a cornfield for
mites.
Porter
said `cropdusting' is a throwback to the early days
of aerial agriculture. `In those days, everything was done in dust form, so
it went everywhere,' he said. `Most places in the country, cropdusters are sprayers,' he said.
Agricultural
aviation is just one facet of the wide realm of flying known in the United States as general aviation. It encompass all forms of aviation besides scheduled airlines
and military aviation.
Like many
in general aviation, Porter feels the public doesn't appreciate the
importance of ag aviation to the economy and to
society. Simply put, a lot of the food we eat depends on cropdusters
for seeding, fertilization and pest control.
`People
don't think much about where their food comes from,' Porter said.
We found
the same situation back in Lordsburg, N.M. Lordsburg Airport was literally a
port in a storm for us Friday night. It was an attractive, well-lighted runway
where the airport manager, John Heemsbergen, lives
with his wife, Anna Lee. They gave us a friendly welcome and let us borrow a
courtesy car overnight.
Heemsbergen said the airport is also an economic asset for Lordsburg,
a town of 3,500 in the middle of nowhere. `Everybody who comes into town,
whether they're building a motel or a truck stop or working on the gas pipes,
comes through this door,' Heemsbergen said. `The
people who come in here pour money into this town.'
But Heemsbergen complained that local officials see the
airport not as an economic asset, but as a place where wealthy people fly for
pleasure. As a result, he said, the town won't invest in projects such as new
hangars that would stimulate more business at the airport.
Heemsbergen said he and his wife are leaving the airport this year
after three years. `We basically make our living selling airplanes,' he said.
`I think I'm going to buy 80 acres that's narrow and long and build my own
strip."
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FIGHTING
FIRE WITH FLIGHT
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney DAYTON DAILY NEWS
DATE: July 31, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho -
It's humbling to fly through the sky in a small airplane while the earth
reaches up towards you and looms high overhead before you. My partner, Ty
Greenlees, and I were appropriately awed Monday
as we flew north from Sacramento, Calif., toward Yreka, a small, high-desert town at the foot of Mount Shasta. While my little orange Grumman
AA-1B chugged along, straining for altitude, forested peaks and ridges rose
steeply below us.
We
followed Interstate 5, a railroad and the Sacramento River up steep, forested valleys as
the land rose to peaks more than 6,000 feet high. Far ahead, its snowy
slopes rising into a massive, wind-raked pile of clouds, Mount Shasta slowly filled our windshield.
Mount Shasta is a volcanic peak that arises to more than 14,000 feet
above sea level. The United States has many fourteeners,
but Mount Shasta stands by itself, rising majestically from land just a
couple of thousand feet above sea level.
We
landed at Montague-Yreka Airport, a small field with a
3,300-foot runway. Ty's mother-in-law, Sallye Hale, vacationing in the area, greeted us with
two cold bottled beers and a slab of smoked salmon. The airport manager
loaned us the airport courtesy car, a 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood two-door. It
was a huge, white land yacht of a car. We iced down the beer and the salmon
in a foam cooler. We could hardly open the Caddy's
doors, they were so heavy. Ty drove and did a
terrible Elvis impersonation.
Then we
had a chance to see what real airplanes do for a living. A passing
thunderstorm had touched off numerous wildfires in the hills west of Yreka.
White smoke plumes rose high into the air. We saw a spotter plane circling
high over one of the fires and guessed that fire attack planes were on the
way. We staked out one of the fires at a pulloff
along a state highway.
This
was a sight we never see in Ohio. In the western states, state
and federal agencies fight forest fires from the air as well as on the
ground. Airplanes drop smoke jumpers into fire areas and attack fires
directly by bombing them with water or fire retardant chemicals.
We had
seen two four-engine planes, a gray C-130 Hercules cargo plane and a red
and white P-3 Orion, circling a fire as we passed Mount Shasta. Now, we figured those planes
would be back to fight the fires near Yreka.
We
didn't have long to wait: The P-3 soon showed up. It made a low pass over
the fire, circled behind a hill, then came around
again. It was scant feet over the hill when it let loose a long plume of
red fire retardant that fell over the fire like a blanket.
It was
a serious situation, as fire crews on the ground battled fires that kept
springing up and the Orion bombed the area again and again, swerving each
time to avoid surrounding hills. But we couldn't help treating it like an
air show: While I watched and Ty took pictures,
we sipped our beer and chewed on succulent hunks of salmon.
We got
on much closer terms with lightning the next day.
Yreka
was overcast Tuesday morning with scattered low clouds and patches of rain.
We took off early, checking the chart closely while we climbed to clear the
ridges and peaks on our route into southern Oregon.
The
weather was threatening, and we called the Federal Aviation
Administration's Flight Service Stations for weather briefings at each fuel
stop.
In Idaho, a particularly nasty-looking
thunderstorm was closing in on Mountain Home Municipal Airport as we left. Heading east, we
steered to the left around a column-shaped shaft of rain and watched as the
cloud spilling it out grew and darkened.
Lightning
started flashing under the cloud, and we knew the rainstorm had developed
into a full-blown thunderstorm. The winds in thunderstorms can throw a
small airplane high into its midst, batter it with hail and dash it to the
ground like a toy. We steered away, watching the lightning grow closer off
our right wing.
When I
saw a lightning bolt off my left wing, I thought my heart would stop. I
looked up through the canopy and saw dark cloud spreading over us. I
shouted a four-letter word and firewalled
the throttle.
`I
don't like it here,' I said.
It was
our last close encounter with thunderstorms on Tuesday. We droned on across
Idaho, passing over black, convoluted fields of lava along
the Snake River Plains. Hungry and tired, we landed late in the afternoon
at Idaho Falls and called it quits for the day.
After
more than a week of flying, we were finally headed east again. Our flight
Wednesday morning to Jackson Hole, Wyo., a ritzy resort town near Grand Teton National Park, brought none of the anxiety we
had anticipated.
We
followed the Snake River up a valley rimmed by snow-flecked peaks. Below, a
carpet of low, cottony clouds slid by. Bright sunshine bathed us as we
slowly descended into the valley, landed and looked forward to a relaxing
morning in Jackson Hole.
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FLIGHTS
OFFBEAT, SCARY
* From Amazon jungle hops to critter chasing, these pilots push their skill
and luck
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney DAYTON DAILY NEWS
DATE: August
3, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
EDITION: CITY
SECTION: NEWS
PAGE: 15A
WAXHAW, N.C. - Townsend Field looks like a
typical small airport, almost lost in the forested hills south of Charlotte, but the pilots here do flying
that would make a fighter jock shudder. Don't expect to find them swaggering
into the local bars, though; you're more likely to find them praying.
This is
the home base of JAARS Inc., the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service. JAARS is
the flying, computer and communications arm of Wycliffe Bible Translators, a
Christian missionary organization that has been translating the Bible into
every language of the world since the 1930s. Its missionaries live in the
world's most remote villages - and JAARS pilots get them in and out. David Ramsdale,
editor of JAARS' newsletter Beyond, talked to us about his 13 years of flying
in Peru's Amazon jungle. The highest
altitude we faced on our trip was 10,000 feet above sea level; Ramsdale, breathing oxygen from a bottle, used to fly
single-engine Helio Couriers up to 22,000 feet to
cross the Andes Mountains.
Helio Couriers are sturdy planes with big wings and engines
that let JAARS pilots get in and out of seemingly impossible airstrips.
Ramsdale recalled one strip tucked far back in a valley. After
flying over the strip to eyeball its location, he said, `You'd fly down the
valley (and) suddenly you'd come around the bend, and you had to be in the
right place, and you were committed to land. There was no going around. It
was built into the side of a mountain.'
Sweat,
sunscreen, tears
TUCSON, Ariz. - The morning we were to fly into
Tucson, I slathered my face with SPF 25
sunscreen to protect me from the merciless desert sun. Big mistake.
It was
warm, and by the time we reached Avra Valley Airport north of Tucson, we were perspiring freely. I was
flying this leg, and just as I lined up on the runway, my eyes began to
sting. Sweat was running into my eyes, and the sunscreen with it. I blinked
fiercely, almost blinded by sweat, sunscreen and tears.
`Ty, stand by the airplane. You might have to take it,' I
said. I can't remember what Ty said, and I doubt if
I could repeat it here anyway. I made a safe landing, but that was the last
time I used sunscreen.
Air-tracking
animals
JACKSON
HOLE, Wyo. - The small, yellow,
fabric-covered plane parked at Jackson Hole Airport looked like a Piper Cub, but it
wasn't. And it had a curious antenna that looked like a TV aerial mounted on
its struts under each wing.
It was a
rare plane called an Arctic Tern, and owners Claude Tyrrel
and Jerry Hyatt of Worland, Wyo., fly it to track animals for the
state's fish and game agency. The agency tags a wide variety of wild animals
with radio transmitters to study animal populations and movements. Tyrrel and Hyatt use receivers in the Tern to locate
them.
Just back
from a morning of tracking grizzly bears, the bushy-bearded Tyrrel said he also tracks antelope, elk, mountain goats,
bighorn sheep and wolves. `Pretty near any kind of critter that moves is
tracked by aviation,' he said.
STRUGGLING
OVER ROCKIES
* The mountains threaten to push the flying duo beyond their skill limit
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney DAYTON DAILY NEWS
DATE: August
3, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
Climb. Climb. Climb.
Jackson Hole, Wyo., is a flat, green valley just
south of Yellowstone National Park. It embraces a long, blue lake
that mirrors the stately, snow-streaked peaks of the Grand Tetons. High mountains rise all around it. That's why we must climb, and
that's what I urge my little orange airplane to do as we start down the
runway at Jackson Hole Airport to continue our two-week flight around the
United States.
It's a
lot to ask of my Grumman AA-1B. It has short wings and a small engine. It
wasn't designed to fly much above 12,000 feet. The airport's runway is at
6,445 feet above sea level, and Ty and I make a
full load with cameras, computers, clothes, and full fuel tanks.
The airplane
starts sluggishly down the runway. The wheels rumble as it runs on and on,
accelerating until the thin air flowing under the wings begins to push it up.
We rise
slowly, barely flying, and the puffy remnants of morning fog lie just ahead.
We bank gently into a left turn and begin the long, exacting task of climbing
high enough to get over the mountains to the east.
We fly a
racetrack pattern, climbing at 200 to 300 feet per minute. We fly toward a
steep valley where the Gros Ventre
River
flows, then turn away. This valley is our best path through the mountains,
but it winds among peaks higher than 10,000 feet to a pass 9,000 feet above
sea level; we need more altitude.
Climb.
Climb. Climb. We have 9,000 feet and begin heading up the valley. Carpets of
fog hang over the valley floor below us. We are barely climbing now. I pull
out the mixture control a notch, leaning the fuel flow. The engine's beat
seems to quicken, and the needle on the rate-of-climb gauge inches upward.
I fly
while Ty takes pictures of the snow-flecked peaks
all around us. I try to keep the airplane trimmed to its best climb rate -
too shallow and we stop climbing, too steep and we flirt with a stall, which
would cause the wings to lose their lift and the plane to nose into a dive.
It's a
delicate process: Flying slowly in the smooth air, every movement affects our
balance. When Ty reaches behind our seats for a
camera or a lens, the airplane's nose starts to come up and I nudge the
control yoke forward to stop it. When he leans forward, the plane's nose dips
and I pull back. When we turn to follow the valley, I bank ever so gently,
and the nose turns dreamily to its new heading.
So far,
so good. But neither Ty nor I have flown in high
mountains before. We have read about the treacherous downdrafts and
whirlwinds that mountains can make, but knowledge isn't the same as
experience. I know my airplane is close to the limits of its performance; I
worry that the mountains might push us beyond the limits of our skill.
We reach
10,000 feet and start slowly across the highest pass. We watch white patches
of snow, green alpine meadows and gray outcrops of rock slide below us. Air
coming up the mountain rocks us gently, but the winds stay asleep.
A sawtooth line of peaks appears in the distance to our
right. It's the Wind River Range, and I reflect on the scene. Twenty-one years ago this
week, I climbed among those mountains, higher then on foot than I am now in
my airplane. Twenty-one years ago this week, I proposed to my wife in those
mountains.
As the
peaks around us begin to drop away, I am grateful they have let us go.
FUELED BY
ROMANCE
* Although pilots often rationalize their flying, most are driven to it by
love and recreation.
BYLINE: Timothy R.
Gaffney Dayton Daily News
DATE: August
4, 1997
PUBLICATION: Dayton Daily News (OH)
OSHKOSH, Wis. - When we
cooked up this Spirit of Flight project last winter, Ty
and I pitched it to our editors as a way to link the wide world of modern
flight to Dayton's aviation heritage.
We
contacted national aviation leaders for comments and downloaded megabytes of
facts and figures from the Internet. But we weren't fooling anybody. And after two weeks of
flying across deserts, over mountains and around thunderstorms, we conceded
to ourselves that this highminded-sounding project
was nothing but an old-fashioned romantic adventure.
Even Phil
Boyer, president of the 300,000-member Aircraft Owners and Pilots
Association, had us figured out before we took off. We were flying for the
romance of it, he told me in a telephone interview.
But that
notion didn't put him off. In fact, he said AOPA surveyed pilots extensively
a few years ago and found out that romance is why people fly.
`People
do not learn to fly for transportation,' he said. `It's the recreation and
romance that starts this thing off.'
And just
as we tried to sell our project on journalistic grounds, Boyer said pilots
try to rationalize their flying.
`We
apologize for it all the time. We want people to know that we use our planes
for business ... we don't want to admit that we own a plane to expand our
horizons on the weekend,' he said.
Nobody
apologizes here at Oshkosh. Since July 30, thousands of
airplanes of every description have covered the ground and filled the air.
This is the home of the Experimental Aircraft Association and the site of its
annual fly-in convention, which runs through Tuesday.
It's part air show, part convention and part flea market.
Hundreds of thousands of people who love aviation come to show off their
planes or gawk at the planes of others. Homebuilders rub shoulders with
legendary designers and astronauts. But, despite its vastness, it has the air
of a small-town festival or a big family reunion.
Pat
Wagner, a wingwalker from West Milton, has been coming to EAA fly-ins
since the 1960s. `It's like coming home. I don't know why. You're only here
one week.... You just kind of feel like family,' she said Sunday.
We got
the same feeling as we closed in on the airport Saturday afternoon in my
little orange Grumman AA-1B. When Ty radioed our
position to Air Show Control, we heard air show performer Patty Wagstaff jump on the frequency.
`That
sounds like Ty's voice,' she said.
We didn't
answer - the frequency wasn't for chatter - but we grinned at each other,
knowing we'd soon be seeing a lot of aviation friends.
Flying
for romance is a notion Boyer said aviation manufacturers and organizations
are trying to revive to stir up new interest in general aviation - the broad
field of flight that includes everything besides airlines and the military.
They're
trying to get people excited again because, despite the enthusiasm here at Oshkosh, general aviation is sagging.
Since
1979, Boyer said, the number of U.S. Licensed pilots has dropped by about 25
percent, from 827,000 to 622,000. Less than half as many new students sign up
each year as in the 1970s. And airports are closing around the nation.
We saw
what all those facts and figures meant during our flight. The average small
airport office has a rundown look. Aging airport managers struggle to keep
the airport open for aging pilots and their aging planes. Airports that once
had two or three runways open have one, while weeds consume others.
It was a
sobering aspect of our trip, because we also saw many of the ways that
general aviation touches our lives - from seeding and treating crops to
fighting forest fires and studying wildlife.
And we
steeped ourselves in the romance of it, which is something that defies
quantification. We couldn't find a way to put a value on the sense of wonder
that comes from watching the colors and patterns of land and sky change as we
crossed from one side of America to another and back again.
Romance
is more than just sizzle to sell the product called
general aviation. It's the root of it all. Call it a challenge. Call it
excitement. Call it an affliction, as Wilbur Wright did nearly a century ago.
It's why we all fly, and it's the best reason of all.
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