A daughter solos and a dad accepts that kids grow up
He Says
She was born into a family that loves the sky. Her mother holds an instrument rating and a commercial ticket for single- and multiengine airplanes as well as for balloons. One grandfather was a naval aviator in World War II and the other still flies regularly. Her uncle owns an airplane, a cousin is a pilot, and a great-aunt soloed prior to World War II. Amelia had her first airplane ride when she was three weeks old, and she was standing on the right seat of the family airplane, making turns before she was two. I always assumed that she would learn to fly; she likes speed, is a sprinter and high jumper on the school track team, and has been riding and jumping horses since she was 4. Having soloed dozens of students over the years, I figured getting her soloed would be no big deal; figure out how we're going to pay for lessons, get her with an instructor, and encourage her when the inevitable tough times occur. It would just be a natural progression. I'd be cool and calm about the whole thing. It wouldn't affect me a bit.
Right.
Last summer Amelia discovered that the minimum age to solo a glider was 14, rather than 16 as it is for powered aircraft. She said she wanted to solo on her birthday, the next spring. I said it was OK if she could demonstrate that she had the maturity and determination to do what was necessary to be ready to solo on her birthday. She agreed.
I called Benz Aviation in Ionia, Michigan, and learned that it was a very serious sailplane operation and had soloed a number of kids on their fourteenth birthdays. I liked the feeling I got over the phone and scheduled her first set of flights.
It is September 2002; Amelia is assigned to one of the principals of Benz Aviation, Tony Smit. He has flown with young teenagers in the past and displays a professional, respectful manner that is as close to perfect for dealing with kids as I've ever seen. He does not mess around with a lot of theory on the first lesson. It's right out to the sailplane for a hands-on preflight. They board the glider, buckle in, and discuss the checklist. Soon they are rolling on takeoff, breaking ground and flying low until the towplane lifts off. As they climb out and I strain to keep the pair of aircraft in sight, I'm struck by the realization that for 13 years I have worked to make sure my daughter was fed and clothed and secure; that she had a warm, safe home, didn't talk with strangers, and that her mother or I knew where she was at all times. Now I was willingly engaged in a process that would result in her going alone into the sky; a place of unimaginable joy to those who have never visited it, but also possessed of great dangers. While I knew that I could not keep her wrapped in cotton all her life, this step toward independence suddenly seems huge.
The smile on her face after the first landing is a pretty good indicator that these glider things are fun. She makes two more flights and handles the controls more in each one, including during tow and well along final approach to landing. On the way home she is happy and confident that she can meet her goal of soloing on her birthday.
As fall deepens I watch her overcontrol as she works to sort out the rudder during the takeoff roll and how to keep the sailplane just inches off the runway until the towplane lifts off (one of her favorite parts of the flight, she tells me). I am increasingly impressed with the quality of the instruction at Benz Aviation. I find myself sitting in on Amelia's ground school sessions because material she is learning is filling gaps in the glider training I received years ago. I listen to them make a call to Lansing Flight Service Station on a speakerphone and I learn that there is such a thing as a soaring briefing containing material of specific value to glider pilots. I am very impressed with the Lansing briefer who takes extra time to go over things with her.
During her third lesson, after Amelia boards the sailplane, I watch a teenage girl go through her cockpit chores and talk with Tony. Without looking up, she reaches to close the canopy and, in the midst of that simple action, the girl transforms into a young woman. Her calm, contemplative expression gives lie to her years. The unaffected movement to the canopy handle has no residue of the gawkiness of childhood; it is self-assured, unhesitating, and unerring as she unconsciously completes a task that I have been watching a younger person perform until just now. I am again made aware of the fact that I will someday have to let her go, but the image of this instant, now frozen in my mind, makes me a little more comfortable with the concept.
In November, Benz Aviation shuts down its glider operations for the winter so Amelia works on preparing for the presolo written test. This is an area where she is not exactly enthusiastic; she much prefers to fly. She passes the written.
When operations start again in the spring I see that Amelia is overcontrolling only rarely, and that she anticipates the sharp pull up and fairly steep climb of the high-powered towplanes. While some lessons are better than others, it is starting to come together. One evening when I am chatting with my mother, I tell her that it looks as if Amelia will hit her target of soloing on May 21. There is silence, and then my mom says, "You mean I'm going to have to worry about another generation flying?" It is only then that I appreciate what she had gone through first as new wife to a naval aviator and later as their two teenage sons learned to fly.
During one lesson I fly the towplane. At first I am so busy holding speed and watching for traffic that it is a while before I think about the fact that the person on the controls of the glider behind me is the little zoomer I used to chase around the house to catch so I could change her diaper.
On the third tow it is a bit of a surprise when Tony pulls the release to simulate a rope break only 200 feet up. I turn out of the way, thinking of airplanes and the need to land straight ahead as I watch in mild amazement while Amelia makes a one-eighty, lines up with the runway, and then glides the length of it, landing and stopping where we had begun the takeoff roll. On the next flight I rock my wings vigorously at 1,000 feet, the signal that the towplane has a problem and the glider must release. On their last flight Tony gives Amelia a rope break at 100 feet. She turns 90 degrees to the left, into the wind, and lands on the intersecting runway. It looks as if she is ready.
Three days before her birthday, Amelia sprains an ankle at a track meet. She can't walk on it, but wants to see if she can fly and tells me that the rudder pedals don't take much force. We go out to the airport and I watch her have her best lesson ever. Evidently, a bit of discomfort serves as an excellent device for focusing her attention. In fact, she gets a true emergency as the towplane rocks her off tow at 600 feet. After she lands she tells me she expected him to signal her to release because she could see a lot of exhaust smoke coming out of the towplane. (It turns out to be fouled plugs.)
The night before her birthday I wake at 3 a.m. unable to go back to sleep. This is silly. I cannot possibly be nervous; this is just another person soloing a glider. She has been well trained, it's not a space shuttle flight or walking on the moon. I still can't sleep.
Finally it's time for her to get out of school. We'd called the flight standards district office and let them know we were coming to get a student pilot certificate and all goes smoothly when we arrive.
At the airport, the weather is nearly perfect, although the wind is blowing a little more than I'd like. Nervous? Me?
I am assigned to the towplane and preflight it while Amelia checks over the sailplane. The tows go well, even though it is surprisingly rough from about 600 feet up to about 1,700 feet. After the second tow, I see Tony get out of the glider. He walks over to me and calmly says Amelia will get off tow at 2,500 feet. I look over at her, alone in the glider. She looks confident and determined.
I'm glad one of us is.
In what seems only seconds, the wing runner is signaling and we launch. The climb rate is exhilarating and I hope Amelia can adjust. In the bumps I suddenly have the irrational feeling that being on tow is like balancing a bowling ball on a pin and there is no way she can possibly control the glider. Yet she remains perfectly in position.
Going through 2,500 feet I hear the bang and feel the jolt as she releases. I look back to see what seems to be a big yellow fish turning away. I make the obligatory 90-degree left turn and again look back. She has made her turn and is tracking in the opposite direction. Suddenly I'm trapped in a metaphor: I've given my daughter wings and she is using them to fly away from me.
Easily remedied. Another turn now, this time toward the airport. Amelia has turned as well and is parallel to me. She pulls the nose up steeply and stalls, then drops the nose sharply and does it again. She loves doing stalls and is doing them on her solo, happily dolphining her way through the air. My fears absolutely vanish. She is one with the glider, feeling its magic, at home in the sky.
I hurry down, land, and taxi over to where people are waiting. As I look up, she enters the downwind. Moments later she turns her base early, allowing for the wind, then turns final, plays the air brakes, lands, and rolls to a stop right in front of us. She is beaming. We are running. The feeling is electric.
My daughter has experienced the sky while alone, relying solely on herself, something only a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the people on this planet will ever do. She shares a special secret with each of them, something of immense value, something others will never know or fully understand. All too soon she will be moving away from me, yet with the bond that we now share, that of the eternal sky, we will never, ever be far apart.
Rick Durden, AOPA 684126, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is an aviation attorney who holds an airline transport pilot certificate.
She Says
I thought a glider would be really different from a powered airplane. My parents had both flown powered airplanes, so I wanted to try something new. I was about 11, maybe 12 when I thought about it. Every time I went out to the airport, I looked to see if there were any gliders. Gliders seemed to me like ballet dancers, the way they were built. They were long and slender. Graceful looking. I had seen a few glider takeoffs; the loud power airplane went first and then there was this graceful, silent thing floating barely above the ground. Everything about it appealed to me and I wanted to learn to fly it. I knew it would be a really big challenge.
My dad started looking for places where I could learn to fly. He found Benz Aviation in Ionia, Michigan. My instructor, Tony Smit, had taught some other kids how to fly so he was willing to teach me. I was 13 when I started my instruction.
My first lesson was last fall, just about when school started. I went out to the airfield feeling excited, nervous, and thought, This is going to be strange. I had a sweater in the car. I wore a short-sleeve shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes. I knew it was important to wear comfortable shoes, especially in a glider, because you have to be able to push the rudder pedals. I walked into the little airfield building and met my instructor. Tony seemed nice and I felt comfortable with him.
The first thing Tony showed me was how to do the preflight on the Schweizer 2-33 and what to look for as I did it. I learned to look for gashes in the fabric, dents in the leading edge of the wing, to make sure the safety pins were in the wing struts.
Tony showed me how to open the canopy and look for a castellated nut in the cable that connects to the rudder pedals and how to open the air brakes so I could check them. While we were outside of the glider Tony also talked about how I would be doing ground school in the winter.
The first flight was mostly getting acquainted with the glider and with Tony. I wasn't nervous at all by the time it was over.
In the second flight Tony began showing me how the controls worked and told me not to make big, jolting corrections when the towplane was towing us. Using the stick was easy for me because I had been riding horses since I was 4 years old and I was used to controlling the horse with small, easy corrections.
The towplane lifted us up gradually. I had my hand on the stick but Tony did most of the flying. This was to give me the feel of the glider. It was smooth; everything seemed to flow together. I felt a little bit relaxed, but cautious, because it was completely different from the power airplanes I had flown with my dad and my grandpa. I was very aware that the glider had no engine.
When we released from the tow rope, it got real quiet. I could just hear the wind going by. It was so cool! When the airplane left us, I felt free. In my family, only my dad had done this. This is so cool, I thought. How many kids have done this? I am so lucky! How many kids in the world would pay to do this right now!
Tony gave me the controls and said, "Make a 90-degree turn to the left." So I did. I was used to that from powered airplanes, so that wasn't that hard. Then he said, "Make a 180-degree turn to the left." So I did. I made more turns and raised and lowered the nose to control my airspeed.
When we reached 1,000 feet above the ground it was time to head into the pattern. Tony told me that when you reach about 1,000 feet you look out for any airplane traffic and do a checklist, USTALL. The U stands for undercarriage, or landing gear, but ours was already down. The S stands for speed. You have to be at 60 mph when you turn to land. The T stands for trim, which has to be all the way forward. The A is for air brakes. You have to check them to see if they will open, and then you close them but keep your left hand on the air brake handle. The first L stands for look out. It means you look for traffic on the runway and in the air. The second L means land.
As you land you look down the runway and let the glider float down. If you need to add air brakes, you can. Let it float until it touches the ground, then pull open the air brakes because they also work the wheel brake so you can stop. After landing, you can open the canopy, catch your breath, and talk about the flight; then get ready to go again, if you're doing another flight. You can sigh, exhale, relax, and feel great.
The very best thing in the world is doing it all by yourself. My solo flight was on May 21, 2003, my fourteenth birthday. The school day kind of dragged at first, but then the afternoon went by fast. I got out to Ionia right after school. Many people were there — my friend Julie Stout, a photographer named Mark, my Grandmother Shadoan, my mom and dad, and family friend Paul Newton. I was excited. I was nervous but I knew I was going to do something I really wanted to do.
Even though she has a commercial pilot certificate, my mom was a nervous wreck. She watched the plane like a hawk and stayed glued to her spot. My grandma was excited. "My granddaughter is flying a plane by herself." Julie was working on her commercial rating in powered airplanes but had never flown a glider, so she was excited.
After Tony got out and I took off, it was easier to control the glider because the plane was a lot lighter. My dad was the towplane pilot so he was concentrating on making the tow up
as smooth as he could. It felt pretty smooth to me.
I released from the tow at about 2,500 feet, and the first thing that went through my head was, I'm by myself in a plane. I am free. My life is good. I did some stalls and looked for some thermals, but there weren't any. I did some turns and was flying around to look for lift. At about 1,000 feet I entered the pattern to land.
I did the checklist and turned final, lined up with the runway, opened my air brakes to slow me down a little, and floated down to the runway, closed my air brakes and touched down, and pulled open the air brakes to stop. I opened the canopy to everyone running to me yelling, "You did it! Yeah! I'm so proud of you." I was like YES! It felt so good.
Amelia Durden of Grand Rapids, Michigan, will be a freshman at Cadillac Junior High School. She plans on soloing in a powered aircraft when she is 16.
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