Pilotage

Rummaging around my bookcase the other day, I came across my first logbook. It's black, very slim, and a little tattered but still in good shape. Years ago I wrote my name in the lower right-hand corner of the cover, in gold ink. It was the only color ink appropriate for the bursting pride a young Atlanta teenager felt in having his own logbook. I was 2 months past my fourteenth birthday when I started the logbook.

The first five entries are for instructional flights in a Piper Colt — white with a red stripe, and protruding below the panel was a handle that you pulled to activate the main wheel brakes. I remember it as a perky little airplane.

But my first logbook doesn't tell the whole story of my early flying. I have vivid memories of certain flights that I took with my father before I started training — in particular, one night flight. It was in a PT-22, a pre-World War II trainer, an open-cockpit two-holer. I remember looking out over the side of the rear cockpit, across the fabric-covered wing, at the ground slipping by below.

The years tend to dull and alter the facts, but I seem to recall feeling a kind of exhilarating resignation. On the one hand I felt the danger of flight acutely. That was the exhilarating part. On the other hand, I was resigned to the fact that I had no control over my fate — if we were going to crash, well, we were going to crash. These were the irrational excesses of a tender imagination running at full throttle. Even so, the flight left an enduring impression. I was completely blown away by the sensation of sitting in that open cockpit and flying over the earth.

I think it was at that moment that I fell in love with flying, even though I don't think that I realized it at the time. I believe that, because my mind often returns to that scene as my earliest memory of flying.

There's definitely something to the wind-in-the-face style of flying. You're not so much flying through the air as immersed in it, feeling and hearing and smelling it.

Even now I'm enamored with the rush of air across my cheek. I remember the first time I went upside down in an open-cockpit airplane. It was in a new Air Repair Stearman owned by Pompano Air Center. The pilot, Randy Gange, gave me plenty of warning about the impending loop and roll, and I managed to cinch up my restraint belts a few hundred times in the space of a couple of minutes. I didn't fall out, of course, but it sure felt strange. And thrilling.

Not long ago I flew in Doug Keen's Classic Waco YMF-5 in Fort Myers, Florida, where Keen operates a sightseeing business out of Page Field. We also went upside down. Keen skillfully managed to maintain positive Gs all the way around the loop and barrel roll, so I wasn't in much danger of popping out and doing a half gainer with a full twist on my way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Since I knew what to expect, it wasn't so strange, but it was just as thrilling as the first time.

I even get a kick out of opening the pilot's-side window on my 172 to look down upon the land. It makes me feel that much closer to the elemental flight I've enjoyed in open-cockpit airplanes. The fresh air blowing about the cockpit cleans out any dust bunnies that have collected in my imagination. It's restorative — I land with renewed enthusiasm. Open-cockpit flying was an early source of inspiration for me, and now I'm rediscovering it. But as a student pilot, I was pulled in a different direction.

Most of my primary instruction took place in Wellsville, New York, south of Rochester, in Piper Cherokee 140s. (I still can't remember which way you're supposed to turn the overhead trim crank for nose-down pitch.) One of my strongest memories from that time was of gazing enviously at the Piper Cherokee 180 that the FBO had on the line for advanced instruction and rental. The jump from a 150-hp plain-spoken trainer to a 180-hp traveling machine — painted red, no less — well, that would be a dream come true, I thought.

The two airplanes were virtually identical in appearance except for the 180's red paint and snazzy wheelpants, and one crucial difference — the cowling. It was fiberglass and had a bump on top that flowed back from a big spinner. It was how you could tell a 180 from a 140. That bump distinguished a lowly trainer from a real airplane. Anybody could fly a 140, but a 180 — wow, that was something.

And the Comanche 260 that the FBO used for short charter flights — that was really something. With its retractable landing gear and constant-speed prop, the Comanche seemed the pinnacle of personal flying.

Those two airplanes were the physical manifestations of my dreams. I wasn't yet qualified to fly them. But they were within the realm of the possible. Unlike the big twins that my father flew, I could imagine myself flying them.

The warm and fuzzy image of watching the world slide by beneath the wings of an open-cockpit trainer got me in the door, but the sight of a 180-hp Cherokee kept me coming back.

I passed my white-knuckle checkride a month before turning 18. I'm serious about the white knuckles. I distinctly remember the examiner's peeling them off the yoke and chuckling. A few weeks later I checked out in the red Cherokee 180-with that all-important bump on the cowling.