Aren't there times when you just want to throw up your hands and leave town? You need a break, to be somewhere else with different weather and new sights. As pilots we can.
Five hours in most small aircraft will take pilot and passengers to another region of the United States. Easterners can reach the Midwest or South, and vice versa; plainsmen can tour the mountains, or westerners can touch the Pacific. New technology makes it easier than ever. Computer weather maps, such as those on AOPA Online, allow you to find good weather, plan routes, and estimate stopover possibilities. Most states have excellent travel Web sites with attractions, lodging, ground transportation, restaurants, and detailed local information. So just gas up and go. Perhaps the highlights of our adventure will inspire you.
The reason for escape
For my wife and fellow pilot, Maureen, it was clearing the night's snowfall off the sidewalk. Her workmates from school had just departed on a week's vacation for sunny islands and foreign ports. But there she was—muttering as she shoveled, and grinding her teeth. For me, a quick solution was crucial to divert her attention from my failings at the shoveling job, and, hey, being away from e-mail for a week would be great!
Our salvation was the airplane. We picked our destination from long-range weather maps showing a lovely high over the Carolinas for the next week, and packed a few duffel bags. With snow outside the window, it felt foolish adding the swimsuit and flip-flops, but maybe? Those Web forecasts pitched 70-degree weather at us, instead of the 30s outside. Printouts from the travel sites had red circles on likely lodging and destinations.
While flying cross-country, some pilots may sneak around the boundaries of special-use airspace in silence, hoping for the best. We found that planning ahead with approach frequencies written down, military operations areas (MOAs) highlighted on our charts, and regular communication with air traffic control made the journey much easier, and certainly safer, since the controllers knew who we were and what we required. It took the worry away and made our flying legs more enjoyable. We could watch the change of scenery, and other traffic was not a surprise.
The getaway
Maureen's mood began to change as we headed to the airport. She smiled as we purchased unfamiliar charts and topped the tanks. Yes, she wanted to fly the first leg—and do the complete preflight herself. She was almost calm as our course from Connecticut took us into the New York Class B airspace, tracking right over John F. Kennedy International Airport. A mile up, on assigned altitude, on the JFK VOR, we had a bird's-eye view of 747s below and even a Concorde on the ramp. (Why are the busy approach controllers especially polite to female pilots?)
Manhattan glistened as it passed off the wing tip beneath a crystal blue sky. South of Lakehurst, New Jersey (site of the Hindenburg crash), the snow disappeared. Suddenly it felt like vacation.
Even from a mile high, we could see that whitecaps dotted the Chesapeake, but for once those brisk winds gifted us with a tailwind. Washington, D.C., controllers threaded us around jets and over Andrews Air Force Base. Just two hours in flight, and Virginia became a landscape of farms, two-lane roads, and wooded lots. Shannon Airport, at Fredericksburg, was our first fuel stop. Though at one time it was famous for its antique airplane fly-in and a rare Pitcairn Mailwing biplane, insurance curtailed the event. There are paintings mixed with aerial mementos crowding the walls and old sofas occupied by pilots swapping tales. Maureen found an airplane cookie cutter and was thrilled. Or was it the 60 degrees and sunshine?
After topping off we returned to our southwesterly course to western North Carolina. Late afternoon sun warmed the cockpit and contrasted the Blue Ridge Mountains on the western horizon. During the last hour of flight, the land became knobby hills, forests, bass lakes, and farms. Crossing into North Carolina, we landed in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Our plan had been to visit the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, to tour the fabulous mansion and grounds. But after years of neglect, this airstrip was being repaved the next day. Aircraft on the ground after 7 a.m. would be grounded. No notam, just a note on the airport door. Over spicy barbecue at a local restaurant, new plans crystallized.
So with too little sleep, and too little touring, we flew south again early the next morning. The brick-red soil of the Carolina Piedmont was a new sight for Maureen, as the farms and towns of the Old South spread below. Just east and south of Lancaster, South Carolina, we searched for a 4,000-foot grass field known as Bermuda High Soaring.
Maureen had yet to fly a sailplane, and I hoped to rekindle my soaring passion. Arriving early, we could land without disturbing launches, which begin as midday sun creates thermals. Given a comfortable room off the pilot lounge, we studied soaring rules. After lunch, when cumulus began to form, several long-winged ships were pulled out from hangars, and a Piper Pawnee towplane warmed up.
Sitting up front under the canopy of the Schweizer 2-33, Maureen looked excited. Behind her, soaring guru Frank Reid provided instructions and signaled the towplane to take off—and it did, lifting gently over the grass and forest into the sky.
Flying wide arcs, they circled up into the blue sky below the clouds. At 3,000 feet, Maureen pulled the big knob on the panel. Bang, the rope released, and the only sound she heard was the whistling of the wind and the thumping of her heart.
Tentatively she put in stick and rudder and began to feel the glider move. In a pocket of rising air, the glider rose at 300 feet per minute. Circling like a hawk, she marveled at the peace of the sky mated with flight.
Later that afternoon, Reid climbed in behind me. Generally the glider followed behind the tug as my feet remembered the rudders and my hand guided the stick. Practice is the only path to regaining those skills. Powered aircraft drive almost like an automobile, while gliders have to be flown with delicate inputs of stick on the ailerons and pedal pressure for the rudder.
Borrowing Reid's pickup truck at sunset, we meandered through the backwoods to the hamlet of Kershaw. Gus's Pizza was the place to swap flying stories with another soaring student who had driven from Tennessee. The dream of rising like a bird and swooping like a hawk is a spell that attracts people of all backgrounds to gliderports. Visit the Soaring Society of America's Web site ( www.ssa.org) for places near you.
Had we known it would be such fun, we would have reserved more glider time. But the Atlantic Coast and beach beckoned. Heading east, controllers steered us around the military playgrounds. There were attack helicopters practicing off one base and huge Lockheed C–130s doing touch and goes at another.
The Carolina coast begins as fingers of river and marsh reaching back 50 miles among farmland, and finally becomes delicate tendrils of sand forming north-south sea barriers.
Manteo, a fishing village on Roanoke Island where Virginia Dare (the first child born of English parents in the New World) was lost forever, hosts a commodious airport, left over from World War II submarine hunting. Avgas was relatively inexpensive, and friendly staff rented us an inexpensive car while providing local suggestions. A bridge off the island heading east connects the edge of North Carolina as it juts into the Atlantic. A high-rise hotel at Nags Head, the Surfside, provided clean, $39 rooms with breakfast. Maureen was ecstatic as the sun warmed winter-cold bones while she walked in the sea breeze with the sand under her feet.
The name Nags Head was derived from colonial bandits who lashed a lantern to a horse on the beach at night, tricking ships to wreck on the coast. Now it is beach homes and honky-tonk businesses. But in "winter," most are shuttered and peaceful.
Any pilot would be drawn to Orville and Wilbur's airstrip just six miles north at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk. Hidden from the highway, a winged monument tower atop an immense dune gives away the location. The National Park Service Visitor Center contains many exhibits that explain the Wright stuff: their three winters of attempts and eventual success.
The early flights were just extended glides as the brothers tried to understand how to make an airframe fly—and be controllable. No proper engine existed, so they designed and constructed their own, while devising the wind tunnel and modern propeller as well.
They chose Kill Devil Hill for its constant wind and remoteness, so no one would learn of any failures or steal their discovery. You walk along the actual path of those flights, peer into the rough plank sheds of the shelter and workshop, and imagine their airplane from the full-size replica on display discussed in the museum.
Packed and fueled again the next day, we couldn't leave without a nearby stop. Maureen had to land on the First Flight airstrip, to have Kill Devil Hill in her logbook and memory. In minutes, our much more stable "flyer" had swept across the bay and settled alongside the hill, just yards away from the Wright's 1903 flightpath. Maureen felt that landing at Kill Devil Hill was her personal graduation from flight school.
As we flew north, Norfolk Approach provided radar guidance and steered us around traffic. Miles of wharves and gray Navy ships lined a vast harbor. The Chesapeake mouth is 20 miles wide with just a sliver of land on the northern side. It was only minutes over water, but with the view out the cockpit of the ocean and bay everywhere, it was reassuring that controllers watched us reach land again.
The finger of soil broadened as we flew north, with tidewater farms stretching between ocean and bay. It was sunny, and a pleasant flight; we passed the time checking off landmarks below. Approaching two hours in the air, and with only 40 miles to go to our Delaware stop, the benign sky suddenly darkened ahead. What we thought was just the beginning of dusk actually contained thunder and lightning.
Flight service forecast a front moving across Pennsylvania, but nothing to bother us. I thought the light was sunset from the west. "Lightning," Maureen shouted, and pointed straight ahead. It blocked our goal, just minutes away. I swung the airplane to the west.
It woke up the controllers too, as our straight course on the screen changed 90 degrees toward Baltimore airspace. They found the cell on their radar and offered vectors.
Then a weak voice on that Delaware airport unicom reported that the cell had passed and the rain had halted temporarily. Another black cloud approached as we touched down. Grabbing our overnight things, we knotted tiedowns and ran for the hangar just as big raindrops fell.
The rules may state the delay between drinking and flying but nothing in the reverse. "Whew," was the cry as we sipped cocktails around our friends' wood stove a bit later. What's a good vacation without a weather-flying story?
Totaling 13 flight hours, we had exchanged snow for sun, mittens for flip-flops. It would have been 1,500 miles in a car, with freeway sights rather than aerial views and sandy airports. There is no escape like an aerial winter retreat.
Links to additional information about winter flying and flying destinations may be found on AOPA Online ( www.aopa.org/pilot/links/2001/links0102.shtml). Tim Snider, AOPA 528158 , and his wife Maureen, AOPA 1269637, of Stony Creek, Connecticut, own a Grumman Cheetah.
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