Why we fly

As the expanded Camp David restricted area slid by off my right, I wondered what President Biden might be doing over there on this beautiful summer Saturday morning. I continued north, passing over the endless ridges and valleys of the Keystone State, this morning many of the valleys cloaked in a thin layer of fog. Bright and beautiful at 5,000 feet, but probably a little gloomy for the ground bound in those little towns tucked into the nooks and crannies of the Appalachians.

I find the terrain in this part of the world fascinating—an undulating forest. Beautiful to observe, but always making me wonder where I would stuff the Bonanza should a problem arise. Less than 40 minutes later I crossed the last ridge just south of Lock Haven, made a wide right turn to avoid some departing traffic, and soon settled onto Runway 27R as a Piper Cub touched down on the grass of 27L. I felt like an interloper in my Beechcraft, arriving at the historic home of the original Piper factory. Many of the Cubs that had filled the field a day earlier for the Sentimental Journey Fly-In had departed already, but I enjoyed my day there. And I got to see those same ridges and valleys at the end of the day lit by a setting sun, touching down back home at Frederick, Maryland, at dusk.

A couple of weeks later I was northbound, flying a Cessna Citation M2 business jet at Flight Level 200 over a solid white undercast in Oregon and Washington. We stayed low because it was a short flight; just as well, as it gave us a more intimate look at Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Rainier heaving themselves up out of the clouds. Breathtaking.

As general aviation pilots we get to experience these vistas in ways that few others do—from canyons to crops and water falls to fireworks, we view geologic patterns, weather phenomena, and much more unseen by others.

And we nearly lost it all 20 years ago this month when a group of terrorists turned airliners into weapons of mass destruction, killing thousands in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The understandable fear and confusion shut down the U.S. airspace system for the first time in modern history.

Watching those horrible events unfold that day, it was easy to surmise that the freedom to fly that we had cherished for nearly a century at that point was in peril. And indeed it was. There was a mass scramble to get the airlines flying again, but suddenly suspicious security agencies didn’t trust “little airplanes.” The idea of an “unknown” pilot flying around without anyone knowing where he or she might be going was simply too much for the security experts to comprehend. “You mean they don’t even have to file a flight plan?” was a common question to our team working at the FAA to get GA flying again—as if a filed flight plan was somehow a guarantee of safety. The airline flights, after all, had been on flight plans.

GA was shut down for days. Eventually IFR flights became possible, but no VFR flying in Class B airspace near primary airports. Our team advocated for more freedom for GA and over time it happened, but not before some other weirdness cropped up. At one point, the Department of Energy insisted that airplanes not loiter over nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, they had removed the locations for those plants from all the publicly available maps and charts. So how, exactly, were we to avoid flying over something when we don’t know where that something is?

Many pilots thought the ability to fly past Manhattan on the Hudson River corridor would be gone forever. But that too was returned to us. Those of us who fly in the national capital region still must deal with the special flight rules area and the flight restricted zone. While annoying and tedious, most have learned to live with the procedures.

Flight schools and flight instructors still deal with paperwork issues necessary to training foreign students—another result of 9/11, but even that has become workable.

Two decades later, our freedom to fly is intact, although onerous regulations often crop up making us always cautious. But on sunny Saturdays when you can skim over a tree-lined ridge and slip into a valley airport for camaraderie with fellow aviators, it’s easy to forget about the potential challenges and focus on the pure joy of aviation.

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