Aero-Tips!

A good pilot is always learning -- how many times have you heard this old standard throughout your flying career? There is no truer statement in all of flying (well, with the possible exception of "there are no old, bold pilots.")

Aero-News has called upon the expertise of Thomas P. Turner, master CFI and all-around-good-guy, to bring our readers -- and us -- daily tips to improve our skills as aviators. Some of them, you may have heard before... but for each of us, there will also be something we might never have considered before, or something that didn't "stick" the way it should have the first time we memorized it for the practical test.

Look for our daily Aero-Tips segments, coming each day to you through the Aero-News Network.

Aero-Tips 08.15.06

My shoes were wet with dew as I climbed into the back seat of the white-and-red Piper Super Cub. Morning twilight ceded to a yellowish haze as the summer sun sprang from behind a line of trees. Its glint bounced off the tilted wing-tops of half a dozen sailplanes huddled before a day of flight.

I was 15, and I had flown before. My first flying memory is of being strapped three across in the back seat of what must have been a Cessna 172, my father at the controls and my sister and brother at my sides. I'd already logged a good bit of passenger time in airliners, mostly 727s and DC-8s and United Air Lines' first 747s running back and forth from my father's maintenance base in Honolulu. But this was my first real flight, my premiere launch airborne in a seat with access to controls, and the first lightplane flight of what would evolve into a career looking up at planes, looking down at the ground and, most importantly, looking to my left as I teach others the science and the art of aviation.

My dad's cousin Raymond, an Air Corps veteran of America's retreat from the Pacific into Australia in the dark, early days of World War Two, and holder of a few endurance records in his homebuilt sailplanes, brought me to this hazy, misty glider strip on the banks of the Ohio River. Hoping to help but mainly staying out of the way in the predawn chill, I'd watched gliders be drawn from flat, white trailers and assembled on the slick grass in anticipation of being pulled aloft. Raymond and his son Brian, who was about my age but already a veteran of this Saturday glider ritual, motioned for me to come over to the Super Cub after it was pushed out of a low Quonset hut, the only structure on this field. I had come along hoping only to see the gliders fly. But Raymond had more in mind.

The pilot had a habit of taking the Cub up for a short hop before the first glider tow of the day. He wanted to warm up the engine and get a feel for the air before climbing with the awesome drag of a sailplane in tow. But mostly, I think, he wanted the dawn sky to himself, to loft for a brief moment as the only aviator in the blue, before the air was filled with gliders and the later risers from the paved runway across the river. Whether out of his own generosity or some urging by my dad's cousin, the tow pilot ushered me into the Super Cub's back seat, to share the sky that West Virginia summer dawn. My earliest flying memory was as a dream, my airline travels akin to sitting in a plush drawing room. But today, this very moment, as the Lycoming engine sputtered to life and thick metal blades spun into a powerful blurring disc ahead, I was truly going to fly.

My memory of the pilot is that of the stereotypical ex-bomber captain, then only three decades removed from far less joyous lofts over murderous skies in a craft crewed by kids only a few years older than I was at that point…and the captain still in en-route climb to age 25. Today he worked efficiently in the front seat, saying nothing-this was before radios, intercoms and headsets reached such sporty cockpits-glancing back just once to see I was strapped in and clear of the controls as he latched the Cub's door against the still-chilly wind. Noise grew faster than speed when he pushed the throttle forward, but in an almost impossibly short distance we were airborne and the rumble of tires against dewy grass hushed to slick air whisping past the wings and windows, engine and propeller noise muffled far ahead. Long morning shadows arched quickly away and we sprang into bright sunlight, angling slightly as "my" pilot banked low over the river. Tendrils of steam fog strained upward, trying to join us in the cloudless blue, but they were no match for the Super Cub's power and made it only a few feet above the mirror-like river.

The shore, a line of trees, and the bright green runway were now on the left side of the airplane as we sped a few hundred feet above small fishing boats tucked into the shade along the river's banks. A minute later my pilot tilted the left wing down sharply and, although it still felt as if "down" was toward my seat, the shoreline twirled to appear out the front windscreen, our runway still on my left. In a shallower bank we lined up with the grass, trees along the sides growing and shadows lengthening to again tint our wings dark as the mowed turf smoothly rose and again rumbled against our wheels.

Landing is my most favorite and least favorite part of a flight, for as I later learned it is the ultimate test of a pilot's finesse and command of his or her craft, but it is also the end of another day's dream as we trade the sky above for the world's reality below. As we rolled into position for the first sailplane hook-up and Raymond helped me out of the Super Cub's back seat, pilot still in place and propeller bending blades of grass in its blast, I knew that I'd felt something that I could never feel in the first-class seat of a 747 or even the passenger seat of a light airplane. Although I didn't touch the controls that day I could see their movements, large and coarse on the ground but small and smooth, almost imperceptible movements at times in the air, and I knew that next time aloft I would ask to reach for the controls, and I too would touch the sky through them.

Visibility was good, the air was cool and smooth, and the flight long enough to give me a taste but short enough to leave we wanting more. It was the perfect first flight.

My dad's gone now, and so is Raymond, and likely my veteran pilot as well. What they started that day, however, carries on, and I hope will continue forward through my students and my readers and my friends and my son. In the terrible turmoil of today the sky remains a refuge and an opportunity, but only if we pass it along to others who will help us retain this wondrous freedom.

Aero-tip of the day: Saturday morning's not too far away. Give someone a "first flight" to remember.

FMI: Aero-Tips