Pilotage

Sometimes when I'm flying my airplane my mind drifts slightly off course. I glance out at the wing and wonder about the geography that has slipped by underneath it, reflecting briefly in the white paint. I figure that if a small odometer were in the center of the airspeed indicator, like that on my car, it would be registering about 300,000 miles. That's a lot of scenery to take in.

My airplane lived all of its first 19 years on the West Coast, much of it in the San Francisco area and north. It's spectacular country — velvety green hills rising above the rugged Pacific coastline, vineyards on the hillsides, and tall forests climbing the higher peaks.

Buz Marten, the previous owner, kept the airplane in a carport hangar at River Ranch Airport when he was at his house in Marin. About an hour north he also had a retreat that sat just off an inclined gravel airstrip carved out of a low mountaintop. The leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer still suffers the small dents and dings that were an inevitable consequence of living and flying in that gorgeous setting.

I bought the airplane and brought it east to Maryland. It wasn't the Skyhawk's first transcontinental journey. Buz had made a couple himself. My trip was a heck of a lot of fun, but he had enjoyed double the pleasure — once he reached the East Coast, he turned right around and flew back to California.

The Mid-Atlantic was a new experience for the airplane. For one thing, it lived outside, tied to pins in the ramp. For another, the airplane was a lot colder in the winter than it had been in the moderate San Francisco-area climate. The winter of '93 was a tough one, and for the first time in its existence, 58Q felt the frigid touch of arctic winds, snow, and ice, as well as the searing blast of an engine preheater.

The flying was different, too. The barely IFR Cessna got some new radios and a GPS and began to experience lots of cloud time, especially when crossing north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It slogged through the dense, hazy muck of stagnant late-summer skies and the groundspeed-robbing headwinds of brilliantly clear winter highs.

The terrain was interesting and varied, from the Chesapeake Bay area to the rugged hills of Pennsylvania and western New York to the big cities that define the Northeast Corridor: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The Skyhawk saw them all.

Its next stop was the Midwest: Kansas City, a 90-minute flight northeast from the airplane's birthplace. (Note to almost everyone who does not live in Kansas City and therefore knows little about the place: Kansas City is in Missouri, not Kansas. Yes, there is a Kansas City, Kansas, just across the river — but the one in Kansas is a much smaller town.)

The Midwest takes a lot of hits for having flat, featureless terrain, but the critics are largely uninformed, at least as far as Missouri is concerned. The Show Me State, and especially Kansas City on its western border, is marked by rolling, tree- covered hills. In this part of the world the elevations are modest — you have to keep flying west into far western Kansas and Colorado before the land begins a steady rise to meet the Front Range of the Rockies — but be sure to avoid those tall towers thrusting up like the tire-bursting spikes that guard airport rental car lots.

A little farther east, in Illinois especially, the perspective from an airplane is of unending open land, most of it neatly sectioned off and farmed. Metal silos and barns have replaced the familiar wooden structures, but the plain farmhouses still hide behind hedgerows of windbreaker trees.

Big cities are scarce in the Midwest and Great Plains. Small towns rule, and many have a small airport on the outskirts. Flying in light aircraft is considered essential transportation when the closest city is a hundred or more miles away.

Soon my airplane will be on the move again, this time to southwest Florida, land of perpetual warmth and salt-tinged air. First thing I'll do for it is treat it to an anti- corrosion bath.

Florida flying is similar to Midwestern flying in several ways. The probability of encountering a tall transmission tower is much higher than that of running into cumulo-granite at 2,000 feet. And, as in the Midwest, powerful air mass thunderstorms can complicate an afternoon flight, except that in southwest Florida thunderstorms are almost daily occurrences.

In the Midwest you can fly in any direction for hours and hours. Not so in Florida, where east-west trips in a 172 last an hour at most before you run out of land.

Florida airports line the coast like fenceposts on range land, thanks to World War II pilot training. They are busy, too: Florida is home to lots of pilots who do lots of flying. I look forward to that.

I won't miss the strong Midwestern wind that rattles the control surfaces when the airplane isn't flying and impedes its progress when it is. I will miss the experience of flying in changeable weather and shooting IFR approaches without having to wear a hood. But I'm sure a few sunset flights along the beach will ease my disappointment. The fact is, flying is enjoyable no matter where it's done.

So long, MKC. Next stop: FMY.