Pilot.

I went flying with Flight Instructor Prabesh yesterday evening as part of our weekly flight together. I’m working on what’s called my Instrument Rating, meaning when all is said and done after this checkride I’ll be able to fly in the clouds and safely fly an airplane in instances where I can’t see the ground or the horizon. It’s a special skill and when achieved I’ll be the first pilot in the family to have achieved this milestone.

We’ve been working on my instrument rating in a selection of Cessna 172 airplanes, which I’ve flown many times before, but not recently. I have to show the new flight school that I’m perfectly capable of handling a C172 in less than ideal conditions, so Prabesh and I went up and did a lot of basic maneuvers to make sure I could handle the airplane in an emergency. This involves pulling the engine and making emergency descents, doing steep turns (showing I can control the aircraft in such a situation), and stalls, showing I can get the airplane flying again after it’s lost lift under the wings and stopped flying.

We had a lot of fun flying last night. We’ve been flying after dark working on my Instrument Rating, since I don’t need to see anything when I’m theoretically flying in the clouds, so it was a nice change of pace to see things and admire the surroundings in the daylight.

I love flying airplanes. It’s a love I did something about rather late in life but it makes me very happy. And as of Tuesday, I’ve been an official private pilot for seven years.

Seven grand years.

Eight years ago today was my first flying lesson. With instructor Chuck in the right seat, we took off from runway 33 at KRME Griffiss International Airport in Rome, New York in a 1966 PA28-140 (or Cherokee 140). The four seat, low wing airplane was my trainer all the way through the following December when I earned my Private Pilot’s Certificate.

My life has never been the same.

The unevenness of the week continues. I’m feeling the effects of a head cold, undoubtedly contracted during a visit back east, and I feel the need to sleep. I was scheduled to fly tonight and I felt well enough to accomplish the flight, though I wasn’t at the top of my game. I seriously considered calling off the flight, but I kept myself together long enough to practice a few approaches to the airport under instrument simulation.

I plan on feeling better for next week’s lesson.

I have a goal of completing a couple of the ratings in my aviation plan by the end of 2022. And I plan on doing it safely and confidently. My most conservative decisions are around my thoughts as a pilot, and it took some self inventory to decide to fly tonight. I’m glad I did.

Now I just want to go to bed.

On Saturday we drove to KRYN Ryan Airfield, on the southwest side of the city, to look into flight opportunities. As I mentioned last week, I haven’t flown since our move to Tucson and since Monsoon Season has seemingly come to an end, it’s time to take advantage of the cooler weather and get back in the air.

Today I confirmed a flight for Saturday. I’ll be going up with an instructor in a 1969 Piper Cherokee 140. It’s just a couple of years newer than the airplane I learned to fly in and I’m looking forward to “getting back to my roots”, so to speak.

Flying in the desert will be different than flying in the northeast or midwest. I’m looking forward to tackling the new challenges this weekend.

I miss flying. I haven’t flown an airplane since our move to Tucson. Part of this absence from the sky has been due to trying to find a flying club that I’m comfortable with. Another part is the fact that I don’t know these parts too well, and more specifically, flying over the American desert. It’s going to be different, and I’m going to need to quite a bit of flying with an instructor to get familiar with these parts. We are situated near three airports; one of them is an Air Force Base. I’m sure I can navigate these parts just fine, it’s just the nuances of flying in the desert that I need to learn.

Back in our Upstate New York days I loved flying as much as I can. I flew with a great group of pilots. I completely trusted the airplanes I flew, mostly because I had an ownership stake in the airplanes and I knew them inside and out. When we moved to Chicago, I enjoyed flying, and I met some really nice folks in the aviation community, but I was never 100% comfortable with the airplanes. I had a few maintenance issues in the air. None of these issues with dangerous, they were just uncomfortable. I have to hand it to my airline and other commercial pilot counterparts: they fly airplanes they don’t know at all on a daily basis and they don’t think twice about it. Maybe they do. I really don’t know.

I shared my thoughts around flying again with my husband today and he is as encouraging as always. I’ll be in the air soon. With monsoon season winding down, I feel like the weather will be much more cooperative. After all, Southern Arizona has around 350 sunny days a year, and that means lots of flying opportunities.

There’s always a risk when soaring above the airplane in a man-made craft. I know too well what can happen when things go wrong. I’ve known too many pilots that have met their end doing what we love. It’s all about controlling the risks, being confident in our skills, and knowing our craft.

I’ll get this figured out. I have to. I’m excited to. I look forward to flying again. I’ll be learning lots of new things.

Never stop learning.

There is a term used among the General Aviation Twitter community that it used to describe a pilot who hasn’t been able to fly in a while. That term is “avgry”. It’s a combination of “aviation” and “angry”.

I am definitely feeling “avgry”.

I’ve been struggling with a glum mood for the past several weeks. There’s a lot happening in the country, what with domestic terrorist attacks egged on by Trump and the like, but aside from that, I’ve just been feeling blue. I came to the realization that while this is by no means the longest I have gone without flying an airplane, not being able to fly combined with other pandemic restrictions is making me stir crazy.

Today my husband and I drove to Waukegan National Airport just so we I could stand in the hangar and say hello to the airplanes.

We then took a moment to stand on the ramp and take a selfie. The weather has been awful for the past three weekends, so there wasn’t much going on.

I’m hoping to fly next weekend as the long range forecast looks promising. I’m going to go up with an instructor and try some new (to me) maneuvers that are typically done by commercial pilots. I have goals set for my aviation career; I can’t let weather keep me from reaching them.

I like having a term to describe being “angry about not being able to engage in aviation”, but I don’t like feeling “avgry”.

As a pilot I don’t have much success in flying flight simulators like X-Plane 11 or Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. The software is amazing; today’s technology provides a level of realism at a price we would barely even imagine a dozen years ago. Nevertheless, I’ve found the experience to be less than ideal.

With the pandemic all the rage and me not being able to get up and fly as often as I’d like, I finally decided to invest some money into a decent flight simulator setup and take to the virtual skies. I bought Chris’ old Alienware desktop gaming PC with lots of upgraded components, finally got my hands on a set of USB rudder pedals and a yoke and throttle quadrant and downloaded the dozens of gigs of data from Microsoft to get the software installed.

I’m having fun with the setup.

I’m not a fan of carrying out various functions (deploying flaps, retracting gear, etc) via keyboard commands, so I’m going to add more switches and buttons and baubles to the setup, but for now I’m able to take off from any airport in the world all via computer.

I chose my dad’s old home airport as the runway to depart from on the sim. The data for this private airstrip is a little off, it has the runways listed as 18 and 36, when in reality they are 16 and 34, but otherwise the landmarks and topography and the like are all very accurate. As a certificated private pilot I’ve never flown an airplane out of dad’s airport (I’ve always been along for the ride) but I felt a certain amount of excitement when I flew the sim computer out of the strip for the first time. It made me appreciate the amount of skill my dad and his fellow pilots based at that airport had. With a gravel bed at one end, and trees and power lines at the other, you have to be on your game trying to get in or out of the small field in Upstate New York.

I’m looking forward to giving it another simulated try this weekend.

I believe in living life without regrets. I have no regrets. I have lived a very full and fulfilling life. I have done what I want to do, I still have things I want to do, and there are many more things I’m going to do. Things have happened the way they have because that’s the way they’re going to happen.

I have always wanted to be a private pilot. This is something I talked about casually but it wasn’t something my dad and I talked about a lot when he was alive. While I know he loved me very much and he was proud to have me as his son, I kinda know I wasn’t his favorite. That title went to my sister and I never had a problem with that. My relationship with my dad was great, it was just primarily unspoken. And we really didn’t talk much about things like flying airplanes and the like, even though we did it a lot together. I figure he just didn’t know how to process having a gay son in the 1980s. No worries, no angst, it’s just the way it was and it is.

I think of him at this time of year because my last phone call with my dad took place during the week of Thanksgiving in 2011. He had just flown his second home built airplane for the first time and he wanted to tell me about the experience. I can vividly hear his voice in my head; the airplane was faster than he expected, it kind of caught him by surprise, but he said he would learn it and he would eventually have fun with it.

At the time I wasn’t a private pilot. Starting in my 20s my plan had always been that I would become a private pilot but I would surprise my dad with the accomplishment. I would fly with an instructor, solo, get my ticket, and then show up in an airplane at a fly-in breakfast at the airfield where my dad was part owner. That was always my plan. Unfortunately, becoming a pilot is an expensive venture and it wasn’t until I was in my mid 40s that I was able to put together the budget necessary to reach this accomplishment.

After my dad’s crash and his passing, which occurred during the second flight of his second home built airplane, I never lost sight of wanting to become a private pilot, in fact, I was more determined than ever to reach that goal. With dad I had always flown in the right seat of the Cessna 150/152 or the Piper Tomahawk, the back seat of the Piper J-5A, or the front seat (where the passenger sits) in his AcroSport II (pictured above, photo taken in 2001). The only time I had sat in the left seat of an airplane was with Dad’s flight instructor in the Cessna 150, N7177F. After the day’s flight instruction was completed, the instructor would take my sister and me up in separate flights, him in the right seat, and us in the left seat, for a turn in the pattern. One time we did two turns because the first time I pulled back on the yoke too much and made the stall horn squawk on takeoff. I was probably 10 years old at the time. I can vividly remember the exhilaration I felt during that flight in the left seat of N7177F. When the stall horn squawked on take-off, the instructor said, push the nose a little bit and I did it. I think I nearly took the hat off a farmer working in a field off the end of the runway that day, but everything was good and we had a great time on runway 34 at 1NY3.

The NTSB report of my dad’s crash in 2011 talks about witnesses hearing “sputtering” before the airplane went down. It was my dad’s second time ever flying a Wittman Tailwind W10. He’d built it from scratch from plans. The airplane was powered by a Lycoming O-320. It had 150 horsepower and is basically the same type of engine that powered the Cherokee 140 that I flew for my flight lessons to become a pilot. That exact engine had previously powered my grandfather’s home built, a Jungster II. Gramps’ airplane was grounded when he was no longer able to fly it and no one was interested in taking over the airplane. I know Dad said on more than one occasion that he would never fly it; too challenging to be any fun. But the engine was of some value, so it was rebuilt to be put into the Dad’s Wittman Tailwind.

The day of the crash witnesses heard the airplane sputter before it went down. I know Dad had lost an engine during flight before, in fact, shortly after he rebuilt the Piper J-5A, the two of us were on downwind for runway 16 when he lost the engine and the prop promptly came to a halt. We glided in safely. I was never scared. I was never concerned. I knew he could handle it and because he never had a radio in any of his airplanes, I just heard a faint “huh” after he lost the engine and glided onto the runway in a fairly elegant 180º decent.

It was probably Dad’s unfamiliarity with the Wittman Tailwind, and specifically the airplane he had just built, that prevented him from doing the same when he apparently lost his engine the day of the crash. And as a private pilot, this is why I have so many questions I wish I could ask him.

You see, Dad and I never had the chance to have a conversation “pilot to pilot”. I’ve never been able to fly with him in the right seat as I flew us someplace for a rubber pancake or whatever. Do I regret this? I don’t; things on our timeline happen when they do because they were meant to happen then. But I really wish I could talk to him “pilot to pilot” and ask him some questions about his flights and why he made the decisions he did leading up to the flight. I think the Wittman Tailwind W10 with 150 HP engine may have been the fastest airplane he’d ever flown. I don’t find anything in his logbook indicating he went up with an instructor in that airplane, or anything like it, before his test flights. Perhaps he was more confident in his abilities as a pilot than I am in mine.

A couple of years after he passed my sister and I went to a medium, who immediately asked “who is John and why is he saying he fell from the sky”? My sister went back to the same medium a year or two later and my dad had a message for me: “you can’t be afraid of the airplane and you always have to put it where it needs to be; if you’re afraid, it’ll put you where you don’t want it to be”.

Good advice, for sure.

When our parents have passed on I’m sure we all have questions we’d like to ask if we had just one more chance to talk with them. I have no doubt that he’s happy I’m a pilot and that he’d approve of my skill as an aviator.

I just wish we could have that “pilot to pilot” chat we never had.