Pilots

I had known Lynn Karlin of Belfast, Maine, for several years when she rang me up and said she had an idea for a collaborative article. Many people pitch you story ideas, or want you to help them write their memoirs, when they know you work as a writer — but this was different. Karlin was a pilot, an airplane owner, and a professional photographer. She had worked for Women's Wear Daily (WWD), and her portfolio included photo credits in the New York Times Magazine, and House Beautiful and Country Living magazines. She had been profiled in Newsweek after a chance encounter with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in a New York City hamburger joint led to a page-one photo credit in WWD. Karlin "has ink in her blood" as is often said of people in the news media. So I was curious about the subject of a potential collaboration.

I could not imagine what she had in mind. I doubted that she wanted us to set some kind of piloting record in her Cessna 150 and I was pretty sure she didn't want me to write her memoirs. She was also a dance instructor, and I was hoping that our collaboration on an article would be more fruitful than her attempt to teach me to dance had been. (I broke my ankle — not while dancing — and spent the next six months hobbling.) What was the theme of our collaboration going to be?

"Wheelpants," she said.

"Wheelpants?"

"Wheelpants. Let's do a story on wheelpants."

"It sounds a little ... unfocused," I said after a while. Were we going to report on the technical aspects of wheelpants? Airfoil aesthetics, perhaps?

Not much came of the wheelpants proposal. Meanwhile, I kept writing about other aeronautical subjects, and Karlin, who had developed a specialty of photographing beautiful gardens after she moved from her native New York City to Maine in 1983, kept flying her Cessna 150. Last year she published a book, Gardens Maine Style (with writer Rebecca Sawyer Fay as collaborator, published by Downeast Books). Seeing her book reminded me of how interesting and multidimensional pilots are. So I rang her up and told her I wanted to do a profile of her for AOPA Pilot.

There was a pause as I awaited her reaction.

"It sounds a little unfocused," she said. As a private pilot who flies about 100 hours a year in visual weather in a very small airplane, Karlin is modest about her aviation credentials. But surely there was a story in the transformation into a pilot and country dweller of a Queens native who used to troll the streets of Manhattan in search of attractive, well-dressed photo subjects for WWD's "What They're Wearing" feature.

In some ways, the Jackie Onassis incident marked both the high and low point of her pre-aviation existence. Karlin had gone into the restaurant for a lunch break with the writer assigned to interview her photo subjects. It was Karlin's second week on the job. They had joked about bumping into Jackie Onassis, who knew and could dodge the other staff photographers — wouldn't that dazzle the folks back at the office? Incredibly, there Onassis was, sitting at the counter. "She was reading Rolling Stone magazine and eating a hamburger," Karlin recalled. "I got behind the counter and started taking pictures. She got up and left." The photo ran under the title, "Burger Queen." Nowadays, Karlin cringes slightly as she recalls the tale.

After moving to Maine (where she met her future husband after stopping at a house to investigate a sign proclaiming, "Vegetables for sale"), a flight with one of her clients opened her eyes to the world of general aviation. "The surprise was, I didn't know pilots were regular people," she said. Reinforcing the desire to enter aviation was a photo assignment shooting tall ships from an open-air position in a helicopter. She and a friend began sharing the long drive around Penobscot Bay to the nearest airport where flight instruction was offered. Both earned their private pilot certificates.

Airplane ownership came along by chance. One day a Cessna 150 came to town on a "display" flight aimed at selling the aircraft to some lucky pilot. Karlin was offered a ride. She hesitated. "If I take a ride in this airplane, I'll end up buying it," she said.

The ride did indeed lead to a change of ownership for the airplane, which Karlin flies for pleasure and to scout locations to photograph. Additional purchases included a handheld GPS, a hangar, and a new paint job.

Even after 1,000 hours of flying, Karlin shares a sentiment expressed by many pilots: "It's amazing to me that there is such a thing as a flying machine." And, of course, wheelpants.