Flying Through Life

I had known Deborah just three days when I took her for a ride on my Breezy. She passed that test with flying colors, so to speak, and that evening successfully rode on the back of my motorcycle. Some other things that I won't mention here also went very right, so 13 days after we met, we were married. That was in April 1995.

That summer we flew around the northeastern United States in my old Stearman, Deborah riding in the front hole as a passenger. It would be an understatement to say that she liked it. In August she announced that she was taking lessons.

"Why not?" I asked myself. "The more she knows, the more fun this will be," I thought. I readily assented, little knowing that I had just signed on for an aviation adventure as complex and challenging as anything that I had yet encountered.

Deb chose to take the plunge into aviation with a female flight instructor, Pat Emery, another woman in love with flying. Together they hit the skies in a Piper Warrior.

Deb returned from her first solo all aglow, and infuriated. She was in the pattern at Longmont, Colorado, when a chauvinist oinker flying a T-6 intentionally cut in front of her on final, forcing her to go around. Pat braced the clown on the ground about cutting off a student on her first solo, and he gave Pat the cold shoulder. Women's voices on the radio he wasn't ready for.

We have seen too much of that during the last three years. Women pilots seem to threaten some men's identity; it's almost as if some men think that they are losing something because women share the sky. This resentment is expressed in different ways, some subtle, some not.

One day a male test pilot sitting beside Deborah at a luncheon in Georgia couldn't think of anything to say to her. After awhile, he screwed up his courage and decided to give it a whirl. He cleared his throat, then said, "So ... does Steve let you touch the radios in the airplane?"

By this time I was getting used to this sort of reaction, but I still wanted to belt the guy. (In the interest of fairness, we shall include Deborah's comments, which shall be in italics.)

After the luncheon we headed for the local airport. Although it wasn't her turn, Deb climbed into the left seat of our Cessna 182. I didn't think anything about it. Safely out of the Atlanta area and cruising the airways, I casually reached for the radio to tune in a new ATC frequency. She slapped my hand.

"Don't touch that," she snarled. "You and your test pilot friends!"

When she became a fellow pilot, the challenge, as I saw it, was to help her acquire new skills, while not being condescending. I desperately wanted her to love aviation as much as I do and to want to go flying with me. Sometimes things worked out, sometimes they didn't.

Deb had just gotten her private pilot certificate when we took a cross-country from Boulder, Colorado, to San Diego. On the way home we arrived over Sedona, Arizona, after the sun was completely down. The night was as black as a cat in a coal mine at midnight. Deb was flying; I was in the right seat. She took a hard look at the chart and saw that the airport was on top of a mesa, with higher peaks nearby. She wisely chose to make a spiraling descent to the runway to avoid unseen, unlit granite obstructions. I pretended to go to sleep to show her how confident I was in her abilities.

I had that airplane lined up just right. The power was set, the GUMPS check done, the speed perfect. It was so quiet in the airplane that I started to relax a bit. Over the threshold, I pulled the power and started the transition. A quiet peace settled over me. This was fun!

I had no trouble pretending to be asleep until she pulled the power to idle. I could feel the airplane flying slower…and slower ... and slower ....

Suddenly, Steve sat bolt upright, slammed his hands down on the console, and shouted, "Don't go too slow!" I about jumped out of my skin. I let up on the back pressure on the yoke; the airplane bounced off the tarmac - there went that good landing. "Too slow"? Who was he kidding? The stall horn wasn't even beeping.

For some reason she bounced on landing, but it was safe. Still, the temperature dropped dramatically. She didn't speak to me for two days.

Two hours, more like.

After the thaw we kept getting better at working together in the cockpit. We were becoming a crew.

Well, sort of. We came up with this rule that the person in the left seat did nothing but fly. The right-seater navigated and handled the radios. I could live with that. The only problem was that when Steve was flying and I was navigating, he got nervous. If he asked for a tidbit of information and I didn't fire it back to him instantly, he would "borrow" the chart, never to return it. And if I was the least bit hesitant over the radio, he would cut in. I would end up sitting in the right seat, doing nothing, while he flew solo.

One day after one of these episodes, we landed somewhere in Mississippi, I think - he had all the charts, and I was a bit peeved. I grabbed the charts from his lap. "At least let me carry them into the building," I said.

"If you feel that way," Steve said huffily, "you can just file and fly the next leg by yourself."

"I would," I told him, "if I knew where we were or where we were going."

Enchanted with aviation (I had certainly done my best to encourage her), Deborah threw herself into instrument training. One day in West Virginia she launched off solo to see a friend in Toledo, Ohio.

When she landed and parked in front of the FBO, the girl at the desk came outside and looked all around. "You flew in here by yourself?" the girl asked Deborah.

That's right, she was assured.

"I've worked here for two years," the girl told Deb, "and you are the first woman pilot to fly in alone."

Deborah kept working on her ratings. She had gotten her commercial ticket and taildragger signoff when the time came for her to learn to fly the Stearman on our grass strip at the farm.

Deb was a good pilot by this time. She had excellent skills and took instruction very well. Even better, she approached the Stearman with a healthy sense of respect.

My taildragger sign-off was in a Piper J-3 Cub. The J-3 is to a Stearman what a Cessna 182 is to a North American P-51 Mustang. I let Steve talk me into trying the Stearman anyway. Suffice to say, I was terrified. It was bad enough trying to share responsibilities in the cockpit, but now he was going to teach me to fly his baby! I knew that he wanted me to achieve this milestone, but what if I ground-looped it? As I climbed in the back hole for the first time, I had visions of our marriage going up in smoke.

The takeoff was, well, interesting, but the flying went OK. Then Steve decided that it was time to try a landing. As I turned on final, the runway disappeared. All I could see with all that airplane sticking out in front of me was Steve's white knuckles as he gripped the sides of the front cockpit. I started laughing - I think that panic had set in.

Here we are on final and she's laughing. Why me, Lord?

"We're gonna die!" I shouted over the intercom.

Actually, the landing went OK, for a first attempt. Deb got better on every pass. She got a little huffy a time or two when I helped her on the controls, but by and large, progress was steady.

I felt nervous before every flight. After each flight, I felt good, yet the glow wore off when the time to fly again approached.

Deb was having trouble sleeping, and she was sweating a lot those days, even though the days were cool and she's pretty skinny; but I could see progress. She picked up the techniques quickly.

After five hours of dual, I thought that she had the hang of it. I got out of the front seat and watched her go round and round the pattern. After each landing to a full stop, I would walk over and we would talk about that landing. I could tell that she was loving it.

When she had about 10 hours, I sent her off to Lewisburg, West Virginia, 60 miles down the valley, for fuel.

He was so casual when he sent me off, told me that he had some things to do while I was gone. No big deal. There was a decent crosswind at Lewisburg. My first Stearman landing on concrete, and it had to be in a crosswind! It was safe, but I wouldn't call it pretty. Two hours later, when I landed back at the farm, Steve was still sitting exactly where I had left him, in front of the hangar. Panic had kept him rooted there.

Deborah fell in love with flying the Stearman to Lewisburg for gas. The bizjet pilots sitting in front of the FBO would watch her taxi in, get up and stroll over to the fence for a better look, then almost drop their teeth when she pulled off the flying helmet and all that hair fell out. For some reason she really liked that aspect of it.

Then there was the trip that summer to the West Coast in the 182. We were IFR bucking a headwind all the way from Pocatello, Idaho, when we arrived over Puget Sound. Deb had done all the flying that day.

If Steve ever again says, "You need the experience more than I do," he is toast.

Our destination was Oak Harbor Airpark on Whidbey Island, and the field had no instrument approach. The weather folks said that there was room to fly underneath the clouds if we could just get down. What we needed was a hole so that we could cancel our IFR. And lo, there was one!

There was a hole all right, with Paine Field at the bottom. He wanted to cancel, and I said no. I didn't want to drop right into Paine's airspace.

I tried to explain to Deb what I wanted her to do, but she ignored me.

What he wanted me to do was clear; it was just not possible right then. He spoke slowly and distinctly, as if English were my third language. After a few minutes of that, I told him that he could get out now if he wanted to.

A little later on we managed to get Seattle Approach to give us a descent, and sure enough, there was plenty of room under the clouds.

We'd had so much "fun" that I spent the rest of the day wondering how much a slightly used husband would bring on the open market.

After our share of misadventures, we have developed the imminent death rule. The person in the left seat is the pilot in command and has the authority and responsibility for all decisions on the conduct of the flight unless death is imminent, in which case the copilot can put in his or her two cents. The person in the right seat is the copilot, responsible for VFR lookout, navigation assistance, radio communications if asked, and backing up the pilot.

Every husband-wife team must work out a satisfactory cockpit relationship that works for them. Regardless of what anyone thinks, spouses flying together have a whole different dynamic than two pilots who are not emotionally involved. When the cockpit crew is married or having a significant relationship, crew resource management can become a very complex subject.

Common sense tells us that there may be days when couples should probably avoid flying together. A cockpit isn't the place to solve nonaviation problems or salve a wounded ego.

Still, having a sport that both spouses enjoy doing together adds a wonderful dimension to marriage. Flying through life with your best friend is as good as life gets.

This past February Deborah flew with a gentleman in his 50s who started flying at the age of 13 and had accumulated 20,000 hours so far. She asked him, "Is flying as much fun now as it was when you were 13?"

He didn't even think about the question before he answered. "No," he said.

Deb was equally quick with her riposte. "It's your own fault," she told him.

Stephen Coonts, AOPA 1056593, and his wife own four airplanes. A former naval aviator, he is the author of six best-selling novels and a nonfiction work about flying his Stearman, The Cannibal Queen. His latest novel is Fortunes of War, published in May by St. Martin's Press. Visit his Web site ( www.coonts.com).