Nick is lucky I didn’t snap a gear leg on his beautiful Cessna 180 with my swerving roll-out as we arrived at the Concrete Old-Fashioned Fly-In.

South of Mount Baker, the runway at Concrete, Washington’s Mears Field is wedged on a valley floor between the Skagit River and the Cascades Highway. With a hill flanking the south side of the runway and tall ridges on either side, the destination is a daunting one for flatlanders on first approach. Gusty winds up the valley rarely take a break, and it’s just a question of where along the ridgelines the clouds are going to settle in: Will the highest peaks have a white halo, or will the ceilings drive arrivals to trace the river down low in the valley?

Known by some as “Wash-Kosh,” the Concrete Old-Fashioned Fly-In sells no tickets. There’s no charge to pitch your tent 50 feet from the runway, and volunteers won’t chase you down on golf carts demanding you to drive your tie-down stakes into the ground before the prop comes to a stop.

Oh, there are ways to spend money there, but it’s not the money pit I’ve come to accept at an airshow. The T-shirts may have been made on someone’s home ironing board with heat transfer sheets they printed, but for $20, one followed me home. A $35 swipe of the credit card secured me a dinner plate with barbecue beef, pork, and a rib, along with salad, baked beans, potatoes and a lemon bar dessert piled with fresh fruits. The next day, breakfast was served in the town’s school, just outside the airport fence, and at noon a local lady drove us into town for lunch at “our town’s family bar,” (her words), a joint that opens at 7:00 every morning. As they say, you can’t drink all day if you don’t start early. A beer garden erected in a space between hangars had a few kegs fueling the aviators with more than eight hours to spare, and a kind lady had a cart set up frying up donuts and donut-dogs. Think corn dogs, with a sweet twist. There were also a number of tip boxes scattered about, which I sprinkled some cash into.

Unless you happened to swipe your card for some self-serve fuel or linger too long by a propeller rocking a “for sale” sign, those were about the only ways to spend money at the Concrete Old-Fashioned Fly-In.

The fly-in had been on my radar for years, but always conflicted with my expected magazine work at Oshkosh. Before we flew in, I knew four of the people there. I didn’t hurt for conversation. A fella sat by his V-tail Bonanza and told us the tale of how he restored the Globe Swift parked in the next spot. The owner of a clipped wing J-3 Cub offered the story of how a hangar rash incident resulted in a red elevator hanging from the horizontal stabilizer, transplanted from a J-5 project. Folks who are good with their hands know there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary repair that works. Leaning into the patchwork color scheme resulting from the temporary repair, an outer perimeter of green and white, along with some dark brown teardrops, applied artistically, transformed the transplanted elevator into a watermelon slice.

Admitting that the Cub is on the cusp of a full re-cover, owner Darren Clarkson made it clear that when the plane emerges from its metamorphosis, it’ll still have a slice of watermelon on the tail.

There’s no tower or Airboss on the radio, and no airshow to close the runway each day. Any effort to make a pattern call may have to wait for someone with a handheld radio explaining to his buddy where they’re parked with a camera to capture the landing on film. Want to take someone for an airplane ride? Go for it. Leave a lawn chair behind to mark your parking spot for when you get back.

Packing a good flannel shirt for a July fly-in seems wild to Georgia boy, but after escaping the south’s oppressive heat and humidity, the Concrete Old-Fashioned Fly-In is a breath of fresh air on many levels. Other than the homebuilts, most of the airplanes on display were past the half-century mark. With the proper Instagram filters, one could believe photos from the fly-in were also past the 50 year mark. Other than occasional interruptions from technology, one could easily feel like they’d just stepped through a portal in time, and stepping through that portal is something I’ll be looking forward to in coming years.

p.s. After all that trash talking, I still caught the tail-end of EAA Airventure in Oshkosh anyway. Short notice, poorly planned, and for the first time since 2007, I didn’t camp. But that’s a different tale.

A kind question disrupted my train of thought with an option I’d considered, but ruled out at every turn. Stubborn pride? It fades quickly when you’re hurting.

“Excuse me, sir. Would you like a wheelchair ride?”

I took half a breath. “Yes, absolutely.”

Within moments, Eric had found an abandoned wheelchair, and was loading my suitcase into the lower deck. I slid in from the side like a pro, and he said as much.

“I’ve watched this process for 17 years from a very different perspective,” I told him. “I’m usually the pilot with somewhere to be while we wait on the pieces of the special assist puzzle to come together.”

“What happened?” Eric’s question might also be yours, and even to me, it was still a bit of a question.

We had just finished a productive day of Albatross work in Nevada, where Kim and Nick’s dream bird continues to gain momentum toward flight. We’d built, tested, modified, re-fit, and continued to craft the cradles intended to hold the hull up, supporting more than 10 tons. It was the last day I had available to help out before returning home. We’d peaked on Monday with four of us on the effort. Aaron had been there to design and construct the cradles; After Tuesday we lost Kim as she had to get back to work. Wednesday and Thursday, Nick and I soldiered on, preparing to hoist the Albatross into the cradles, so he could do some critical work on the landing gear. We were essentially putting the flying boat into a dry dock, in the middle of the desert.

As my last day wound down, we had the Albatross up on the cradles. There was still some level of reinforcement to be implemented - 20,000 pounds of airplane is a challenge to support, even though the cradles sure felt beefier than anything I’d ever used on other aircraft. For reference, I’ve used large styrofoam blocks to support a Piper Turbo Lance for similar projects. The Albatross cradles used 4x4 frames and nearly three-inch sandwiches of plywood.

We called it a day. With the worksite cleaned up, Nick and I went to our respective accommodations to clean up and then we’d meet up for dinner. Freshly showered, I threw everything into the suitcase and backpack, then headed down to check out of the hotel and pack the car.

In true pilot fashion, I’d wound up choosing the cheapest accommodations in town. Torn carpets in the hallway were tacked down by nails that wouldn’t stay put; air conditioning wouldn’t be available until they declared winter well and truly past. That there was no light over the lobby exit door was far from the most shocking of discoveries.

The shadowy exit hid two steps down to street level, and I missed at least one of them. The resulting fall, with suitcase and backpack in hand, terminated with an audible “pop” and more than a few curse words. The folks sitting at a nearby picnic table only looked my way long enough to ensure I wasn’t dead before they retuned to their chatter. I guess if you’re cussing, you’re not dead.

I stood, unsteadily and assessed the pain. It wasn’t all that bad… until I stepped forward. Then the world spun a bit. Thankfully the iron railing nearby was more sturdy than the rest of the hotel. I hobbled to the car, and said a little prayer of thanks. Had this been my right foot, driving would have been a tougher proposition. I hobbled into dinner, then back to the car.

Because pilots are cheapskates I had to stop and fill up the rental car before I returned. Reno’s rental car return is a short walk to the terminal for able-bodied folks. I hobbled my way through, dragging my left foot well behind, once I found the only way to apply weight that offered less pain.

I stopped and bought a bottle of painkiller from an airport vending machine. Over dinner, I had modified my listing from jumpseat to non-revenue travel for two reasons: First, to occupy a jumpseat or travel in the cabin as a jumpseater, you have to be able to function as a crew member. I could barely function as a person. Secondly, as a non-rev I could order a drink - Woodford whiskey on the rocks as we passed Colorado Springs helped me ease into a nap as the time zones rolled past.

Which brings us back to Atlanta, where Eric offered a helping hand.

Riding through the airport on a wheelchair, it felt like I was watching a video. Everything was so familiar - I’ve been roaming the place regularly since 2007. But, the perspective was off. My eyes were level with most other’s waistlines. Instead of walking with purpose, I was rolling through the crowd and trying my best to keep anyone from pumping into my bad foot.

I tipped Eric for his bit of kindness, and caught an Uber to the car. A few hours later, the podiatrist was showing me an X-ray of my foot.. Bad fracture on one of the bones for my left pinkie toe, back toward the heel.

Doc says it’ll be 8-10 weeks in a walking boot, which is to say 8-10 weeks out sick at work. Thank goodness for working at a place where I have benefits that soften almost every bit of that blow. I’ll find ways to stay busy, but I’m certainly gonna miss going to work.

It won’t be the longest I’ve gone without flying, but I will certainly be itching to get airborne whenever and however I can.

While down for the install, things were hopping at the Griffin, GA airport where his avionics shop was located - but not the flying sort of activity. Crews had apparently repaved the only runway; the prolonged closure wrapped up, then a final NOTAM (The notices we get of things that aren’t as-published) announced the runway closure for another two days as crews were painting the stripes and markings.

When we fired up to pick up Rick’s plane yesterday, two NOTAMS remained in place: The AWOS was out of service, and two taxiways were closed: E2 and W3. The airport diagram didn’t have ANY labels for taxiways, so your guess is as good as mine which taxiways those might be, but I figured that almost any combination wouldn’t keep us from our destination at the avionics shop.

We landed without drama, and the pickup went smoothly enough. There was one little hiccup that the shop hopped right onto fixing for Rick, and with things seemingly under control, I fired up to taxi out. As I approached the parking ramp’s exit, I could see a work crew at a nearby taxiway intersection with the paint striping rig. A pickup truck came wheeling up and parked right in front of me, blocking my path to the runway. An older fella hopped out of the truck and made some hand gestures that I didn’t recognize, then he reached into his truck for a handheld radio and pointed to it energetically.

I keyed up my radio on the airport common frequency to greet the fella, and there was no response. Three tries later, I gave up. Trying to avoid some variation of the event where another pilot from a major airline in Atlanta was accused of using his airplane as a weapon against a figure of authority, I shut the airplane down and waved him over to the side window.

“Do you know what the UNICOM frequency is?” he asked. I told him. “Oh. That would have been helpful earlier.”

He proceeded to fill me in on all the things the NOTAM had failed to capture: The runway was open, but striping along the taxiways continued. They had just painted all the curved lines transitioning from the taxiway that paralleled the runway, to the taxiways that crossed the runway. They were about to start painting all the runway hold-short markings.

He didn’t want me taxiing through the wet paint, which makes sense.

In other words, they had very nearly painted me into a corner.

“I suppose you want to depart,” he said, and I nodded. “This paint takes about 45 minutes or more to dry at this temperature.” He looked up and down the taxiway. “But all we’ve painted is the 90-degree arcs. If you’ll turn right, and go past this first helicopter, you could cross the straight segment of the yellow line - we painted it yesterday. If you can keep your wheels between the yellow line and the edge of the taxiway without hitting the taxiway edge lights, you could get on out of here.”

I retracted the flaps to eliminate the lowest-hanging bits that cold catch a taxiway light, thanked him for the creative problem-solving, and went on my way.

Each time we go fly, pilots are responsible for reading the NOTAMS associated with their flight. Written in ALL CAPS TEXT IT IS REALLY DIFFICULT TO DISCERN ANY LEVEL OF PRIORITY ASSIGNED TO THE INFORMATION BEING CONVEYED. BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA, FOR EXAMPLE, HAS PAGES UPON PAGES OF NOTAMS FOR EACH OF ITS DEPARTURE PROCEDURES SPELLING OUT TREES AND OTHER OBSTACLES THAT HAVE YET TO BE CHARTED INTO ITS DEPARTURE PROCEDURES AND MIGHT HAVE SOME SINGLE LINE OF TEXT OF OH THE AIRPORT IS CLOSED TODAY BURIED IN THERE. AND DONT FORGET THE ADVISORY ABOUT MIGRATORY WATERFOWL. THAT ONE NEVER GETS OLD.

And, in focusing on those pages of often irrelevant messages, sometimes the folks in charge managed to completely fail to tell you about the important things, like a guy in a truck, whose work crew can effectively close the airport without notice, lacking the ability to even warn you about it on UNICOM, much less record a message to add to the AWOS weather broadcast, since that system was down for the count as well.

Keep your eyes open, and avoid getting painted into a corner. Even then, be receptive to outside ideas. It might be the difference in taking off as scheduled, or looking for a rental car for a long drive home.

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted here. Things are going great - just busy. I left Plane & Pilot magazine in late summer, and have been writing freelance for a few publications. Also, a “friend” ratted me out to the new chief standards captain on our fleet back in the spring, and I’ve been editing our fleet newsletter, which has kept me rather occupied… I don’t enjoy dry subjects like the airline stuff often becomes, but I’m working hard to help produce material that is approachable and readable, and the bosses seem to think I’m doing that. It keeps the keyboard from cooling off, which was the whole point of this substack when my writing at P&P was interrupted a few editors ago.

We’ll still share some stories - I have plenty of drafts in the bin, but the schedule will be irregular at times. And rather than mull over this one and let it languish as a draft, I’m about to just hit send. Any typos are just the writing equivalent of “scruffy hospitality,” where you don’t spend the day cleaning up before company comes to visit your home.

In the meantime, huge congratulations to my buddies Matt and Nathan, who both passed milestone check rides this week. Matt is a freshly-minted CFI, and Nathan just finished the maneuvers check ride for upgrade to captain at his regional airline.

It’s always nice when you can wrap up with some good news.

Until next time!

Let’s break down what MOSAIC really is, what it means for you, and why it matters for the future of flying.

What Is MOSAIC?

At its core, MOSAIC is a modernization effort aimed at updating and expanding the scope of the LSA category. The 2004 rule defined LSAs by restrictive metrics—max weight limits, stall speeds, and fixed landing gear among them—that, while forward-thinking at the time, have grown increasingly outdated. MOSAIC shatters those old boundaries, shifting toward a performance-based framework and enabling a wider variety of aircraft and missions while still maintaining a firm safety foundation. When light sport came along, the cutoff excluded types as light and simple as the Cessna 120/140. Now the new rules will open the floodgates for sport pilots—and higher-certificated pilots operating as sport pilots—to fly a wide gamut of aircraft as long as performance and operational criteria are met.

The rule affects 14 CFR Parts 1, 21, 22, 36, 43, 45, 61, 65, 91, 119, and 147, covering everything from certification of aircraft and pilots to maintenance, flight operations, and even space support vehicles. This isn’t just a tweak—it’s a sea change.

Before we go deeper, allow me some candid thoughts. Think of them as study questions to ponder as you read the rest of this post, and maybe dive into the comments with your thoughts or questions of your own. Overall, I’m really encouraged by the new regulations, but some concerns linger.

When the light sport rule originally passed, the “most desirable” existing planes in the category skyrocketed in value overnight. A Piper J-3 Cub worth $18,000 suddenly was a $30,000-35,000 aircraft. Same with Aeronca Champs. Cessna 120s, just a few pounds heavier and disqualified from LSA eligibility, saw no such price spike. This rule change allows the vast majority of the general aviation fleet to be operated as light sport aircraft were, as long as no more than two seats are filled. Honestly, that’s about as full as any of us ever fly anyhow. Will this glut of availability for operating under reduced regulation flood the market and pop the inflated aircraft values? If not across the board, then perhaps for the types most affected by the LSA balloon?

Maintenance is a big area of contention as well. Light sport aircraft owners can go to a 16-hour class that will allow them to do the maintenance on their bird as a light sport repairman, but no such remedy exists for owners of aircraft with standard airworthiness certificates. Should MOSAIC have included something akin to Canada’s owner maintenance program? Owner maintenance in Canada comes with its own cactus-load of spikes: Once an aircraft is entered into owner maintenance, it cannot be returned to standard airworthiness, and cannot be used in any form of for-hire flying (as I understand it).

Avionics is another big issue left without consideration. The experimental guys and gals have all sorts of cool widgets. Some wiggle room for loosened certification criteria for avionics on aircraft operated under MOSAIC could have been a big positive safety shift for owners and pilots.

We now continue with the “OMG ITS AMAZING” coverage of today’s announcement.

Subscribe now

Key Changes Under MOSAIC

1. Weight Limits Are Out; Stall Speeds Are In

Perhaps the most headline-grabbing change is the removal of prescriptive weight limits for LSAs. Instead of a hard 1,320-pound max (1,430 pounds for seaplanes), MOSAIC introduces a more flexible definition, based on maximum stalling speed. Specifically, LSA airplanes can now stall at up to 61 knots in the landing configuration (VS₀), up from 45 knots previously. That change alone allows for sturdier, safer aircraft with more features—airbags, larger cockpits, and additional safety gear—that were previously infeasible under strict weight caps.

2. Four Seats (Sort Of)

Under the new rule, light-sport category aircraft can now be built with up to four seats. However, sport pilots are still limited to flying with one passenger. The benefit here is for manufacturers and owners who want a versatile aircraft platform—one that can be used for flight training, travel, or eventual transition to higher pilot certificates.

3. More Performance, More Aircraft Types

MOSAIC allows for higher cruise speeds (up to 250 knots), retractable gear, variable pitch propellers, and new types of propulsion, including electric and hybrid systems. It also adds helicopters and powered-lift aircraft (think tiltrotors and eVTOLs) to the mix. This means that aircraft resembling Cirrus SR22s or Mooney Ovations could now potentially fall into the expanded light-sport category—so long as they meet the new performance-based criteria.

4. Expanded Sport Pilot Privileges

One of the biggest wins for pilots is the dramatic expansion of privileges under the sport pilot certificate. With additional training and endorsements, sport pilots will now be permitted to:

• Fly at night

• Operate aircraft with constant-speed propellers

• Use retractable landing gear

• Fly helicopters

• Operate aircraft with simplified flight controls
  (I have zero idea what constitutes simplified flight controls. FADEC? Fly by wire? Elevator limited to prevent stalls and rudders limited to prevent spins? Interconnected rudder and aileron? Someone help me understand. This article pitches the idea of simplified flight controls as new aircraft replacing conventional controls with something like a screen with commands like “take off,” “proceed on course,” and “land.” Much like how drones have lowered the bar from the challenge of traditional radio control aircraft, this could attempt to make flight “foolproof”)

• Fly faster and higher-performing aircraft

While some of these privileges require additional training, they represent a clear pathway for pilots who want to expand their capabilities without necessarily upgrading to a private or commercial ticket.

5. More Flexibility for Maintenance and Repair

MOSAIC also redefines the repairman (light-sport) certificate. The new rule allows light-sport repairmen to inspect a broader range of aircraft, including experimental amateur-built (EAB) aircraft of the same category and class. That’s huge news for aircraft owners looking to save on maintenance costs or perform their own condition inspections.

Furthermore, the rule aligns maintenance training standards more closely with the FAA’s Mechanic Airman Certification Standards (ACS), potentially lengthening the training time but adding more credibility to the certificate in the process.

6. Light-Sport for Aerial Work? Yes.

A major shift under MOSAIC is that light-sport aircraft will now be eligible for certain aerial work operations. While these will still be limited in scope (think survey flights, pipeline patrol, and agricultural applications), it’s a groundbreaking move. For the first time, we’re seeing FAA regulatory language that allows LSAs to be used in revenue-generating work.

The Safety Continuum: Why the FAA Is Doing This

None of these changes happened in a vacuum. The FAA has grounded MOSAIC firmly in what it calls the "safety continuum"—a regulatory philosophy that matches the rigor of certification and oversight to the level of public risk an aircraft poses.

Here’s the logic: experimental amateur-built (EAB) aircraft have long offered flexibility in design and performance, but they come with increased safety risks due to the lack of standardized certification. Normal-category aircraft meet much stricter FAA requirements, but they’re expensive and slow to develop.

LSAs, as expanded under MOSAIC, now occupy a broader middle ground. They’re more capable than EABs, yet simpler and more cost-effective than fully certified aircraft. By raising the ceiling—literally and figuratively—on what LSAs can do, the FAA hopes to steer pilots toward safer, certified platforms rather than riskier experimental ones.

Industry Reactions: Applause with Caveats

Feedback on the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) is largely positive. The FAA received more than 1,300 comments, the overwhelming majority in favor. Organizations like AOPA, EAA, and the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) praised the rule as a long-overdue modernization. Several manufacturers, including Van’s Aircraft and Flight Design, called the proposal “revolutionary.”

Still, some trade associations—such as the Aeronautical Repair Station Association (ARSA) and the Aircraft Electronics Association (AEA)—voiced concern that MOSAIC could duplicate or conflict with existing certification pathways, especially in the “primary” category of aircraft. Others, like the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), questioned whether expanding sport pilot privileges without increasing medical or training requirements would be a net positive for safety.

What Happens Now?

The MOSAIC final rule is set to go into effect 90 days after it is published in the Federal Register, with some provisions delayed for up to a year. Manufacturers are already lining up new designs, and we can expect to see a new class of high-performance LSAs entering the market in the next 12 to 24 months.

Training providers are also likely to update curricula to accommodate new privileges, while maintenance schools and repairman training programs will have to align with the new ACS standards.

In short, expect the next few years to be a period of rapid evolution in the light-sport ecosystem.

Why It Matters

For years, the LSA world was brimming with potential but hampered by arbitrary restrictions—weight limits that stifled innovation, operational limits that confused pilots, and certification pathways that made little room for new technologies. Some claim that MOSAIC is a full-throttle course correction.

By giving pilots, manufacturers, and maintainers a clearer, more expansive roadmap, the FAA is finally acknowledging the capabilities of modern general aviation aircraft and the desires of the community. If you're a pilot, this means more choices. If you're a manufacturer, it means new markets. If you're a student or future flyer, it means a more affordable and safer on-ramp to the sky.

Is it perfect? Nope. For beginners, I’d love to see some allowance for avionics and instruments that aren’t certified. Also, airplanes that can be operated as sport aircraft under MOSAIC still require traditional A&P mechanics to do their maintenance and inspections if they were built with a standard airworthiness certificate. I’d love to see some expansion of capabilities for light sport repairman certificate holders. Will there be growing pains? Of course. But after decades of waiting, MOSAIC is the rule many have been hoping for. I don’t think it’ll kickstart some sort of new golden-age of flight, but it dang sure can’t hurt.

The MOSAIC regulation is 717 pages long. Here’s the PDF. Nope, I haven’t read the whole thing and there’s plenty of possibility that I’ve missed, or misunderstood, a few things in trying to skim and digest it. I’m just a guy, who likes airplanes, enjoys writing, and tries to spread a little information along with the entertainment. Take that for what it’s worth.

Share

Leave a comment

“Can I get you anything else right now?” The waitress, Holly, hovered nearby. I was the only customer there. The laminated menu/placemat hadn’t budged; the order was set in stone before I left the hotel. The streak of syrup across the table was more than excused—expected, even. The plate before me offered a culinary comfort, the glass of tea magically refilled every time I looked up.

I’ve had many meals at many Waffle Houses. I even know my normal order by heart, as it’s called to the grill operator: Pull one, half bacon. Bacon Texas Cheesesteak plate, scattered, smothered, covered. Mom managed a Waffle House years ago; there were times when if I wanted a Mom-cooked-meal, it was served on a Waffle House plate.

I don’t eat from the WaHo nearly as much as I did then—for that, my doctors are grateful.

It dosesn’t happen often, but occasionally I get layovers in markets where there’s that signature yellow-and-black branding, and the siren call is strong.

Greetings from Biloxi, Mississippi. For years I’ve flown into here, and recently the yellow diners along US Highway 90 have caught my eye when flying in. On this stretch of the Gulf coast, there’s a dining opportunity that I’ve never had before: Scattered, smothered and covered, seaside.

Looking out the window today, I scooped up my hashbrowns with a view of the waterfront, framed in live oaks sporting Spanish moss. My flight attendants were in the casinos, hoping to win big. The first officer was working out, and my afternoon stroll had ended at a half-cleaned booth with the beach view.

Snapping back to Holly’s question – “No, I’m good. I’ve eaten at a lot of Waffle Houses before. This is the first one I’ve visited with a beach view. I’m just kinda taking it all in.”

Holly waved across the dining room. “The place is all yours. No rush. We’re glad to have you here.”

As I sipped my tea, I decompressed a bit. In the last few days, I’d held while dodging weather, narrowly missed a lightning strike, been significantly delayed getting to my layovers for two nights in a row, refused my first airplane as captain for maintenance issues, called out fatigued, been rerouted, and finally landed with enough time on a layover to get out for a few hours before bedtime.

I probably should have tipped a little more. It was lunch and therapeutic release, all in one.

It’s billed as an Orlando-adjacent airport, a gateway to the Magic Kingdom without big-airport hassles. Locals like the short walk to its gates, and TUI even offers flights to Europe.

While the place is incredibly convenient for customers, it brings its own special challenges for airline pilots. Florida Institute of Technology’s flight school is there. It is a massive operation, but they’re not alone. At MLB you’ll also find Eastern Florida State College’s aviation center, Melbourne Flight Training, and Northstar Aviation with helicopter flight training. With nice weather year-round, it’s understandable that flight schools love the area, but student pilots sharing the airspace with passenger jets makes for a challenging mix. The layover itself is nothing special, either - we’re nowhere near the water. There’s a grocery store within walking distance of the hotel, and that’s about all there is to say about that.

Over the course of a five-day trip, we had two passes thorugh Melbourne scheduled, as well as a Daytona Beach round trip (similar challenges, what with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University [Harvard of the Sky, just ask any alum] on the field). The threat of traffic conflicts with training aircraft was a constant presence over the course of the trip.

On our first pass through Melbourne this trip, the controller had four planes in the pattern, a business jet trying to make a controlled departure time, and us, waiting on a gap in radio traffic to pick up our clearance. Oh, did I mention in all this chaos that it’s often only one controller handling three stations at once? Yep. Same guy or gal, dealing with airborne traffic on the tower frequency while juggling ground control and clearance delivery duties as well. I’ve heard controllers patiently explain to students, on frequency, how IFR flight plans work, reminders of what the traffic pattern altitude is, and how to tell whether they are north or south of the field when reporting their position.

The local flight schools really should have these controllers on their payroll as flight instructors for all the services they render.

Suffice to say that Saturday night, we were on our toes as we descended for a landing at Melbourne. Back at the gate in Atlanta, a passenger had leaned forward to say hi. He was a former Boeing engineer, and his son was crazy about airplanes. They tracked the planes they’d flown on. “We’re pretty sure we’ve flown on more than half of your 717 fleet at this point,” he said. The son stood behind him, his hand on dad’s shoulder for guidance, his other hand held a folded-up white cane. “Hey thanks for flying with us. It’s always nice to talk to the folks who treat a flight as more than getting from one point to another,” I told them.

Melbourne was trying hard to sell us on a visual approach that night as we descended, but a few clouds stood between us and the field. I could almost hear the sigh as the approach controller cleared us for the RNAV approach to 27L, and handed us off to the tower. Not only would we create spacing issues by insisting on an instrument approach when they were running visuals down there, we’d have to hang a 180-degree turn on the runway and back-taxi thanks to a taxiway closure that eliminated our normal path to the gate.

But the Melbourne controller handled it like the pro he is. Minutes later our passengers were spilling into the jet bridge, eager to be off the plane and on their way to whatever was next. I was tired and a little cranky—I wanted to be off the plane even more than the customers. It had been a day.

The Boeing engineer and his son were last off the plane. As his son stepped off the plane and onto the jet bridge, he stopped and turned back toward the doorframe. His hand caressed the fuselage, picking up on an irregularity in the row of rivets that even I would have hardly noticed. He signed a question to his dad, signaling something I hadn’t picked up on at our first interaction back in Atlanta. The gate agent back at departure had run down our list of “specials,” but it had failed to register that the special assist customer with hearing impairment and the one with a visual impairment were one and the same. Now I found myself in a short conversation with him, via his father, as we explained the thing that felt out of place along the doorjamb.

“He loves this stuff,” his dad told me, as the son turned back to the plane and made a few signs toward the airplane, one of the few American Sign Language gestures that I recognize: I love you. Then he turned toward us to begin his walk up the jetway, and with misty eyes, I offered the only other ASL gesture I know:

Thank you.

A yellow and white Cessna 170 clawed into the air as I drove up, climbing smartly into the cold January wind. Leaving my rental car at the gate and walking out onto the ramp, the Cessna’s growl faded into the distance. The taildragger’s departure was a false sign of life, a snore from a patient in a coma. As it faded away, it left only the sigh of a breeze pushing through the stubble of mowed-over cornstalks in neighboring fields. There are many hours an airport lies quiet and still, but this silence was on its way to being terminal. I was visiting an airfield that wasn’t long for this world.

But this airfield hadn’t always been struggling toward its last breath. And while the airport bears John Trinca’s name and signature in the concrete, a more recent operator of the field is the one most associate with the airfield.

Bob Mazure started hanging around Trinca in the 1980s and remembers the place fondly. “Pete Billow ran the place and instructed in Cubs. Even then, he was a crotchety old guy but everyone knew that if he taught you how to fly, by golly, you could fly an airplane.”

Mazure, who flew KC-97s and KC-135s in the Air Force and later retired from American Airlines, bought a Stampe SV4 biplane, a French aerobatic machine, and kept it there for years. Its Renault engine proved less than reliable, and Trinca’s isolated location turned out to be a perfect place to fly from. “I’ve had two engine failures in single engine aircraft, both at Trinca in the Stampe,” he recalled. The first time, the fuel system failed to feed while inverted on a test hop over the field at 3,000 feet. “The prop stopped instantly. I just brought it back around and made a normal landing. One of the Cubs had landed out in the corn field nearby; they helped me to push the plane back off the runway.” The next failure, years later, was a little more catastrophic. “Climbing through 700 feet, it started shaking like mad. I made it back to the runway and found a connecting rod had snapped, knocking out a half-square-foot hole at the engine mount. The whole engine was wobbling loose.”

Again, a Cub had landed in the cornfield next door. “After that, if I saw a Cub in the cornfield, I just went somewhere else,” he joked. He later bought an AT-6, and shoehorning the large trainer into Trinca took some effort. There were longer runways nearby, but Bob stuck with Trinca as his home base. “That 1,800 foot runway was tight, so you had to be right on the numbers.”

The grassroots crowd continued through the 1990s. Darren Clarkson, now a 737 captain, showed up around 1990 or 1991 and was one of Billow’s last students. “I’m sure he did some tailwheel training with other pilots after me, but I was his last student to start from scratch and continue through solo,” he said. “I later found out he had macular degeneration and knew his flying days were numbered, but he soldered on, and didn’t ease up a bit.” The airport was tired and ratty, as was the main cub he trained in, N91949. “There was no intercom, and Pete didn’t talk much anyway. He might say 10 words in the course of a flight. If you needed rudder, you felt a push on the pedal. If you needed to get the nose down, a nudge on the stick would let you know.” He taught attitude flying; Clarkson said his first time seeing the airspeed indicator from the backseat of the J-3 was on his solo. Having grown up with early flight simulator programs, he knew that speed mattered and once asked what speed he needed to fly. “You don’t need to see all that,” Pete told him. “Just put the nose here and it’ll fly.” In fact the only instrument Bellow really cared about was the altimeter. “He wanted us at 1,100 feet before we turned out over a neighborhood nearby. Not 1,090 feet. It had to be exact,” Clarkson said.

As demanding and cantankerous as Bellow was, the man had a soft spot or two. There was always an airport cat around, Clarkson recalled. One even took a flight of its own. “There was a lady in a Cessna 172 who had fired up and she always took a long time before she taxied out. One day she was sitting there, engine running, and the cat gave chase to a rabbit. The thing cut under the airplane, and the cat went through the prop. Thwack. We all heard it. The cat sailed a good hundred feet through the air and landed in a nearby hangar.” Pete walked over with a shovel and a garbage bag to collect the remains, only to find the cat licking its wounds, one side splayed open with ribs exposed. The cat, previously unnamed, lived for years after with a new name. Anyone who hung around Trinca field at the time will remember the cat named Propwash.

But the years passed, and so did the cat. Eventually, Pete did as well, at age 83.

Trinca is slated to close in a few months, a quiet death assigned to a small field whose passing will hardly draw notice from the aviation community. It’s no Meigs field or Santa Paula. A rural strip in the middle of New Jersey was an unlikely place for a farm boy turned aviator from Georgia to be standing on a cold February day, but I’d also been there 17 years before, as college kid with wet ink on my pilot and mechanic certificates. A friend had bought a Beech Musketeer to train his boys to fly in, and while the purchase wasn’t sight unseen, it may as well have been. It had been long neglected, and while he’d bought it for a song, he got what he paid for. I went up to spearhead the effort to get it flyable so we could bring it home to Georgia.

Through the late 1990s, I’d hung out on AOL’s two main aviation chat rooms. There I met a number of characters, and three or four I’ve met in person over the years. One of those guys was John Tremper, a mechanic, pilot and flight instructor who had a hangar at Trinca where he maintained, restored, and instructed in Cubs, Champs, and the like. When I got through finding a ton of things for the Musketeer’s mechanic to fix, I hung out with John for a day or two at Trinca and the nearby Andover-Aeroflex airport. As he gave me the grand tour at Trinca, I struggled to keep my jaw off the ice-crusted ground as he ushered me between hangars with an AT-6, Mazure’s Stampe, and a Great Lakes, as well as a number of other stick-and-rudder machines. This wasn’t a polished operation; if anything, it was the opposite. The hangars were a patchwork of different building materials. Many of the fabric airplanes had survived numerous winters in the elements, and they all had the scars to prove it.

Even then in 2002, the airport’s fate had been sealed. On my more recent visit, Tremper told me how Billow had big plans for the place at one point. He drew up designs similar to nearby Sussex airport, and had hoped to draw in more traffic, including some larger airplanes. He replotted the runway a few degrees off the original orientation, so he could lengthen the runway. “But at a meeting, he used the wrong word. Instead of expand, he should have said improve,” my buddy said, and from that point, the fates turned against him. The township opposed the changes, and instead of blossoming into a great community airfield, it withered on the vine. Eventually, the airport went up for sale. The township swept in with an eminent domain order, and took the property for a million dollars less than he’d hoped to get for the place. The new management of the airfield ranged from inept to vindictive depending who you asked, and tenants progressively pulled up the stakes, flew over the hill and tied down at Aeroflex-Andover airport or elsewhere. John was the last tenant, evicted a year before my return to Trinca. The hangar he’d used as a workshop now houses equipment from the township.

So as I stood on the ramp, watching the wind whistle through a shredded, faded windsock, I certainly had the place to myself. I’d not bothered locking the car; anyone approaching would have been visible from far away. My thoughts drifted to other airports closed or closing – ranging from the midnight assault mounted by the Daley political machine in Chicago to the incremental slow death being forced on Santa Monica, California. Here was an airport with a death sentence whose only crime was being a $17,000 a year drain on the community – a community which hadn’t bothered trying anything revolutionary like selling fuel or building hangars. Instead, the town’s preferred tool for change at the airport was a bulldozer.

“They tore the roof off the office,” John told me, “and didn’t bother replacing it for a year. It was constantly flooding. Multiple pages of drainage plans were executed, and what it did was create a swamp. Tadpoles filled a giant pool of water, and one day I came to the airport and the thousands of tadpoles were suddenly thousands of frogs. I had frogs in hangars, in airplanes, and one was even perched on top of the control stick in my Cub.”

I joined Tremper at Aeroflex, where there were plenty of planes – but not much activity. General aviation has suffered in the region, stifled by Temporary Flight Restrictions whenever the president headed to play golf at his nearby Bedminster resort. John pointed out planes that had migrated from Trinca, but many of them had not flown since their reposition flight.

Billow’s old Cub, N91949, is now Clarkson’s Cub, and is partway through a restoration. Darren bought the project years ago and had hoped to fly it back to New Jersey, to set it back down onto the same patch of grass where his flying career began. The restoration won’t be done in time, though. There are too many projects and not enough man hours, he lamented. When it does take wing, it’ll be a fitting tribute to the instructor who launched and influenced the flying lives of many.

My visit couldn’t run very late—I had an early hotel shuttle to the Newark the next morning for my next flight. As I parted, John apologized. “Sorry you came out here for nothing,” he said.

It really wasn’t a matter of expecting any level of activity. I just wanted to say goodbye. You’d do it for a friend on life support, if you thought they could hear you. It seemed the dying soul of an airport might likewise desire a little company from a sympathetic visitor before it slipped away.

Trinca Airport closed September 30, 2020

“We bought an Albatross. We’re gonna head out to Nevada for a week or so to work on it. It hasn’t flown in ages. Wanna come join us?” For some of us, that’s all it takes to bid a week off, leave the grass growing to hay at home, and swap the suitcase from layover wardrobe and uniforms to overalls, coveralls, and greasy t-shirts.

My friends Kim and Nick, a husband-and-wife captain couple, bought the Albatross for a song. Now, most of us know that the most expensive airplanes out there are the cheap ones, but the couple had no illusions. They knew this would be a major undertaking of money and time. The Albatross has been parked for two decades, and it shows. In addition to Kim and Nick, Dave Hamilton, a retired airline pilot and neighbor from their airpark joined for the adventure. Another Dave, who lives locally and has Grumman albatross experience, joined us on-site. Phil, a pilot with Nick’s operation, joined us from his home in Napa Valley for two days. I spent the better part of two days just clearing bird nests, bird poop, and baby birds (I soloed three of them) from the engine compartments as we disconnected hoses, electrical plugs, and mechanical control linkages. A minor safety wire scrape on my forearm the first day led to a bigger gash the second day - I decorated the bird with red blotches both days before even realizing that I was bleeding. Any good project is going to draw blood; this one wasted no time. Within days, I had scrapes all up and down my arms, and several fingernails had been bent back or broken into the quick as I wrestled with recalcitrant hardware. The old girl was grateful for the attention, but showed her appreciation with some level of violence.

Nick had several days’ head start on us, and we showed up midafternoon Thursday. By Friday, we’d made good progress against the birds and had the engines pretty well prepared for removal. Built up as QEC units—Quick Engine Change— the entire unit from firewall forward is intended to be removed and swapped quickly. Nick says that trained crews could swap both engines in a day. Between lack of training and working on an aircraft left to the pigeons, finches and sparrows for two decades, we weren’t working at such a pace. Saturday and Sunday, we removed system components to send out for overhaul, like fuel and hydraulic pumps, fuel selectors, fire extinguishers, and the like.

Monday dawned and another joined our team for the day, Paul LeVeque. Paul is well-known in the Albatross family, as a pilot, mechanic, and restorer. He brought a truckload of specialized tools - lifting cradle for the engine, strap harnesses and removal tools for the propellers. The big goal of this trip was to remove the engines and props for overhaul and inspection. This was the one day I showed up early, and I set up my iPad to record a timelapse video of the day’s progress. It was a burst of fury as we dove in, wasting no time while we had the brains and equipment on-hand. The Albatross’s unique prop domes came off, and then we set to removing the propellers themselves. With a strap around the hub slung from the Unimog’s crane, Nick sat atop the engine, pushing the assembly off the crankshaft while Paul and I wiggled the blades to keep the prop from binding as it slid. Once free of the crankshaft, I pulled the lift away, and from the ground, grabbed the lowest blade to guide the thing to a safe landing on a freight pallet. Rinse and repeat for the other side.

The engines came off in similar fashion, with 1500 pounds or so of metal, rubber, and fluids dangling on the hoist. I don’t think anyone breathed for a moment between the engines popping loose of the mounting hardware until they sat on the ground, bolted to build-up stands. We scarfed down some sandwiches for lunch after the first engine was safely on the ground. From there, we dove into removing the right engine, while Kim and Atlanta Dave began to break down the propellers.

With both engines on the ground, we all jumped into breaking the props down. With everything tagged and disassembled, we called it a day. Nick and Kim treated us to a steak dinner cooked on the pool patio grill at their hotel that night. We’d earned it. As you can see, we got some stuff done.

The posts have been erratic. Someone at the airline said the magic words “we need you,” and I’ve added another title to the list - editing my fleet’s monthly newsletter. Excuse any typos - this one was typed straight to the page, threw some media in, and my editing pretty much was a squint. “Good enough,” I say, as I hit send. There wasn’t a lot of time for polishing today, but I’m way overdue. There will still be content here, but I ain’t promising every Monday.. between here and the magazine, I’ve still got plenty of tales to share.

Talk soon!

Subscribe now

On a slow day in the allied advance into Germany, and pursuing some wild rumors, Coonley and some other GIs grabbed a Jeep and went exploring. Allied forces had made it into southern Germany and Munich had just fallen. They rolled through a small town and stopped at an iron gate, now infamous, bearing the words “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Work Liberates, or other similar themes, depending on your translation.

My mentor, Hal Coonley, was one of the first Americans to step into the Dachau concentration camp on the heels of its April 29, 1945 liberation. Survivors were still there, begging for help, for food, for anything. Bodies remained, scattered all about. He claimed there was still ash in the crematorium’s furnaces. Dachau was the longest running concentration camp of the war, and his account was absolutely chilling even as he dodged many details to spare me, then still a child, the horrors he’d experienced.

We hadn’t planned on a trip to Dachau. Shoot, that we were in Munich was a fluke in and of itself—our original plans of Amsterdam, Dublin and/or Edinburgh had failed as sold-out flights foiled our plans for a non-revenue travel adventure. We saw seats available for Munich and headed to the airport. We’d left the house still basically unprepared for the trip, studying travel guides as we waited to board. As it turned out, no amount of studying could have prepared us for the side trip ahead of us. We didn’t realize we’d picked the crew’s layover hotel until our first morning there, when I recognized one of the pilots from our flight over as we stood waiting for the elevator. He asked what we had in store for the day. We told him. “Oh, yes, I’ve been,” he said. “There’s also an aviation museum nearby that’s a short bus ride away. Check it out while you’re there.”

We walked into the Dachau visitor center just a few moments before noon, and we returned our audio tour equipment ten minutes ahead of closing at 5 p.m. Amy and I read nearly every display. Once we started the tour, there was no turning back, and any plans to swing by the aviation museum that day were immediately shelved.

I’ve been to plenty of museums where I didn’t feel bad shuffling through at a brisk pace to see selected portions of the displays. Dachau is a place where I felt bad that I didn’t have multiple days to spend on-site.

Dachau was one of the very first concentration camps spooled up after Hitler’s rise to power as chancellor and his dismantling of a constitutional republic that took only 53 days. The Nazis needed a place to park tens of thousands of political dissidents and undesirables. The abandoned ammunition factory outside the community of Dachau was hastily converted into a concentration camp.

Just a few months shy of 80 years after the camp’s liberation, I stood outside its famous gate. A careful excavation had unearthed the rail spur and loading dock where untold numbers of people had been violently unloaded in a fusillade of fists and rifle butts, marched into the grounds, cruelly processed, and issued uniforms proclaiming their reasons for imprisonment. The place quickly filled with political foes, faithful Jews, “antisocial” types including gay and bisexual men, clergy, immigrants, and emigrants who’d left and then returned. Those who didn’t wave the Nazi flag—and even some of those who did, but did not wave it strongly strongly enough, were imprisoned, tortured, experimented upon, and used as forced labor in the war effort.

In my mind, concentration camps were mostly all death camps where the captives walked in and never left. The public schools in Georgia didn’t get into the deep details of this stuff. The camp at Dachau actually was a work camp, and among many other things, the prisoners were farmed out as labor for the German war machine, building aircraft, munitions, and cameras. If you’re scratching your head thinking “where’s the airplane content?” here’s another airplane tie-in: Many workers were forced to manufacture BMW aircraft engine parts; another factory built in a giant bunker had prison labor building the Messerschmitt Me 262, the infamous German jet fighter/bomber aircraft. Many of these people were used as test subjects for altitude and hypothermia research for aircrews, as well as testing treatments for malaria and infection.

But don’t let Dacahu’s official designation fool you. For a “work camp,” there sure was a lot of killing going on. Mass executions—often simply to meet quotas—wiped out thousands. Firing squads had special ranges; the crematory furnaces had a waiting room leading to a “shower room,” where the shower heads weren’t plumbed to water. The official tour insists this gas chamber was never used, some eyewitnesses from the time insist that they were indeed used, but not on the scale of death camps like Auschwitz. The more prevalent method used was to hang prisoners from the beams directly before the furnaces, and then cremate the remains.

The sun sank low over the horizon as Amy and I left through the gate that so many had no such opportunity to do. It was instantly ten degrees warmer as we passed through the gatehouse. It could have been the gap in the trees to the west there, allowing the sun to hit us after trees had shaded the last portion of our walk. It could have been something else: About 200,000 people had been incarcerated at Dachau between 1933 and 1945. Scholars believe at least 40,000 died there. Many of those detained were sent to other sites for execution, thus keeping Dachau’s mortality figures comparatively low.

Still, standing on the site that facilitated 40,000 deaths at the hands of a political machine and its followers caught up in the propaganda and misinformation—some thought it could never happen. Some today seem to think it could never happen again.

And some people seem to think it never happened at all.

That’s a thought so chilling, even the sun couldn’t overcome it as we walked into its light.

Captain Mark Hanna and I took up a position beyond the check-in counter where the event began for most participants, and we handed out trading cards and pilot wings as we began a discussion with our new friends that would mill around the area for a few minutes before we began to work our way through the security checkpoint and head toward the gate. I’d expected mainly young folks, whether it was told to me or an expectation of my own, and there were plenty of kids. But there were also participants with gray hair, and all ages between.

I asked several participants about parts of the process they might fear, or what things they didn’t understand. I told them that both at the event, and on a real flight, to speak up and ask questions, because things that concern them might go unnoticed elsewhere. Mark had participated in a similar event earlier, and he said that several people had difficulties stepping from the jetway onto the plane because a gap of light was visible between the platform and the fuselage, a situation remedied easily enough by some creative thinking. A sheet of cardboard, or some blankets wedged into the gap to make it seem like the jet is attached to the walkway is all it took to remedy his situation.

On board, we had an extra flight attendant, several Madison, Wisc. airport station staff, and volunteers in addition to the participants who helped fill in the seats to make a realistically-loaded cabin. Everyone worked in concert to ensure a smooth boarding. We roamed the aisle to ensure that all questions were answered and that any fears were allayed before we began doing airplane things.

Doing airplane things, for an event like this, brings us into a realm of things well out of the ordinary. First of all, I called the tower on the phone that morning after breakfast and explained what we were doing. A random airliner doesn’t often call up for push and taxi without an associated flight plan, and to do so with a desire to taxi around the airport for 10-15 minutes is just all that much more unusual. I outlined the event we were participating in, what we were hoping to provide for the participants, and the possibility we might have to stop unexpectedly if someone stood up or reacted poorly to an unexpected stimulus. Our crew briefing covered similar considerations, and where the extra flight attendant should be—we chose to station the spare flight attendant in the emergency exit row positioning them to prevent an unexpected evacuation or to aid with a necessary evacuation.

As a flight crew, we had an additional threat—we had two captains and zero first officers. Being as that my upgrade was much more recent, I volunteered for the right seat, since those flows and procedures are more recent in my mind. Our fleet standards captain, who oversees our check airmen, verified that we were legal for such a thing, and gave me a list of things to brush up on ahead of the event to include the first officer’s duties in an evacuation, the associated flows, and the engine start/shutdown procedures.

As I fired up the APU, Mark made an announcement explaining that I was starting an engine in the tail, and told them the things they might expect to see, feel, and hear as we started engines on the airplane – the sound of the spooling turbines, changes in air conditioning flow, and the flicker of lights as we shifted power sources.

We pushed back, started an engine and called ground for taxi, and we plotted out our route. As we taxied, we did our normal flows and checks before starting the second engine to simulate a normal flight as much as possible. As we reached the runway, we added a brief summary to “flight attendants, prepare the cabin” to make it clear that on a normal flight, the increased noise, acceleration, and vibration of a takeoff would come next. We then taxied across the departure runway and down the back side of the field, before re-crossing the departure end of the departure runway, where we made another announcement that noises would accompany our after-landing procedures and the engine shutdown leading to parking at the gate.

As our friends deplaned, many stayed behind for pictures on the flight deck. There were a couple of avgeeks in our midst. Over the course of the event, there were a lot of handshakes, a number of hugs, and a few high-fives. I expected to answer a lot of questions. I didn’t expect to be asking nearly as many as I answered.

There are 35 times as many passenger seats in the jet I fly for a living than there are in my Mooney, so statistically speaking, I’ll probably never handle as many special-needs passengers in my airplane as I will at work. But, there are some good takeaways for us in the general aviation world. In a light aircraft, though, “special needs” can take on a different meaning when you consider that every passenger is within reach of the cockpit controls. I recently took two sisters we fostered years ago for their first airplane flight. As we threaded our way around and beneath the Atlanta Class B airspace, transited one class D airspace before landing at another class D airport, I was juggling radios, coping with crazy traffic at our destination (tower was denying touch and go requests due to volume and I was number four for the runway at one point), and still had to tend the two girls scream-laughing into the intercom. I found myself thankful for the intercom’s isolation functions.

When you’re taking someone new to flying—or new to our kind of flying—for a trip around the pattern, take a moment to view our world through the lens of their experience. In addition to whatever you’re using for a safety briefing, give them a heads-up of what they will experience. Banked turns are not something most folks really experience outside of flying. The up-and-down bobbles and bumps of maintaining altitude can be uncomfortable for a first-timer. Let them know ahead of time that there will be moments you must ignore their questions – such as when you’re being instructed to follow a Cherokee you haven’t seen yet, that’s just a mile off the nose.

When you take a moment to see things through their eyes, it serves as a revival of sorts for us as well, a reminder that while there’s good science behind everything we do in airplanes, there a little bit of magic and art sprinkled in for good measure.

I’m a little off schedule at this point, and I hope you’ll forgive me. Sun ‘N Fun was busy. Massive crowds, to hear the organizers tell it—in fact, they closed the gates to on-site ticket sales Saturday because the crowds had packed the place to capacity. There were some cool things to see, but after a day and a half, I was on the road back home. I’ve got some extracurricular work at the airline: Tomorrow I’ll head to Columbia, S.C. for another “Wings For All” event, and I’m also donning the editor’s visor for my fleet’s monthly newsletter.

Let’s aim to get back together Monday morning to talk airplane stuff again.

It’s that time of year again: Pollen has a ¼” blanket on every horizontal surface, and it while might be 80 degrees today, it’s probably not a typo if the weather report says it’ll frost again before it’s well and truly springtime. The private school kids are on their way back from Cabo; the public school kids are gearing up for their beach trips in a week or two.

And in this gap between the two tiers of schools taking a week off, it’s spring break for pilots: Let’s all go to Lakeland, Florida, for the Sun ‘n Fun fly-in.

In the years since I’ve started making a yearly trip to central Florida for my fly-in fix, the event has morphed from an EAA fly-in to its own event, and later joined into partnership with the Aerospace Center for Excellence as the airshow serves as its massive fundraising event.

As a kid, I flew down a couple of years with local pilots, piling into a convoy of airplanes to camp out for a few days. In the years that followed, I worked as ground crew for a few airshow performers. For the last eight years or so, I’ve attended with media credentials around my neck, writing with Plane & Pilot. Whether my armband says performer, media, or weekly camper, I’m there for my family reunion.

One constant through the last thirty years of my attendance is that I flew down if humanly possible. I bummed rides before I had my pilot certificate, and with a freshly-inked private pilot certificate I borrowed a friend’s Cessna. Another year, I borrowed the Mooney, long before it was mine. And for every year since the Mooney became mine to care for, I would fire it up and fly in a day before the event began.

This year was the year of false starts. First of all, I forgot to bid off for it in my March schedule – I wasn’t thinking about how our March bid period includes the first day of April, and sure enough I got stuck with a trip right over the first days of Sun ‘n Fun. I hurriedly posted the trip to our swap board, and someone took it, allowing me a sigh of relief. Then the April bid period rolled around, and I remembered to bid off the first week this time.

But then, I wound up on a trip the weekend leading into the event. I lost my chance to stage the airplane to a public airport with amenities like a paved runway, tiedowns, and instrument approaches. Weather was bearing down on us and I quickly realized I’d be threading the needle on being able to depart after daybreak and before the weather.

The pieces just weren’t lining up for me. So I threw my camping gear into the pickup and pointed the nose south. For the first time as an aircraft owner, I’m driving to the show.

I’ve camped most years at Sun N’ Fun, and every year that I attended Airventure in Oshkosh. A few years when we were doing airshow stuff, they gave us hotel rooms, but there were caveats. We were only comped rooms for the days we flew – if they scheduled us to fly Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, We’d be on the hook for the nights in between. And we weren’t exactly in the Four Seasons. One year, I stumbled out of a Red Roof Inn torture chamber, where the air conditioner had wheezed and whined all night long. The bed was sway-backed, my spine matched the mattress. As I wiped the sleep from my eyes and started toward the car to head for the 8AM performer’s briefing, the couple staying in the room next door stepped out, visibly suffering from a room that was no better than mine. The husband wore a green EAA Aluminum Overcast bomber jacket, and as my eyes focused, I realized this was Paul Poberezny and his wife Audrey – arguably the highest of royalty in general aviation back then. Paul founded the Experimental Aircraft Association.

If the best they could do for Paul was a ratty hotel room in Lakeland, I figured there was “next year will be better,” in my future. In the years to come, I’ve made peace with living in a tent for a week or two each year, often pitched between the wing and tail of an airplane. There’s no traffic jam getting to or from the airport, and sleeping next to your plane means you really don’t miss much anything happening at the show.

But as much as I’ve reasoned my way into believing the benefits, there are times when I really just wish I had a car to scoot into town for a grocery store run, to sit at a table for dinner in an air-conditioned restaurant, or to pick up some odd piece from Walmart that I forgot for the seventh year in a row. I can usually find a ride with someone, but it’s always more trouble than it’s worth.

This year, I’ll have wheels, and maybe even trees where I camp, allowing me to sling a hammock or two. But I’ll miss framing the tail of my Mooney in the tent door.

It could be worse. I could be at home.

And even better - I crashed last at a friend’s place on the way down. We rarely see each other more than every other year, and we’ve had a chance to catch up - we used to hang out daily at the Carrollton airport when I was growing up. I won’t get to see him at Lakeland because he has a real job (BOOOO HISSSS) but this was a great chance to visit.

See y’all in Lakeland. I’m arriving today (Monday) midday, and will stay through Wednesday afternoon. I love the opening day energy…. Y’all can stick around for the weekend crowd. I’ll be back at my day job by then.

If you’re thinking “hey wait, he’s not an Airbus driver,” you’re correct… but I was when I penned this piece after a cross country in 2021.

It’s time for a confession, friends. In the time between earning my instrument rating and getting hired at an airline, I never flew IFR in a single-engine aircraft. I air-filed for an approach into Lakeland, Florida, during my multi-engine commercial check ride, and then I was off to more capable aircraft. 

More than a decade later, we bought the Mooney, and I flew it VFR mostly for two years, except for one IFR cross-country. Despite having very carefully filed our flight plan with the correct equipment codes and along designated airways, I kept getting cleared direct to all sorts of places. “I’ll take a heading for now and direct to the VOR when able,” I had to keep replying. I got the hint. It was time for an upgrade. 

After installing a Garmin GPS 175, a G5 attitude indicator and a JPI engine monitor, I felt more capable, but I still flew VFR to get comfortable with things before diving into the deep end of general aviation IFR. Finally, as departure day neared for a trip out west to check off a few more national parks from our list, I frowned at the weather forecast. We’d planned to depart the day after Thanksgiving and spend all day flying to Carlsbad, New Mexico, the first leg of a trip that would loop through Texas and New Mexico to add Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mountain and Big Bend to our list of national parks visited. As the weather forecast started showing rain on Black Friday, the day our trip was to begin, I groused about having to reposition the Mooney to a paved runway for our launch. Then Amy had an idea: Why not load up and depart immediately after the family’s Thanksgiving feast? “The Mooney can fly at night, right?” she asked. 

“Sure, it can fly in the dark,” I replied. And we did. As it turned out, we’d have to deal with clouds and rain, in addition to the dark. A weak band of weather crossed our path, starting at Houston with some strong showers and thunderstorms and dissipating across our route, before strengthening again well to the north. Our route through the weakest part of the front showed almost no rain, but I knew it’d be there. I picked up our clearance airborne from West Georgia as we angled toward Birmingham, then turned down toward Meridian, Mississippi, where the weather began. “Probably gonna be a little bumpy,” I warned Amy, but the caution was overblown. With no convective activity at all, the clouds just gave a gentle nudge now and then, as smooth of a ride as one could ask for. I flipped the intercom mode switch to isolate Amy from the radios so she could enjoy her audiobooks and podcasts, and when I next looked over, she was sound asleep with a pillow wedged between the seat-back and the doorframe. 

Traffic was light, and by light, I mean that often we were the only airplane on a given controller’s scope. Headwinds had me covering ground at Skyhawk speeds. An approach controller in Monroe, Louisiana, and I had a great conversation comparing the weather tools we each had available. As we chatted, I kept gazing out my side window. We were solidly in the soup, and the nav lights had redecorated the light gray surroundings into red and green orbs around the airplane. I’d lost sight of the ground for some time. Amy was sound asleep, and my only link to another was the talkative controller. As I took the handoff to the next controller, I meant it when I said, “Happy Thanksgiving, for the next few hours,” in parting. 

After a fuel stop in Minden, Louisiana, we continued west, soon breaking into clear skies and a beautiful view as the lights of Dallas glowed on the horizon. Controllers in Dallas sent us winging straight through the mostly unused class B airspace, and I had to thank them for the “best Thanksgiving shortcut ever” as we clipped across the metroplex, landing in Eastland, Texas, where airport manager Bode Zeitz helped me push the Mooney into a hangar for the night. I grimaced: Beneath the hangar lights, our freshly repainted, resealed, and balanced propeller had a shiny leading edge of bare metal—I’d completely forgotten that a couple hours of flying in the rain will do that to ones’ blades. 

Worn paint on the prop blades was an annoyance, and just one of several things that reminded me that if flying IFR in the Mooney were to become a regular thing, I’d have to mind the differences from my day job.  

When you’re streaking across the continent at a significant portion of the speed of sound, the interactions with controllers are brief. Check in with a hello and, a few minutes later, a quick goodbye as you exit that controller’s area of concern. Add in a controller pilot data link communications for the handoff to the next frequency, and technology steals your goodbyes. 

But at 140 knots, there’s time to get comfortable, listen to the conversations, and establish some sort of relationship, even if it is as imagined and one-sided as that relationship we all had in grade school with someone who didn’t even know we existed. 

Unlike the Airbus, though, I could look down and see the ground in detail. I tried to keep a landing spot in sight, but there were times when we’d be hard-pressed to come to a stop without hitting a rock, tree or ditch big enough to ruin the day. I looked down on oilfields, natural gas wells and windmills to observe them in greater detail than in the jet—when you’re below 10,000 feet in a jet, you’re laser-focused on the arrival and approach ahead. With apologies to the cast of the movie Airplane!, it’s a completely different kind of flying. 

My gazes out the window were interrupted as I scanned back inside, though, for the needles weren’t as enthralled with the exotic terrain below. Despite the Positive Control wing leveler working just fine, the nose still meandered a little left and right, though it was easily tended with a nudge on the yoke. The fuel selector needed an occasional flip to keep things balanced. When the altitude drifted, shifting the weight of my feet and their Ariat boots were often enough to arrest a sink or climb by moving one foot or both a little forward or aft.

The whole time, I contemplated IFR in a piston single versus at my airline. Airline flying can make a pilot lazy right quick—dispatchers fire over a release package that includes your flight plan, a navigation log that covers the route waypoint by waypoint, weather observations and forecasts and a NOTAM package that usually burns up a dozen pages to tell you that a taxiway sign is unlit or circling minimums on an approach are higher than published—but still well below the company minimums. Our company’s computers generate solutions for weight and balance and performance calculations. We scan the NOTAMS, glance at the route to make sure dispatch hasn’t filed us directly down a line of thunderstorms (it happens more than you would think), and off we go. 

Meanwhile, roaming the country in an old airplane that has outlived two of its prior owners, weight and balance are pretty precise, although the performance calculations are aviation’s version of Kentucky windage—CAR3-certified airplanes come with manuals that are more of a sales pamphlet than a pilot operating handbook. I’m responsible for rounding up the weather and NOTAMS, although EFB apps have made that a lot easier. I choose a route that may or may not be rejected by the system—but so far, all the amendments to my planned routes have been reasonable, if not outright shortcuts.

On the last day of our vacation, a significant rain shower sat right on the north side of our destination airport. I’d departed VFR, picked up flight following and, as we neared, I watched the rain grow while remaining firmly planted just north of the airport. We filed IFR airborne and then took a swing south around the weather and to join the RNAV 35 approach at West Georgia. I’m sure the controller was shaking their head with the wind out of the south and my request for the approach that would have had a significant tailwind, but the ceilings were high enough for me to cancel IFR once we broke out below the overcast and joined the pattern for runway 17, keeping the pattern tight between the runway and the weather north of the field.

I dropped Amy off—that’s where her car was parked—and then flew the last few miles to the airstrip where our Mooney sleeps.

After roaming the country in varying weather conditions and areas I’d never seen before, I left the GPS unprogrammed; my phone and tablet on the backseat. I didn’t bother with looking at much on the panel other than the engine gauges as I scooted the last minutes of a spectacular journey. After I cleared a gaggle of vultures off the runway, the tires rolled onto the grass and clover they’d been missing during their adventure of asphalt, concrete and gravel. 

As I pushed our gray bird back into her roost, my eyes fell to the black streaks of oxidation we’d picked up by flying through the rain. I remembered seeing similar streaks on working planes as a kid. The Gray Gal wasn’t a working bird, but she’d worked well for us. I jotted down my squawk list, threw the last of the bags in the car, yawned and headed home.

For all the differences I’d noted in my return to little airplane IFR, the exhaustion after a long day’s flying is universal. 

I’m using the royal “we,” of course, because we were being pushed back by the tug and the company has a strict policy that I shall not be distracted by outside things during that time. The first officer was doing all the hard work.

Then we were second or third in line to take off. I’d noticed a number of emergency vehicles with their lights on, staged around the airport, and the emergency aircraft landed, stopped on the runway, and began to evacuate. All the communications associated with that were on the other runway’s frequency, but the next words our runway’s controller spoke upended our plans, again: “Attention all aircraft on this frequency, runway 27R is closed to departures for an evacuation in progress on 27L, standby for further instructions. Start planning to depart runway 26L.”

Once again, the beleaguered first officer dove back into his work, resetting all the things to our original plan for departure, and as we taxied to the next runway, we ran the checklist of all the changes. As we taxied on a scenic tour of the airport, I looked to Alex and chuckled. “You do know there’s a silver lining in all this, right? I pointed to the engine gauges. “We’re burning a lot less gas taxiing around on the ground, than we would if we were flying a holding pattern waiting on the weather to improve in Jackson!” We finally got airborne, and the timing was spot-on. I claim luck, not skill, for that one. As we began our descent into Jackson, the weather had improved just enough to fly the approach. As we taxied to the gate, the sun shone through a patch of blue in the disappearing fog layer.

After all that, the normal chaos that accompanies any flight into Houston’s Hobby Airport seemed like a cake walk. In the arrival briefing, we always point out anticipated threats and how to mitigate them: “Large presence of pilots with a cowboy culture, approach control that loves to leave us hanging high before being cleared for the approach, and only one runway is open so any incident will close the airport, forcing a diversion. We’ll probably see helicopters and Super Cubs in the mix. Anything to add?”

“Nah. Sounds easier than the first leg.”

Over the tacos in Houston that evening, we asked each other about our different paths to our current situation. “When did you know you were going to be a pilot?” he asked me. I told my tale about that, then turned the question on him.

“When I was a kid, my dad took me to a number of air shows.”

“Were you living in Atlanta at the time? When was this?” I asked, curious if maybe he’d been at some of the airshows we had done.

“No, we lived a long way away,” he said, and my hopes faded. “We were in Missouri at the time. We went to one big show at Fair Saint Louis, in 2003. I was in seventh grade.”

I fished through my phone to find a photo of two red, white, and black biplanes, Christen Eagles, that were flown by Dan McClung and Buck Roetman. “Recognize these?”

His eyes widened.

“I was there, too! I was the voice announcing their performance,” I said. “They picked me up for two seasons as their announcer and publicist. This was the first show I announced with them!”

After college, Alex had joined the Air Force, and flew C-17 cargo jets before coming to the airline world. He’s sharp; our airline is lucky to have him. I was grateful for his professionalism and proficiency as we juggled all the challenges earlier in the day. We talked about the disdain many of our pilots have for the influencers in our industry - earlier that day, one of our own had posted a barely-veiled social media attack on one of our female pilots for a post she made that was completely within the company’s social media guidelines. I’m fairly certain she’d gone through all the same corporate conflict-of-interest hoops that I’ve done to be able to write about this career. We both agreed, she’s not posting for the people already in the career. She’s posting for the students slogging it out in the trenches, shelling out a lot of money for every minute of flight time they log. She’s doing it to inspire the young girls who haven’t even touched a plane yet, but who need to see that these career paths exist for them. She’s an ambassador for those who dream. If her stuff is monetized, it’s minimal - aviation influencers often carry a much smaller following than the truly big names in the business. It’s worth a mention at this point that Alex, like the influencer who was under attack, is a minority pilot in a field where the vast majority of us check a single demographic box. And Alex, like many others who are outnumbered in this business, knows a core truth: It’s a long, hard slog to the top.

Many prospective students find it easier to take those difficult first steps when they can see people who look like them already in that dream job.

As we finished our tacos, we talked about how those complaining about the influencers are much like those who complained about this year’s Super Bowl halftime show - they’re unable to accept the instances when they’re not the target audience. “It’s almost like as if the old joke about airline pilots and light bulbs is a true story, but comedically-told,” I said.

Come on. You know this one.

How many airline pilots does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. He’ll sit there and hold it while the universe revolves around him.

See y’all next week.

Today was a fine day of flying. Celebrating the centennial of my airline’s first flight, we flew a couple of legs with a layover in Dayton planned. Hearing that the other guy didn’t hate airplanes, he finished my next question: “Any chance you wanna hop an Uber to-” “The museum? Yep.”

We showed up 90 minutes prior to closing, and all but speed-walked the place. Starting with the Wright Brothers and other early pioneers, we passed all sorts of great displays of flying machines, some beautiful while others were lethal. Occasionally they were both.

I had two specific goals - and they were both parked in the same spot. Last Friday, my friend Matt and I made a side trip from a model airplane swap meet to hit the Air Force museum in Warner Robins, Georgia. He’s a Blackbird fanboy, and he got to nestle up to one he’d not seen before. Some discussion came up of the lighting - in some photos you can see a red anti collision light, in others there is none. Between poking around and googling, we discovered the SR-71 had a retractable red beacon on top and beneath the fuselage, but no position lights on the wingtips. In the googling, we found some allegation that the earlier YF-12 did have those position lights.

I found the YF-12 to have this lens, but now I’m not certain whether it’s a position light or not. If so, the red one should be on the left and this one was on the right side.

My other mission: To say hi to the XB-70 Valkyrie. North American built two XB-70 high-speed, high-altitude bomber prototypes, which my grandfather unwittingly helped construct. The upper fuselage was subcontracted to Lockheed in Marietta, where he worked before becoming an airline mechanic. He helped with tooling and construction of some of the honeycomb structures that became a calling card of the aircraft’s innovative design.

We had some quality time before the docents shooed us to the curb.

Following is a writeup I did of the XB-70 for Plane & Pilot’s “This Incredible Airplane,” back in 2020.

Loaded up, the XB-70 was more than a half-million pounds of pure sex appeal. With a six-pack of afterburning GE YJ-93 engines, wingtips and snout rigged to droop—the former for speed, the latter for slower speeds—the supersonic eXperimental Beauty-70 looked like it was busting Mach with the parking brake set and chocks snugged around the tires.

It was a doomed design before North American even started cutting metal. The design was born from the Curtis LeMay school of logic that preached speed and altitude were a bomber’s best defense. But before it even flew, missiles brought it down, figuratively at least. As evidenced by the Soviets’ shootdown of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2, altitude was no longer a defense, and as technology improved, missiles could track faster and faster targets.

Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy argued for the design while campaigning for the White House, and the Air Force issued a contract for a dozen airframes in early 1960. Later that year, President Kennedy got briefed on missile capabilities and the Valkyrie’s associated weakness, and the order was slashed to three vehicles to be used for high-altitude, high-speed research.  North American built and flew two of these birds, AV-1 and AV-2. AV-1 suffered plenty of teething issues associated with the construction process—North American was pioneering the use of stainless steel-skinned honeycomb structures, and more than once, AV-1 landed with panels missing that had peeled off at supersonic speed. AV-2, suffering significantly fewer structural issues, took flight and topped Mach 3.  Construction of AV-3 was never completed.

No longer destined to be a high-altitude supersonic bomber, the XB-70 was now a flying laboratory. As researchers played with advanced aerodynamics, Washington pulled back the curtain for an aeronautic peepshow that astounded many—including the Russians, who reportedly designed the budget-busting Mig-25 Foxbat with the XB-70 as inspiration.

No longer a fighting aircraft, the XB-70 became a showpiece instead, though that visibility wound up killing the program. A formation photo flight in June of 1966 ended in tragedy. The speedy giant was flying in formation with an F-4 Phantom, an F-5, a T-38 and an F-104. After the photographers got their pictures, the F-104, flown by NASA Chief Test Pilot Joe Walker, got caught in the vortex off the XB-70’s right wingtip and was snapped up and across the Valkyrie, clipping both vertical stabilizers and the left wing. Walker died at the controls of his F-104. The XB-70 held its line for a long moment before it began to skid and disintegrate. The XB-70’s co-pilot, Carl Cross, died in the crash. Pilot Al White managed to eject to safety, with injuries. After the crash of AV-1, AV-2 flew on for another two and a half years before it made one last flight to Dayton, Ohio, where it stands as a crown jewel in the USAF Museum’s collection.

The Valkyrie helped provide us with a deeper understanding of high-altitude, high-speed aerodynamics. North American pioneered several construction methods in the process, and a generation of pilots and pilots-to-be were inspired by the image of a machine that may have just flown a little too high and fast for its time.

Want to get deep into the XB-70’s story? Check out Valkyrie: The North American XB-70: The USA’s Ill-Fated Supersonic Heavy Bomber by Graham M. Simons, available as a Kindle e-book on Amazon.com (I’m collecting no commissions on this, but it is the primary source for what you’re reading here).

As word first leaked out that the first officer—generally believed to be the pilot flying—in the Toronto accident was a female, a concerted effort to dox the pilot began immediately. In today’s environment where facts don’t matter nearly so much as a narrative and before the airlines involved could get a press release out about the pilots’ qualifications, the damage was done by unfounded claims that the Endeavor pilots had failed multiple training events and that the pilot flying had only finished her initial training in the jet weeks before. (She’s been flying the line since last April, according to information supplied by her airline.)

If the word “dox” is new to you, it basically means to share someone’s personal information with malicious intent.

Pitchforks and torches are so yesterday. Today’s angry mobs, armed with keyboards and smartphones, sussed out the pilot’s home address via the FAA Airman database and you can rest assured that most of them weren’t mailing notes of sympathy.

Pilots and aircraft owners have never experienced the level of privacy granted to car owners and drivers. I’ve never seen a database where the public can just type in the license plate number of a car being driven like an idiot and have the owner’s home address within seconds. Over the last 29 years since my first pilot medical, I’ve never felt a need to check any boxes to hide my personal information. In fact, that information being public resulted in meeting the son of my Mooney’s first owner and getting to take him flying on our way back from one of our adventures out west.

I opted to cloak myself in the curtain of privacy last week, though. Seeing pilots doxxed as the smoke still lingered over the wreckage was absolutely heartbreaking. If you’re a pilot with your information publicly available in the FAA database, you might want to take similar steps.

There are a number of additional good reasons to opt out of the public disclosure in the FAA databases. Data scrapers can mine loads of useful data—pilots are filthy, stinking rich, after all (sarcasm)—so who wouldn’t want contact information for a certain demographic with disposable income? It could also arm cybercriminals with the first few bits of information to steal your identity. I’ve been aggressively targeted by a certain financial adviser out of Louisville, Kentucky, who apparently scraped the FAA database and called me a few times presuming to know a lot more about me than he should. It also sets a certain layer of professional boundaries, which shouldn’t be a problem, but a couple of incidents over the years of pilots and flight attendants stalking one another has shown otherwise.

Be safe out there… with your flying, but also with your personal information.

How to Protect Your Privacy in the FAA Airman Database

Opt Out of Public Listing. The FAA allows pilots to request limited data visibility in public searches. This means that while your information remains in the FAA database for regulatory purposes, it won’t be readily available to the general public.

Steps to Opt Out:

• Go to the FAA Airmen Services website: https://amsrvs.registry.faa.gov/amsrvs

• Log in with your credentials.

• Locate the privacy settings or request form.

• Submit a request to restrict public access to your information.

This option does not remove your data entirely but limits the information shown in online queries.

Request an Address Change. Instead of listing a home address, pilots can use a PO Box or a business address.

Steps to Change Your Address

• Go to the FAA Airmen Services website: https://amsrvs.registry.faa.gov/amsrvs

• Download FAA Form 8060-55 (Change of Address Notification for Airmen).

• Fill out the form with your new address (a PO Box or business address can separate your name from your home).

• Submit the completed form online, via mail, or fax as per FAA instructions.

According to FAA regulations, pilots must notify the agency of an address change within 30 days. Failing to do so may result in administrative actions or certificate suspension.

Use an Aviation Trust or LLC

For those seeking an extra layer of privacy, registering aircraft ownership under a trust or a limited liability company (LLC) can obscure personal details in FAA records. I’ve been told varying answers regarding how much liability an LLC can shield you from in an accident—talk to your lawyer on this one. Don’t take this post as any form of legal advice whatsoever.

Steps to Establish an Aviation Trust or LLC

• Consult with an aviation attorney or a company specializing in aircraft trusts.

• Form an LLC in a state with strong privacy laws (e.g., Delaware, Wyoming).

• Register the LLC as the aircraft owner with the FAA.

• Use the LLC’s address for your airman certification and aircraft registration.

While this approach requires additional costs and legal considerations, it offers the highest level of privacy for pilots who own aircraft.

Be Cautious with Third-party Services

Numerous websites aggregate and republish FAA data, sometimes making it more accessible than the FAA database itself. If you find your information on such sites, you can often request removal.

The FAA Airman Database serves an essential regulatory purpose, but pilots must be proactive in managing their privacy. From updating your address to opting out of public listings, several measures can help reduce exposure and mitigate risks. Whether you’re a private pilot or a high-profile aviator, safeguarding your personal information ensures both security and peace of mind in an increasingly digital world.

“That’s maintenance control’s wheelhouse,” the dispatcher replied, correctly. We both grumbled about the current bird assigned to this flight making extra work for all involved, and I reminded him that I needed a takeoff solution with more than 10 degrees of flaps to satisfy the deferral we were stuck with.

Then I called maintenance control where Lee picked up the phone. He may have been the most frazzled of all. “I just want to make sure the Knoxville mechanic is waiting for us when we get there,” I told him. Lee assured me that the mechanic, a contractor we use, was already there, working on another broken airplane at the gate next door. If this thing snowballed, I wouldn’t have a lot of time left on my duty day limit.

“He’ll gladly take a break from his thrust-reverser nightmare to do your inspection,” Lee told me.

I smiled at that. Thrust reversers are nasty work. the combination of hydraulics and large sheet metal bits that are always coated in exhaust residue aren’t the sexiest thing to work on. “Hopefully that means we won’t have to talk again today. Hang in there. Quitting time can’t be too far away.”

It always seems like these things pile up at the end of a trip. It traded into what appeared as an easy two-day trip, on paper. There were threats - every time we hit a hub, we’d be sitting for more than an hour, which made us targets for reroutes. The weather that first day in Atlanta was very low overcast - ceilings hanging right at 200 above the runway, and that day’s chariot had one radio receiver deferred, limiting us to standard ILS approaches. That meant that auto-landings were prohibited, and the limitation on our approaches was basically the same as the ceiling of clouds at both our destinations for the day. A low-hanging tendril of cloud could wipe out our shot at landing.

I lost the first officer after the first round trip. They sent him to Tallahassee for a layover and he’d be heading home nearly six hours early the next day. The flight attendants and I picked up a new first officer and headed on to Dallas, where a DJ’d dance club thumped outside my hotel room into the wee hours of the morning. A white-noise playlist on my phone drowned out enough of the din for me to get some rest but I still woke up grumpy, shaving as I heard partygoers from the dance staggering down the hallways to their rooms as I pulled on the uniform. In the lobby, a drunken couple met me as I stepped off the elevator.

“Good evening, captain,” the lady beamed as she greeted me. Her fella leaned on her, and I saw his knee was bloodied by a bad fall somewhere in their festivities. They reeked of booze and marijuana. The flight attendants told me a few minutes later they’d stumbled into the hotel, having lost their key cards, and weren’t even certain that this was the hotel where they were staying.

“Actually, it’s good morning. Some of us gotta work.”

Her eyes got real big. “How late is it?”

“It’s late enough you wanna be sure the shades are down before you get into bed. It’ll be daylight before your eyes close.”

We lost the second first officer on the way back to Atlanta, and his reroute would get him home about three hours early. In Dallas, I’d picked up the first round of drinks for our flight attendants in the spirit of team-building since we were scheduled to stay together for the whole trip… and then they got poached for a reroute about 20 minutes after the first officer got his notification.

I’d sat out my time in Atlanta, all three hours and forty five minutes, hitting refresh in hopes of any reroute that would get me home more quickly. As I ate breakfast in a Chinese restaurant, I filled out the mandatory reports that were due for the week’s adventures — a hydraulic failure and a go-around after air traffic control couldn’t maintain the needed separation between us and a flight ahead of us on an instrument approach. Like most airline pilots, I despise unnecessary paperwork but I went ahead and reported the Dallas hotel. The hotel was fine, but the dance club next door should have been weighed in the site selection.

Alas, of the crew that was scheduled to fly all six flights together, I’m the only who flew my entire trip as planned.

And that last round trip, with the new first officer, was in a jet with the flap position indicator deferred on one side - in essence, the airplane thought the flaps were asymmetrically deployed. No matter the flaps’ actual position, the left flaps indicated being 20 degrees down. The right flaps indicated correctly. In a world where logic has any place, we could have moved the flaps to takeoff position, walked outside and verified they were evenly down and to the right setting. In flight, we could tell by feel if there was asymmetry from left to right. But nothing is simple in the airline world, and the manuals dictated a visit from a mechanic to run the flaps to full travel, then observe their position via an opened inspection panel inside the main gear wheel well, then run the flaps to the takeoff position, mark that position, and then close up the inspection panels and the landing gear well doors. It was about a 20 minute process. I had doubts it would go so smoothly the next time around.

I was pessimistic about anything and everything at this point.

So as we sat on the ramp and waited on ground control to give us taxi instructions, I shook my head and laughed.

“What is it?” the first officer asked, probably fearing the worst.

“I don’t know whether to call it a meme or art, but there’s a thing with an angry possum depicted on it. Says ‘first of all, I’m a delight,’ and right now, I am that possum.”

“I just hope we get to fly again on a less frustrating day. I’ve been flying passenger jets for going on 18 years and I can count the days I’ve been this grumpy on one hand.”

We laughed it off, and 40 minutes later I was talking to the same maintenance controller because the promised mechanic was nowhere to be seen after we parked. I ran upstairs and had the gate agent hold boarding, as there was no sense shoehorning an airplane full of people until I knew we could get the required inspection done soon.

Some days, pessimism and preparation are basically synonyms.

“Is it safe to fly?” In the last two weeks, that question has been asked of nearly every pilot, as the nation reels in the wake of our worst airline crash in decades. I’ve been asked several times myself by plenty of folks who’ve been glued the the continual news updates of the midair between an Army Blackhawk helicopter and a PSA regional jet flying for American Airlines at Washington’s DCA airport. On the heels of that, a med-evac Learjet also crashed violently outside Philadelphia, hitting the ground with such an intense explosion that more than a dozen injuries and a fatality on the ground were reported, in addition to the loss of all aboard the Learjet. And then this week, a Cessna Caravan in Alaska was lost along with all 10 souls on board.

But it was a fourth-grade student doing the asking, in the first of three groups I spoke to this week at a neighborhood elementary school’s career day. After participating in an event last fall for special-needs passengers, I’ve joined the ranks of “ambassadors” at work; getting to participate in engagement events is a fun changeup from a normal day in the office. This one wasn’t handled through the official program, though. One of the children from our church had specifically requested that I participate in the event. I’d shown up with a snappy slide presentation of ways to become a pilot, various careers a pilot can pursue, and what it’s like on a random day at work. I had a fat stack of trading cards to hand out, and a big bag full of plastic pilot wings to share. I should have expected that question, but for whatever reason, I’d expected a class of nine and 10-year-olds would be watching Cartoon Network instead of CNN. But, in each of the groups, a child asked some variation of that question. Each time, a teacher tried to intercept the question to some extent, and each time I waved them off.

I won’t lie, I was shocked at how many students that age were tuned in to current events; but then again I had plenty of signs that the fourth graders of today are wired differently than when I sat in a desk that size. Yeah, there was play dough and watercolor paint on the art shelf, but there were also computers everywhere. Boxes of robotic kits were stacked, ready for students to build mind-boggling combinations of computer-controlled lego technic blocks that could shame any erector set from past generations. It’s like they start pairing kids to bluetooth devices as soon as they exit the womb, and the world’s events play front and center in their daily lives. We’re a long way from TV carts being turned away from students’ view as the shuttle Challenger exploded on launch in 1986.

I locked eyes with the student asking the question each time, and then made eye contact across the room with the others as I continued the answer. “Last week was terrible. I’m sure many of you heard about it; some may have seen the videos. I don’t know how much your parents let you see. I have friends who fly for the airline that crashed, and they often fly that same kind of airplane to that same airport. I was worried for the safety of my friends. I still worry over the trauma they’ve experienced losing coworkers. Sadness, worry, and fear are natural reactions, and I felt them myself.” I took a long second, still locking eyes with these kids. “We know two aircraft collided, and that should not have happened. We know what happened, but we don’t know why it happened, yet. That part will take months, maybe years before the investigation is finished. But in the meantime, the route that helicopters fly near the airport has been pushed farther away, and we’re doing all we can to ensure it never happens again.” A teacher chimed in with how long it had been since such an accident and sure enough, none of the students were even born the last time a disaster like this made the domestic headlines.

Once we got past the elephant in the room with that question, hands shot into the air with all sorts of other questions, the sort I came ready to handle. It became a rapid-fire battle against the clock to answer as many questions before the period ended and a new class shuffled in. Do you fly faster than fighter jets? Why are some landings smoother than others? Where are my favorite places to fly? What do you like most? What do you like least?

Nearly all were surprised to hear they could ask to see the flight deck before or after their flight, and several who had travel plans in coming weeks vowed they’d ask for the chance to see the front office. We talked about how science plays into the job, especially meteorology, and how that in the course of a three day trip, you can experience all kinds of weather and cultures—such as the day I started with a stroll on the Gulf Coast, and that evening snowflakes were falling onto my sunburned skin as I walked the streets of Montreal.

After my third, 30-minute presentation, career day was complete. I found my way toward the exit, and checking my phone, a surprise message awaited me, from Aaron, a new pilot with our company.

We just had our Wing Ceremony on Wednesday and I received your wings…Thank You! I felt compelled to reach out because after reading your note that came with the wings, I noticed a pretty unusual coincidence. I’m actually retiring after 31 years of service in the USAF! I definitely share your sentiment…this has most definitely been the journey of a lifetime. It still doesn’t really feel like “reality” yet. I’m not sure if we’ll ever run into each other, but I would definitely like to hear your story.

Our Legacy Wings program began during the pandemic-related supply chain issues, as one of our uniform contractors was unable to manufacture enough pilot wings to supply of new pilots. The company started a program in which pilots can donate their used uniform wings for new pilots to wear, and these wings are presented at a big party, along with a note from the donating pilot. I’d written a little note congratulating the recipient on making it to our company, and that regardless of where they came from, this should be a big change-up, for the better. I was expecting more of a young pilot coming from a regional airline than a 31-year veteran military pilot, but in this business, we come from all walks of life.

As I fired up the truck and turned toward the house, I smiled. A month or two prior, I’d been standing in line for coffee at the Dallas Love airport. The man next to me struck up a conversation; his son was about to leave the Air Force and become an airline pilot. “Does it ever occur to you that you’ve got the job the military pilots are competing to get? I don’t know about you, but I always dreamed of being the military pilot. It never registered that they might want to go do something else after that.”

I really hadn’t framed it that way in my mind, and I still think it’s a flawed statement to some degree, although I get what he was trying to say. And with a three-decade military pilot now wearing my wings somewhere out there on the line, it just made me smile. Whether we’re nine years old, or 59 years old, some of us still daydream about flying airplanes.

And a blessed number of us even get paid to do it.

I didn’t reach out to every PSA pilot I know, but I did text two in particular. One I’d known as he grew from kid to private pilot, knocked out all his ratings and became an airline pilot. The other had been in my new-hire class at a different airline in 2007—we shared a birthday of sorts as airline pilots. Both responded immediately. Hoping to sleep easier in the knowledge they were safe, I still tossed and turned through the night. There were 64 people on the CRJ-700 and another three on the helicopter. A lot of families would never be whole again.

I didn’t begin writing to provide a while-the-wreckage-burns analysis or point fingers. There are plenty doing just that. I don’t feel a need to be first, or loudest, or to have the biggest following. I generally write this Substack and my magazine columns not for fellow professional pilots, but to share the joy and love of flight with those trying to get here, and for the aviators who still share that joy. I generally share the good days and backspace through the bad ones, or at least relegate them to the drafts folder where they gather dust, awaiting a day when I can revisit and view the event with hindsight to see what lessons can be learned.

I wrote, the next morning, with a cooling cup of coffee on the arm of a comfy chair. I wrote with a cloudy sky outside the window. And I wrote with a napkin handy to dab away the tears that could not be blamed on allergies.

Several generations ago, Ernest K. Gann penned “Fate is the Hunter,” a novel based loosely upon his time as a pilot for American Airlines as the DC-2 and DC-3 ushered air travel into the modern age and away from the biplanes that prioritized air mail over passengers. Air travel was still far from safe. Life insurance wouldn’t pay out for a plane crash. Many large corporations banned their employees from air travel because they couldn’t risk losing their talent. Gann wrote, “A pilot may earn his full pay for that year in less than two minutes. At the time of incident, he would gladly return the entire amount for the privilege of being elsewhere.”

The book opens with a list of air line pilots who had perished on the job as of when the book was written.

Four and a half pages later:

I spent many, many years with my phone blowing up anytime a plane fell from the sky. A Baron spun to the ground in California: “Was that you?” A Korean War-era military jet crashed in Missouri: “I hope you’re alive!” A business jet runs off the runway in Teterboro: “What airplane do you fly, again?” Some turboprop crashes in Nepal: “Was that your airline?”

At least these days most of my family can remember the name of the airline I fly for (I don’t mention that here for legal reasons).

There were many questions being hurled into the abyss in the immediate aftermath. The answers, few and uncertain. The airspace around DCA is incredibly crowded, hemmed in by P-56, the prohibited area encompassing the D.C. Mall area and the Naval Observatory. Other restricted areas nearby include Mount Vernon. The Pentagon is just right there, and although flying over it isn’t quite a party foul, it’s a source of some concern. Helicopters shuffle military, government, and executive high-rollers between airports and helipads all over the area. Three major airports handle airliners into the area; a couple of smaller fields handle the general aviation traffic. Complex approach, departure, and emergency routes in case of engine failure for DCA create an incredibly high-risk environment.

So many folks want immediate answers. Many have ideas, most best left unspoken while we let the investigators do their job. At face value, hours after the accident, this one looks like just a tragic, terrible accident.

The morning after the accident, as I talked with a PSA pilot who is fairly new to the business, he made a solid point. “How do we deal with this?” It’s new territory for a lot of airline pilots. In February 2009, a Colgan Q400 crashed while on approach to Buffalo, New York. That was the last mass-casualty loss of an airliner in America*. The vast majority of regional airline pilots, and a good portion of the major/legacy airline pilots in America, weren’t yet hauling passengers in 2009. I just did a quick bit of cocktail-napkin math and it looks like 70 percent of my airline’s seniority list was hired after the Colgan accident. Granted, I’d imagine that number is even higher at regional airlines, where most pilots aim to get hired, build experience, and move on to a bigger airline.

That many don’t know how to react in the wake of an accident like this is a remarkable testament to the safety culture in the airline world. Fifty years ago, a few months was all that we got between fatal airline crashes in America. There were eight fatal airline accidents in 1974. In the years that followed, three fatal accidents a year seems to have been more or less “normal.” Fifteen years without such an event in our community is both an achievement and an anomaly.

My friend on the phone that morning had flown into DCA multiple times in the hours before the accident. “Each time, we got the caution for helicopter traffic,” he said, which is pretty much a given. There are multiple helipads right near the airport. He’d flown that exact approach scenario multiple times. “It could have been me” are the words a lot of professional pilots are thinking the morning after.

So what do we do? We talk it out. Internalizing the trauma does nobody any favors. Whether it’s on a therapist’s couch or at a bar with compatriots, we remember that while air travel is incredibly safe, it’s that way because we make it so. Was this accident inevitable? Maybe. Certainly there will be changes to prevent it from happening again. We’ve already seen alterations to helicopter routes near DCA to reduce traffic conflicts. We’ll learn from the tragedy, and we’ll mourn for our colleagues. For the families who lost loved ones, we offer our condolences and our renewed vow to keep air travel safe. The trust placed in our hands, in our judgement, and in our industry is never taken lightly. I’ve been doing this for 17 years and still get feelings every time I head through baggage claim to find my ride to the hotel and pass a family eagerly awaiting a passenger from our flight.

Another friend at PSA, a young captain, returned to work a few days after the accident. “Showing up to work today was something I was somewhat dreading. For myself, for everyone else,” he wrote. He texted his crew the day before, telling them to take extra time to process things if they needed to, and when they all showed up, a longer-than-normal briefing followed. “We agreed that we were going to make it through the day—together.” Once they reached the layover in a beach town, the crew of four went for lunch together. “We laughed, we touched sand, and a [very] cold Atlantic Ocean. Lunch turned into a 5-hour outing with smiles all around. I think we’re going to be alright, and I know we have the best crews around.”

*Southwest Airlines in 2018 had a fatal accident when an uncontained engine failure fatally injured a passenger. A 2019 accident of an Atlas Air Boeing 767 freighter claimed the lives of all aboard—crew and a jumpseating pilot—when it plummeted into waters near Houston. There have been fatal accidents that can be framed via all kinds of qualifiers. Wednesday night’s accident is the first all-souls-lost sort of accident involving an American airliner on American soil since 2009 if you want to be that sort of nitpicker.

A few pictures popped into my messenger app. My friend who runs some estate sales asked, “You interested in this?” She threw a price out there that was absurdly low.

It was a Redbird TD2 simulator, a pretty snazzy setup that flight schools can use for a chunk of flight training. A new one ain’t cheap.

For that price? I didn’t blink. “YUP.”

She must have realized that it was significantly undervalued at that price given my immediate response, and I wasn’t mad when she came back with a higher price. In what might be the most awkward and odd of auctions, the price kept going up until we hit a comfortable place for both of us. Her interest, obviously, was getting some coin for the estate, and mine was getting a bargain on a flight simulator that doesn’t just fall into ones’ lap daily.

Matt Russell, seated across the table from me for lunch, went halves.

Flying airplanes around on computer simulations is nothing new to me - I grew up with Microsoft Flight Simulator as it transitioned to the Windows platform in the 90’s, and followed that franchise through the turn of the millennium, even as I transitioned into the world of flying airplanes that don’t just reset after hitting solid objects. I built a flight simulator that mimicked our airshow planes, and drove it from show to show, letting kids jump in and take the planes for a spin - or a loop and a roll, with about three minutes’ fuel on board to let them have fun before a forced landing to signal it was the next kid’s turn.

As a professional pilot, I’ve sweated bullets in flight simulators for the jets, where engine fires, electrical issues, and decompressions can couple with gnarly weather to make you forget that you’re in a hydraulically-flung box at the training center.

Meanwhile, I haven’t owned a flight sim setup in ages. I tried to buy a mini-PC and hook it to the TV for that purpose, but the thing just couldn’t handle the software. I’ve “flown” Redbird products a couple times at Oshkosh and Sun N’ Fun over the years, and marveled at the training value they created, while avoiding the costs that come along with the airline-level flight simulators.

When I went to pick the TD2 up, I winced when I saw the tag on the back of the thing. It was built in 2012. But I’d already forked the money over, so we were committed. Cramming the thing into my pickup, I headed north and hoped for the best.

Having a partner to share the risk in these sorts of things is fantastic. Having a partner with space to park these sorts of things is priceless, and being able to unload this thing in Matt’s driveway instead of mine absolutely made my day.

We managed to put the big pieces of Humpty-Dumpty back together to the state it’d sat when I first saw it - with all the cables balled up in a box to the side. We began to untangle the mass of cords, cables, dongles, adapters and plugs… then we just started plugging things into places where they looked like they’d fit, until we ran out of pieces and plugged in the surge strip.

The power button glowed. The screens flickered up some logos for a moment. Matt mashed the power button and we got a windows boot screen on the center display… and it stayed there, for what felt like ages.

By the time I had to leave, the system hadn’t fully booted. Later that day, Matt texted me a photo. It had booted into the sim program and was flying, technically… but very slowly.

After running all sorts of diagnostics and a bunch of reboots, the machine limbered up. The next morning, on my way to work, I stopped off at Matt’s. I shot a couple of ILS approaches at Huntsville, then looped and rolled the thing before heading to work.

Matt’s working on his flight instructor certificate. I’m debating doing the same. With some modest updates, we could have the simulator at a point where it would again be legal to use for simulated instrument training, or for instrument-rated pilots to retain their currency. If we can get some use out of it and then flip it, great.

Or we could start a flight school.

Nope. I didn’t say that out loud.

See you next week.

As the last lights of Texas slid beneath the wings and Arkansas loomed ahead, I eased the power off and let the Mooney begin a gradual descent toward my next stop. With apologies and a little artistic license applied to a popular presidential quote from the 1990s, I believed in a fuel stop in a place called Hope, Arkansas, the birthplace of former president Bill Clinton. The airport was marked as unattended, with 24-hour self-serve fuel available. I figured it’d make a good quick stop to fuel, hit the restroom, stretch and make the last three-hour flight of a long cross-country flight.

My friend Grayson had bought a 1967 Mooney M20F, and I sort of share the blame in that decision. He’s a pilot at my airline and had longed to get back into general aviation. When I paid a visit to his farm in my Mooney, he started asking questions and sending me advertisements with questions. How about this one? What should I look for?

After a few false starts, Grayson found a promising bird in Arizona, hangared at Deer Valley Airport, which I’m told has leapfrogged Van Nuys, depending on the statistics you use, as the busiest general aviation airport in the United States of America. He bought the airplane, sight unseen, after talking with the broker and getting the results of a pre-purchase inspection.  On paper, it seemed like a fine bird, although its original paint and dated panel could use some attention. Then work piled up, and Grayson couldn’t get to Arizona to bring it home.

Meanwhile, I had bid a month off from the airline to knock out some projects, and, seeing an opportunity for a distraction, I offered to bring the airplane east. I had just begun installing an engine monitor, and, with my airplane in pieces, the chance for a long flight was too hard to resist.

Friends, if you’re flying general aviation around Phoenix, my hat is off to you. That’s some of the most complex airspace I’ve navigated, and the air was thick with aluminum specks all trying to pick through the same routes over and around the class D airports beneath the Class B airspace. Hem it all in with a mountain range on the east side, throw in a weak comm radio, and it was one of the most challenging departures in my years of flying.

I’d climbed to 9,500 before I even thought of leaning. A quick mag check showed the right magneto was running rough, and the most aggressive leaning couldn’t remedy it. I landed just before sunset in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and the next morning I cleaned the two spark plugs that I suspected while standing out on the ramp. The runup was better but not great, and a quick hop to El Paso found a shop that was open and could help me out.

The crew at El Paso Aero tested the spark plug leads I suspected and found they were fine. They found other spark plugs that were heavily eroded, and after a thorough cleaning and re-gapping, I was on my way home with a perfect mag check.

My longest flight in a single-engine airplane followed, as I crossed all of Texas in a single bound, aided by a slight tailwind, and found myself on the ground in Hope. But there, my ambitions were dashed. As I pumped fuel, I noticed frost was quickly forming across the wings. While I’d been careful to note that the dewpoint was a bit lower than the sub-freezing temperatures there, I’d failed to account for the fact that the Mooney and I had been hanging out at 9,500 feet, where the air was much cooler than the dewpoint on the ground.

The cold-soaked aluminum was well below the dewpoint and looked like a grade-school science project demonstrating condensation, sublimation and deposition. So, my chariot turned into a pumpkin—or, rather, a popsicle. It was late at night, and I hoped to launch soon after the sun rose, a winter weather system close on my heels. I didn’t see much need to engage the local taxi or hotel when I’d be back out the door in a matter of hours, especially since the FBO was unattended, and there were a couple of very comfortable recliners in the back room.

In addition to being a presidential birthplace, Hope was home to an ammunition proving ground in World War II, and there is an impressive display in the FBO building. When I stepped inside, a familiar smell hit me—and I have no clue what it is, but it is the exact same smell that permeated a friend’s house where we built model airplanes when I was a kid. It made me feel at home as I floated around the rooms, inspecting the wall of solo shirttails that went back more than 20 years.

A wall-mounted planning chart with a string anchored for distance measuring and a sticker in a door’s window glass touting the 1994 AOPA drive for product liability reform to revitalize general aviation were throwbacks to the sorts of FBOs I grew up in. The vending machine took 85 cents of pocket change and gave me a bag of microwave popcorn, and another 80 cents got me a can of Dr. Pepper to wash it down. The lack of company meant I had nobody to apologize to for the horrible smell as I popped the butter-flavored dinner. All I needed was an energetic group of aviators telling tales in the couches around me to really fire up the time machine.

The recliners were up against some 1940s-era single-pane windows, and to fight the chill, I bundled up in an airline uniform sweater I’d dug from the bottom of my suitcase and used my jacket as a blanket as I drifted off to sleep.

Around midnight, a previously unnoticed base station radio crackled to life as a feminine voice announced that a Stationair was inbound to land. Wait, was that call for here? My mind boggled. Nah, that had to be for somewhere else. I closed my eyes, and then they reported themselves to be on short final, and, sure enough, a collection of lights flashed across the window, then reappeared as they taxied to the fuel pumps. I heard a group of voices approaching and prepared myself for company. It turns out that the six-seat Cessna 206 had been mostly full of folks—a bunch of ladies and one guy, all pilots, who had been out enjoying the evening.

They’d landed to drop off a friend or two, and as they waited on their ride to arrive, they filled into the chairs and couches around me. They told me some of the history about the field that the historical displays had failed to mention, and we traded stories about trips we’d made, each of us comparing notes on our recent trips to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

“Wait, why are you camping out here? You could get a taxi into town,” one of the ladies asked. I explained about the frost demonstration on the Mooney, which I’d moved over right in front of the picture window, and how I hoped to be on my way in just a few hours. Luckily, they had been flying down low, and their wings remained clean. The friend’s ride showed up, and the rest of the group bundled up to board the plane and return to their home base, a short hop away in Magnolia.

As they walked across the ramp, I heard a few words of a conversation. “You know, we really should!” and the rest was lost. Moments later, one of the ladies bounded back inside and gave me her phone number. “If you wake up and get weathered in, we can get you into a hangar, or if something breaks, we know all the local mechanics and inspectors. We won’t let you get stranded here.” I shot her a text message, and she replied with the phone numbers for most everyone in the group. The gabfest, camaraderie and looking out for each other was an absolute shot in the arm, and I drifted off to sleep having enjoyed the visit.

I woke just before sunrise and spent several chilly minutes wiping away most of the accumulated frost with a dirty undershirt, then pulled the Mooney clear of the hangar’s shadow and angled the nose into the sunrise to let nature handle the rest. Three hours later, I was on the ground in Georgia, texting my new friends in Arkansas to thank them for the visit. I handed the keys to Grayson, who continued on to his home in Florida, and I drove home, thankful for the layover nature had thrust on me and for the trip back in time that followed.