De-Rusting My Wings
Sunday morning dawned differently; it wasn’t just the lighter shade of pale that rain-filled clouds had painted for days and weeks on end. Instead, the sun rose in a timely manner, climbing into a blue sky, now dotted with clouds rather than covered by them. Not only were the rains gone, albeit temporarily, but so were the gusty winds, which had calmed themselves into a constant 12 knot blow.
Thinking that maybe the weather geeks had gotten their forecast right, I had booked a plane for the late morning so that I could shake the rust off my pilot’s wings. It had been nearly six weeks since I’d flown, which was three times what I considered a decent interval to remain stuck on the ground. It didn’t count that I had flown with the airlines; this was about my need to take off and land without straining my memory, both thinking and physical.
Airline pilots with tens of thousands of flying hours report that they feel rusty after going on vacation for two weeks. I have three hundred hours, so my cellular memory is considerably more shallow, and the need for freshening concomitantly deeper. Indeed, if I don’t go up every week, I’m particularly suspicious of my flying mind; there is little room for Oops, I forgot to....
Which is why we have checklists. In the planes that I rent, there are laminated dog-earred cards that take the diligent pilot from the pre-flight through the shut down, and everything in between. You want to make sure everything is in working order, that there are no rivets missing or stressed cables. Getting proper maintenance and following checklists is why so many small planes are flying after thirty and more years; the people involved in general aviation recognize that there is little tolerance for error.
The last time I’d flown it had been a good fifteen degrees warmer; now the mercury was sitting in the low fifties. This meant that the air was more dense, which meant the prop had more to chew on, which meant the aircraft jumped off the runway when I gently pulled back on the yoke. I pulled a 180 over the Sacramento River and headed south on the downwind, quickly climbing to 4500 feet, making some lazy turns to the right and the left as I reached for altitude. In the process, I regained a feel for the plane, like awakening muscles after getting outta bed in the morning.
I turned around again and headed north, flying toward Shasta Lake, and u-turning again over our house, I headed for Redding Municipal. It’s got a 7000-foot runway, unlike the 2300 feet at the Benton Airpark where I rent. That length allows for touch-’n-go’s, where I can land, reconfigure the aircraft, and take off again, without having to taxi back to the beginning of the runway. TaG’s are also more complicated because you are thinking about a reverse process as you are completing a first, and you have to make sure you don’t confuse the two. For instance, on a complex aircraft, you want to make sure you don’t try to retract the landing gear instead of flaps.
The first landing was a little bouncy, maybe a B-. Considering I hadn’t flown this type of plane --a high-wing Cessna -- in a coupla months, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t satisfactory either. I rose into the sky again, and turned back into the pattern, this time approaching the runway from the left instead of the right, to accommodate incoming traffic from the northeast. Landing number two was a B+, as was number three, and I’m being modest. I returned to Benton and closed out the day with an A-.
Landings are the trickiest part of flying, at least for me, and making good ones is a serious thrill. Especially when they are the result of deliberate, attentive efforts, instead of taking advantage of luck on the air currents. My first flight instructor said the course of learning is rote, understanding, application, and correlation. After this day’s flying, I felt I was moving toward the other side of application.
As I have found with other endeavors, when I come back to a practice after being away for a while, I often discover an increased alacrity of talents. Something about ideas and practice fermenting in inaction. It’s how I’ve scaled to the next plateau of learning. With other activities, I’ve often slipped into a cockiness, at least briefly, in my excitement over my newly-appeared abilities. With flying, however, there is no cockiness; just exhilaration with the extraordinary nature of flight and my humble role in it. There are no old bold pilots.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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