Waypoints

As usually happens, the worries of the day seemed to fall away as the Bonanza climbed off the runway. The roily air became an excuse to pull the throttle lever farther and farther back. The reduced power and a few sightseeing excursions extended what should have been a 30-minute trip into something closer to an hour.

Thinking about how flying has become a pressure relief valve, my mind drifted back 15 years.

Hunched over in a dark, shallow basement under an old mansion, I shoveled mud from the floor out an open window — a summer job working for a general contractor. The tattered house was being restored.

While I labored, the boss sat upstairs in the kitchen having coffee with the lady of the house. I could hear them conversing through the floorboards just inches above my head. At 18 years old, I was the low man on the crew's totem pole and had the job to prove it. Behind me in the damp, stinking labyrinth was a dilapidated old furnace and a water heater, slightly atilt on the dirt floor. The hours crawled by, the mud pile outside the window grew — ever so slowly, my mind went numb — thoughts off somewhere, probably planning my next flight in the Skyhawk I had just checked out in. My private pilot certificate was only a few months old then.

Just when I thought I couldn't toss another shovelful out the window, a loud pop and a scream behind me snapped my brain into the here and now. As I jumped, my head hit the floor joists above; my hair instantly entangled in cobwebs. I whirled around, head throbbing, finally identifying the shrieking.

Steam whistled out of the water heater where a pop-off valve had resided seconds earlier. After countless years quietly slaving away in the dungeon, the old heater had chosen that minute to give it up. It wasn't going quietly, either. Water poured out everywhere. "Not more mud!" I remember thinking as I struggled to close the intake valve overhead.

Sometimes now when the stresses of home, work, and life in general gang up to make me feel as though I'm about to burst, I search for a release before my pressure relief valve goes the way of the one in that old water heater. And I've found that nothing puts things back into perspective faster than a clear day and a familiar airplane.

I'm fortunate to have an office right on an airport; an available airplane is usually only 50 yards away.

Everyone has his own reasons for flying. Some pilots enjoy boring holes in the sky and tooling around the neighborhood in a tube-and-fabric taildragger. Others see no reason to fly around right side up and straight and level when upside down and around and around will do just as well. For still others it's landings. Around the pattern they go refining their touchdowns until they can put the airplane on the spot every time with a soft chirp of the tires.

I've always been fascinated by the utility of airplanes. Whether piloting a general aviation airplane or riding cattle-car class on the airlines, I find myself computing how long a similar trip would take in an automobile — restricted to a ribbon of pavement and some two-digit speed limit.

I often make the journey from western Maryland to northwestern Pennsylvania, where I grew up. It's 5.5 hours and 285 sm in the car or about 1.3 or 1.4 hours and 185 nm in an airplane. When traveling by car, three of those hours are spent on the pothole-laden Pennsylvania Turnpike (the road's bad, but at least they charge you a lot to drive on it). Factor in a typical two-year-old strapped in a car seat and a typical two- year-old's attention span and it's easy to see how the trip by car can make you want to go flying after you get there, just to relieve the stress. By airplane it's direct Johnstown, Pennsylvania, direct Greenville Municipal for a landing on its 2,700-foot runway — no Class B or C or special-use airspace to contend with.

General aviation airplanes are particularly competitive when going to small and mid-size towns. A colleague's wife recently needed to go to Erie, Pennsylvania. The airlines wanted $500 and she would have to drive an hour to catch the flight. He took her directly to Erie International in his efficient Mooney for a fraction of the price and in far less door-to- door time.

A trip to Wichita for me is about eight hours in a Bonanza — a long time in a general aviation airplane. But it's about the same door-to-door on the airlines because Wichita is one of those places where virtually no one goes nonstop. From the East Coast, at least, Dallas, Chicago, or St. Louis is in your itinerary if Wichita is your destination. In the Bonanza, I can land at Beech Field, Jabara, or Mid-Continent next to the airliners if I want, whichever is nearest my final destination. I can depart whenever it's convenient and make a couple of side trips enroute.

Sometimes, in fact, I wonder how I would make some of the trips I take without a general aviation airplane. For example, last spring Editor- at-Large Tom Horne and I flew to Wichita in the Bonanza for a couple of days and then headed about 20 miles south to Wellington, Kansas. There I picked up N737QN, our Better Than New 172 after it had its engine upgrade at Air Plains Services and before it was re-registered as N172B. I flew the Skyhawk to Olathe, Kansas, landing at Johnson County Industrial Airport just southwest of Kansas City. After visiting with two avionics manufacturers, I headed east to Cincinnati in the Bonanza and Horne followed in the Skyhawk. (Actually, he took off first and I passed him over the Missouri River just west of St. Louis.) We dropped the 172 off at Lunken Airport for the panel and interior work and then came home in the Bonanza.

Watch your travel agent turn pale when you inquire about that itinerary.

We played "Stump the Travel Agent" again last fall when general aviation took us to Wichita; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Fort Wayne, Indiana, in three and a half days.

Sometimes, though, the airlines with their strange sense of economics win. There's no way you can fly a GA airplane from Washington to Los Angeles for the $379 some airlines charge. Or how about $39 from Cleveland to Baltimore? Yet it's $500 from Baltimore to Erie...go figure.

But no matter how you compute it, a day flying — with the soothing sound of a Continental or Lycoming engine, the sense of control when the yoke is in your hands, and the pressure-relief think time afforded when you're a mile above your problems — is always cheaper than the equivalent time spent on a psychiatrist's couch.