Waypoints: The Half-day Solo

I was ready to solo at around nine hours, but persistent strong crosswinds during several lessons kept CFI John Julian shoulder to shoulder with me in the Cessna 150 for a few extra hours—hours put to good work attempting to master crosswinds, Dutch rolls, ground reference maneuvers, and slow flight, according to the yellowed pages of my logbook.

In anticipation of soloing, I wore the same yellow-and-green striped T-shirt to several lessons in a row that steamy summer. So by the time the big event actually occurred, it must have been pretty rank. The shirttail hung in the terminal building at Pennsylvania’s Greenville Municipal Airport for years, eventually partially hidden by those from other students. Years later, a major renovation and expansion project at the terminal led to the shirts being removed. However, I still have a constant reminder of that day, as my mother carefully recorded the date using a permanent marker on the rest of the shirt, which still hangs in my home office. The T-shirt is one of the few possessions of my youth that has survived seemingly dozens of moves to and from college and various houses and apartments early in my career.

There’s a lot of debate these days about when and how to introduce stalls into flight training. Julian’s cryptic remarks in my logbook show we first practiced stalls on the fifth flight. I don’t remember it being a big deal. Not surprisingly, the same lesson included “slo flt” and glides, all easy and efficient maneuvers to perform leading up to and after practicing stalls.

Shortly thereafter, four out of five lessons seemed dedicated completely to practicing takeoffs and landings. I remember becoming frustrated by my lack of progress in finessing the landings, and understanding when to turn downwind and base. Julian calmly responded, “Don’t worry about it. One of these flights, it will all click and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.”

He was right. At some point, all the pieces fell together and I made a beautiful landing. He punched me in the shoulder and said, “There you go. That was all yours.” Three lessons later, he had me pull off on the taxiway and extracted his broad frame from that little airplane and sent skinny little me off for three circuits of my own.

Greenville has a paved runway and a very nice crossing grass runway. That day I used the grass. No big deal. Today, it’s a novelty when I get to land on turf.

VOR navigation was introduced on the sixth lesson, which also included half an hour under the hood. GPS was some pie-in-the-sky Air Force notion back in those days—or maybe pie-in-the-orbit? Loran was just over the horizon. Today we crow about how simple GPS navigation is compared to what we had “back in the day.” However, in its most basic form, VOR navigation is simple. Look at the chart to find the frequency. Tune it. Center the CDI and fly to keep it centered. Not that hard. Of course, course intercepts, wind corrections, radial From versus bearing To, location by intersecting radials, and other more advanced concepts make VOR navigation more challenging. But for a student, in a lot of ways, mastering VOR basics is as easy as GPS navigation. Add DME and you answer the biggest VOR challenge—where am I along the radial?

Like a lot of students, though, the time and money crunch hit and after the end of 1977 I wouldn’t fly again until August 1978, when I quickly came back up to speed and got signed off for a series of cross-country flights—back when you still had to make a solo 300-nautical-mile cross-country crossing three points at least 100 nm away from one another. It would be another eight months before I would take the private pilot checkride, one day before my written exam expired and four days before my eighteenth birthday.

While challenging for a kid with zero aviation background prior, I wouldn’t trade the life-changing experience for anything.

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