Musings: Cross-country in a Commander
Cross-country in a Commander
By Anna Gregory
These days, when I look at the sky, I imagine only what it is like to fly in it. I think about clouds and what it is like to fly through them. I think about the motion of flying that stays with me, like a sailor who cannot walk straight from the ship. Sky is not sky anymore. It is another dimension
And that is how, improbably, I found myself in North Carolina, preparing to fly a 1963 Aero Commander 500B I had purchased across the United States to Seattle. It was two weeks before the latest presidential election. And the week Bob Hoover died.
I was an instrument-rated pilot with less than 300 hours, working toward my single-engine commercial certificate. And I was not yet rated to fly a multiengine aircraft. Several insurance companies had declined to even quote me. But by then, I’d watched way too many Bob Hoover films.
On top of all the logistics, my instructor had to have five hours of dual in the Commander, before he could then teach me. Which is how, equally improbably, I found myself flying jump seat to two multiengine instructors for two long days.
It wasn’t until the evening of day two that I had my first seven-tenths of an hour in a multiengine airplane, and my first seven-tenths in the Commander. All those hours in the jump seat paid off. I felt surprisingly relaxed and at home in the airplane, with its overhead panel and dizzying array of instrument switches.
It turns out that hardest part of flying the Commander isn’t flying at all—it’s taxiing. You must learn to hold your toes barely atop the rudder pedals. The trouble is that if you press too lightly, you’re forced to over-correct, and now you’ve done it—lurching from side to side as hydraulic and brake power team up, sending you bunny-hopping across the ramp.
Flying across the country felt endless. We had time to test out the autopilot. Time to eat lunch. Time to walk to the back of the airplane, talking to the imaginary Don Drapers on their way to business meetings, circa 1969. Time to pull out paper charts, and muse over the small towns beneath us. It was a kind of magic.
All of that came to an end in Evansville, Indiana. We were on an IFR flight plan when the avionics, inexplicably and without warning, began to shut down, one by one. We could see nothing, hear no one, and no longer hear even one another.
Fortunately out of IMC, we squawked 7600 and headed for a tiny nontowered field, Henderson City-County Airport (EHR), a few miles away. It turned out the best avionics shop for states around was based on the field.
As I do everywhere, I put on running shoes and made my way past coffee shops and diners, old homes, truck-stop motels, and drug stores. Running has always been my way of seeing things—at least on the ground. Call it prescience, but the unscheduled stop embodied everything that my own West Coast city did not, and if there was any sense in me that the election might not work out the way I had assumed it would, it started in this two-lane highway town of truck dealerships and shuttered storefronts.
We never did figure out why the avionics shut down. The failure couldn’t be traced or replicated. And it hasn’t happened since, although my emergency radio is now tucked behind my seat, fresh battery pack attached.
By the time we reached Billings, Montana, I didn’t want the flying to end. And I wasn’t due back at work until the following week, so I asked if we could slow our progress. We explored Montana by air, the mountains outside Billings and Missoula, the tumbling rivers and billowing cumulus, so distinctly the western United States.
The trip felt like America to me. The kindness of strangers. The warmth of welcomes. The diner and coffee-shop conversations. The many FBOs. The burned coffee. The vending machines. The ramp rats whose signals to park, and then cut the engines, made me smile every single time with the fun of it all.
And from the air, the clouds and the autumn skies and the light and the rain that I can conjure up in my dreams, but that no words can describe. One country, many skies.
On the final day, we left Spokane, Washington (GEG), headed west over the Cascades in IMC, in icing conditions and turbulence that felt like the Pacific Northwest that it was. Descending in tired silence over the Cascades, breaking out at last above the waterways and islands—in sunshine filtered through purple storm clouds—we were vectored across SeaTac, then northwest across the Sound to pick up the ILS at Bremerton National Airport (PWT).
I started the approach and descent checklist, slowing the Aero Commander to 100 knots. Boost pumps on. First notch of flaps. Throttles coming back. Mixture. Props. I slowed the airplane to a steady 90 knots, relaxed in the left seat. Three green. We’re good.
Anna Gregory is a writer and pilot who lives in Bremerton, Washington.
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