Unusual Attitude

During a decade in Atlanta, one of my weekend jobs was hopping rides in vintage biplanes and warbirds at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. When the business expanded to a second location in Bar Harbor, Maine, the other pilots didn’t want to do the ferry trips: too far, too cold, too much restricted airspace, and no tips.

All true, but the chance to fly an open-cockpit Waco over the rocky New England coast, through New York City’s Hudson River corridor, over the Delaware and Chesapeake bays, and down the Appalachian chain is like watching an American storybook unfold. I brought my wife, Martha, and flying around Acadia National Park with her on a brisk autumn day was one of our all-time best hours aloft.

Back in Atlanta, I couldn’t stop raving about the sensory feast the trip had been, and the other pilots took note. After that, it was hard to get a seat on those seasonal sojourns.

On another Waco trip, AOPA Senior Photographer Chris Rose and I lucked out with spectacular weather and friends along the way from Frederick, Maryland, to Long Beach, California. We met up with John McKenna, president of the Recreational Aviation Foundation, in Moab, Utah, and flew beside his Cessna 185 all the way to Arizona. The image of his workhorse airplane’s silhouette over the Canyonlands during a fiery dawn made an indelible impression.

Splashing up and down the Mississippi River in Walt Fricke’s float AirCam twin on a two-and-a-half-day trek between Florida and Minnesota, you see the “American Nile” up close. Its character changes from the broad, brown, swirling cauldron at Memphis to the clear, braided, island-filled waterway in western Wisconsin. But mostly those trips are memorable for witty narration and laugh tracks supplied by fellow travelers.

Yet I talked myself out of that job, too. I told Fricke what a blast I was having, and he started making the migrations himself.

Marathon trips with other pilots reveal how they think, fly, and—most tellingly—handle adversity.

Earth-rounding pilot/mechanic Adrian Eichhorn is just as upbeat and optimistic when dealing with headwinds, foul weather, and sleep deprivation on the way to Greenland in his Beechcraft Bonanza as he is on stage at AOPA events. My 80-something mom, Wilma Melville, is the most persistent pilot I’ve ever known, and she swears like a soldier when her RV–7A gets rocked by turbulence.

Ferry flights can stretch pilots and airplanes to their limits, too. I foolishly ran dangerously low on fuel in Alaska when headwinds were stronger than forecast. The clamshell canopy on a Russian aerobatic airplane came off in flight over Texas. I’ve been too numb to feel my hands or feet (or talk on the radio) on a winter Stearman trip across the Midwest. I’ve eaten out of vending machines for days at a time, and slept on more FBO couches and recliners than I care to remember. I’ve hopped fences getting into (and sometimes out of) locked airports after hours, and siphoned fuel from other airplanes (with permission!) when avgas was otherwise unavailable.

But unforgettable moments like crossing the Rocky Mountains on a brilliant winter morning with 10 feet of trackless snow on the 14,000-foot peaks, climbing out of the murk into an impossibly pink sunset over Texas, watching vivid rainbows form and reform in Montana, and skimming the waves over the Gulf of Mexico more than offset the inconvenience and drudgery.

Flying across the United States gives pilots a rare and intimate connection to our magnificent country. It reveals itself to us. We know its beauty, and its scars. And even though we fly above it, we’re more closely bound to it.