Slipping the Surly Bonds of Earth
Learning to fly has meant more to me than being a network TV news producer, meeting presidents and prime ministers, reporting on history being made in the moment. The learning experience itself, perhaps because it took place as I was turning fifty, was both stimulating and enriching, not work, far more so than college. Gaining the skills to launch a ton of steel and me into the air, to soar above the birds and clouds, and bring the aircraft back down to earth gently, usually, at seventy miles an hour...I have not known greater excitement or satisfaction.
The other day I flew a Piper again, for the first time in more than a year. The Cherokee Archer has a 160-horsepower engine, the same as the Cessna Skyhawks I usually fly, but the big difference is that this is a low-wing air craft instead of a high-wing. I’d learned in a high-wing, and in Redding, where 40 days a year the temperature climbs over 100 degrees, it’s not a bad thing with the wings above the cockpit; it provides a small degree of shade.
The high-winged aircraft also makes viewing directly below an easier proposition. But when you’re turning, when you are flying a box pattern over the airport in preparation for landing, the high wing dips down and blocks your vision of things like the runway, before you straighten out again.
With the low wing, while it’s true that you can’t see immediately below, you can always see directly ahead and when you turn on your approach to landing, you have an unimpeded view of where you are going.
Though I was principally trained in a high-wing there was a time when I flew with The Lady Audrey, my instrument instructor, in a Piper. When I landed after the first flight, she looked across the cockpit at me and said, You’re a low-wing man.
To my great pleasure, when I finally got back into a Piper again, I rediscovered that feeling. Power, joy, exhilaration. As John Gillespie Magee put it, we "slip the surly bonds of Earth...and touch the face of God."
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
Cessna Skyhawk Piper Cherokee
[Photos courtesy of AirWard at Gnoss Field in Novato, California]
