Always learning

On my first flight with a nonpilot passenger, we didn’t make it out of the tiedown spot without incident. I released the brakes to taxi, but the airplane didn’t move. I added power, and we barely inched forward. I pumped the brakes, thinking they might be stuck: no change. So, I shut down and found a mechanic, who kindly pointed out that—for the first time in my flying career—the previous renter had set the parking brake.

Remarkably, my friend got back in the airplane with me, and we set off for lunch at a nearby airport restaurant. I knew she was nervous about traffic in the busy airport environment, so I explained how traffic patterns keep arrivals and departures orderly, how traffic information on the multifunction display helps support a visual scan, and how pilots communicate their positions to one another over the radio. I didn’t explain, however, that many nontowered airports share the common traffic advisory frequency of 122.7 MHz—so the transmissions we heard as we tuned to airports en route could be from airplanes more than 50 nautical miles away. It wasn’t until we sat down to eat that I learned she had heard the chatter of pilots landing everywhere from Winchester, Virginia, to the far side of Baltimore, and imagined them all to be in an unseen cluster around us.

My husband, though, wins the prize for long-suffering flying companion. I took him flying on our second date. He’d been to jump school and spent hours in the back of a C–130 on military flights, so I figured he’d have no qualms about touring Western Maryland in a Cessna 172. Eager to impress him, I made checkride-precise 30-degree-bank turns around the falls of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and other landmarks near the Appalachian Mountains. Looking a bit peaked at the end of the short sightseeing flight, he politely declined breakfast at the airport café.

But he stuck around, and years later I dragged him along on another miserable flight. I had planned an early IFR departure to beat some forecast turbulence on the way to Connecticut but missed my departure window while troubleshooting the GPS unit. I opted to take off VFR rather than take the time to re-file, but it was too late. Beneath a cloud layer at 4,000 feet was the worst turbulence I had ever experienced.

It would have been a perfect use for my newly minted instrument rating—smooth air above, bumpy below—but I had never air-filed before and worried that I’d incur the wrath of notoriously busy New York controllers. So, I stayed below the clouds, knocking our heads on the ceiling all the way to Hartford.

Pilots love to share the gift of flight with friends and family. But we’ve all smiled through enough ugly sweaters to know gifts don’t always deliver the joy they were intended to. Sometimes the nonpilots we invite to fly with us are eager future pilots, but often they’re simply in it for you—and willing to bear some discomfort to spend time together. Like me, you’re bound to make mistakes, but the best you can do is learn from them. Communicate with your passengers, check in with them about their comfort, and enjoy the flights that go well. In spite of bouncing our way up to Connecticut, we coasted back—IFR this time. A reroute took us directly over John F. Kennedy International Airport, where we watched airliners take off and land below us, with the New York skyline off the right wing.

Recently I took my daughter for a short flight in a Van’s RV–12. No agenda, nowhere to be, just a flight to get in the air. We had just made it to the edge of the Frederick, Maryland, airport’s Class D airspace when the airplane shuddered slightly from a pocket of air rising from the heat of the morning sun. She asked to turn around, so we headed back for a late breakfast at the airport café. While we waited on eggs and toast, I asked her how she liked the flight. She held out her thumb for a 5-year-old’s rating scale. “On the way up: thumbs sideways. When we were flying up high: thumbs down. With the wind in my hair? Thumbs up.”

I’ll take it.