Musings: 83 days

Three years later, I found myself living in the Spanish Pyrenees, having dragged the same airplane with me to Europe. I crafted a grand list of things to see, with plans to publish photography books on the subject: the Pyrenees, Catalonia, European castles and villages, coastlines, and some other local subjects.

A surprising amount of Saharan haze blows inland in Mediterranean Spain, wreaking havoc on my aerial photography objectives. That problem only worsened as summer approached, so when I stumbled across the information that infrared photography can substantially penetrate haze, I sent a camera back to the United States for optical conversion. It arrived in Spain a month later, while my wife was on a long trip visiting family in the States. I went flying a few times in a row to snap images so I could go home and see how they turned out. I realized I had been flying every day for about five days, and I was enjoying it. I tried different times of day, different weather, different lighting—all in pursuit of figuring the new camera out. Then it hit me: Why not break the record I’d set in Ocracoke in 2014?

Day 6 was almost a washout because of a thunderstorm, although I squeaked a quick flight around the pattern. I soon broke my eight-day record. As I was talking about it to a local tow pilot, he mused, “I think my record must be 40 days.”

“Forty days?” I thought. “It’s on!”

As the wind blew harder and the sun began to set, I locked the hangar door and went home—83 days of continuous aviation.One of the larger traumas to this whole affair was the return of my wife, on day 19, as my routine had turned into eating, sleeping, working, and flying. The last time she rode in the airplane was in that week in Ocracoke, and despite regular communication about my goal, one of her first questions upon returning was: “You’re going flying today?” Perhaps my greatest accomplishment was training her to ask, “When are you going flying today?” followed some time later by, “You really need to go flying today, it’s good for you.”

On the twenty-fourth day, angry thunderstorms were blowing through and I sensed a chance to photograph a rainbow. I learned during wilderness flying in Wyoming that getting a photograph of a rainbow while flying requires judiciously operating on the fringe of personal comfort zones. I preflighted the aircraft during a raging downpour, pulled it out of the hangar in moderate rain, and performed the runup in light rain. I taxied to the end of the runway with black skies amidst a receding storm and mammatus clouds and asked myself, “What on earth are you doing?” Just then, the sun began to come out, and a stunning rainbow presented itself at what appeared to be the end of the runway. I applied full power and chased the rainbow as it receded into France.

Before this scheme was hatched, I had booked a flight to London to get my European medical. I couldn’t possibly fly the Cub on day 38 because of my arrival back in Spain at 11 p.m. “Oh, well, I guess it’s done at 37 days,” I thought to myself. Surely that is an accomplishment. On day 39, I couldn’t bear not going to the airport. “Well, I did fly on day 38, even though it was on an airliner.”

The flights continued. I developed a routine where I factored the vagaries of daily life with a summer weather pattern. Would we have morning fog, afternoon wind, or late-day thunderstorms? Would the haze be strong in the morning? If I wait, will the storms hang on too long? I became an expert at local weather, planning personal errands, work, coordinating the car with my wife, and dancing around any other factors.

In the beginning, the plan was novel, if not exciting. At one point, it got a little tiring. Then a switch flipped, and flying every day became so routine I didn’t know how to function without it. A strong heat wave settled in, with foul haze, which meant that some days I wasn’t even getting any pictures. People at the airport began to ask, “Why are you doing this?” My reply, brimming with mathematical indignation, was always the same: “The probability of being able to fly on any single day is equal. The probability of being able to repeat this many days in sequence is dropping at a quadratic rate as each day adds up. I don’t plan on breaking this record after this, so I am going as far as I can.”

At 60 days, because of car trouble, I found myself without transportation for more than a week in a rural area with no car rental agencies, public transport, or taxi service. I bummed rides to and from the airport, even offering pilots I had never met rides in the Cub in exchange for rides home. One day, I walked an hour to the airport in the summer heat, carrying my photography and flight gear, reminiscing how my grandfather did the same thing in the 1940s to take lessons in a J–3.

Seventy days came and went, then 75, and then 80. I had my sights on 100—until day 84. I wandered over to the airport an hour before sunset, only to be greeted with a wall of rain and strong wind. While preflighting the aircraft in tropical storm conditions, Spaniards who were normally brimming with bravado kept asking, “Are you really going up?” “I don’t know” was the reply as I checked radar repeatedly. As the wind blew harder and the sun began to set, I locked the hangar door and went home—83 days of continuous aviation.

I didn’t attempt daily flying records while growing up next to my grandfather’s private airstrip nor while living on an airpark— I tried one on a remote North Carolina island in winter, and another in the prohibitive environment of high-altitude Europe. This is something I cannot explain. When it comes to confidence and safety, I discovered a comfort and currency flying the airplane I had not experienced, a way of knowing both the airplane and the air that is simply impossible inserting weeks between flights. However, I became increasingly aware of just how much could go wrong. I found myself obsessively checking more than ever in my preflight, almost afraid of complacency brewing out of excessive currency.

The adventure took me to the lavender fields of Provence, France, along the length of the Pyrenees, to the Monegros desert, and to the Delta del Ebro. I saw more European culture than I can remember. I broke three additional personal records: most photographs taken in one day (5,102), slowest cruise groundspeed (37 knots), and highest avgas cost ($14.26 per gallon). I logged 86.1 hours; used $2,999.91 in avgas; took 43,747 photographs; traveled to three countries; experienced one summer snowfall, four rainbows, four measurable hail accumulations; and flew from 0 feet to 13,500 feet msl.

As the 83 days wound to a close, I found myself asking the same question owners of unused aircraft ask: “What do I do now?” For the first two weeks, I had my answer: all the things I didn’t get done in the house and office for those 83 days. Once that was caught up, the same question lingers for me as it does for so many: Where am I going to go flying now?

Garrett Fisher is an American author and photographer living in the Spanish Pyrenees (www.garrettfisher.me).