Contrails
Living Without Wheels
By Steve Weaver
Instructor Russ Weaver (no relation, Billie Sue Nester, student, Steve Weaver and friend David Austin. (Courtesy of Steve Weaver)Stopped at a traffic light this week, I noticed the car in front of me sported a license plate holder that proclaimed that the owner’s other car was an airplane. I thought back to a time when I could have used a license holder that said “My other airplane is an airplane,” but then I wouldn’t have had a car to attach it to.
There have probably been other aviation zealots, who have owned two airplanes without owning a car, but I’ve never met another one and it was a strange set of circumstances that caused me to be in such a position.
In the late sixties I was operating a flying school in Central West Virginia, working evenings and weekends at the airport while maintaining my “real job,” traveling for a large national company. I had hired another instructor who babysat the airport and flew students while I was gone and, much to my delight, the whole process was working smoothly. But in the spring of 1969 my employer sent down an edict that would change everything I had put together. They would have me move my work to a large northern city and make the continuation of the flight school that I loved impossible.
I couldn’t do it. I’d poured my soul into my little flight school and I loved my students who seemed like a box of wiggling, happy, clueless puppies to me. I was living the life I had dreamed about and a life that suited perfectly the person that I had at last found myself to be and I couldn’t give it up.
I quit the job. I quit the salary and the expense account. I quit the retirement program, the bonuses and the free trips. Belatedly I realized that I had also quit the company car, and the white Chevy Impala that had taken me anywhere I wanted to go was gone too. So now I had no car and no money to buy another one. How, I wondered, will this work? Actually, really very well as it turned out.
To eliminate the need for a car to drive to work, I moved to the airport. There was an old unused room behind the front of the office that had been a magnet for junk for many years and this is where I would settle. I pitched out the trash, replaced the glass in the windows and painted the walls. In about a week the room had turned into a (very) low rent pilot crash pad and I had eliminated about 90 percent of the need for a car. Other travel requirements were dealt with as they occurred and mostly I found that the airplanes that I had on hand, (a Champ and a Super Cruiser) could usually be landed in a farm field reasonably close to where I wanted to go. This was to be my means of transport for the next year.
I found an 800-foot pasture field on the hill above my parent’s house that would serve well for my overnight visits to my folks. It was located on a bench of land above the valley floor and on takeoff I thrillingly shot off this perch some 600 feet above the Tygart River and the village of Arden, a bit like a ski jump that didn’t end, it seemed to me.
There were cows in the field that seemed to show an unhealthy interest in my fabric covered airplane, so I constructed a corral of barbed wire. This was a place of safety, not for the cattle but for the airplane, and the potential fabric munchers were left moodily contemplating the flying machine from the other side of the fence. I installed permanent tie down anchors made of industrial grade steel mine bolts, which I’m sure are there today, waiting for an airplane to stop by for the night.
Sometimes when the pace of teaching wouldn’t allow for an overnight visit and my culinary efforts had me desperate for a home-cooked meal, I would call home with an ETA and my mom would cook up a picnic fit for royalty. Dad would drive the Volkswagen up the steep farm road to the meadow and he and Mom would meet me when I flew in, and the three of us would dine there together on a tablecloth spread on the grass, high above the village.
During my carless period, visits to friends and relatives were still done on a regular basis. Shortly after starting my new life at the airport I added a J-3 Cub to the stable and now I had an airplane that I could land in someone’s yard if there were no obstructions. I was invited to dinner at a student’s home located beside a 300 foot field. It was located exactly next door to the city limits, so there was a bit of commotion when I landed the Cub there one evening, including if I remember correctly, a visit by a city fire truck.
One of my favorite places for an overnight get away was my Uncle Harold’s place in the country, one county over from the airport. I would jump in an airplane late in the evening, after the last student had flown and land in the farm field across from his house just as the last of the daylight was going. Aunt Goldie would have my favorite food on the table and my uncle, who was fascinated with flying and airplanes, and I would talk aviation until late in the evening.
On one memorable visit there while flying the Super Cruiser I decided to use a new field located a few hundred feet to the east of the house. It was there that I flew that airplane through the top of a very large Oak tree when I forgot to turn off the carburetor heat during takeoff. I never counted this incident as a crash because it’s my belief that in a true crash the airplane has to come to a complete halt, but a very battered PA-12 staggered out the other side of the tree.
After a year or so of this method of getting myself where I needed to go, the little flight school generated enough cash to have a bit left over for an old car and I returned to more conventional means of travel. The field above our old farm is grown over now and Uncle Harold is long gone to his reward, but sometimes when I feel a bit too conventional I drag out the memories of my carless era. They always make me smile.
