In Flight USA Article Categories
In Flight USA Articles
Contrails: Hanging Out with Dwayne
By Steve Weaver
“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” – Leonardo da Vinci.
This was a surprising statement to be made in the 15th century, when most of the world’s population was too busy trying to stay alive to think many profound thoughts. But given da Vinci’s genius, it isn’t surprising that he said this, for flight has always fascinated man. I would imagine that down through time many humans have had such feelings but not the ability to put them into such eloquent words.
Socrates came close, almost 500 years before Christ, when he said, “Man must rise above the earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond — for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.”
Contrails: The Dream
By Steve Weaver
Most people dream. Scientists say that in fact everyone dreams, just not everyone remembers dreaming.
Of the ones who do remember, a small percentage will tell you that they have reoccurring dreams. These are the same or similar dreams that return to us, unbidden and seemingly without a waking connection, hijacking our regular nighttime programming.
I’m not sure what opens the door to our subconscious and lets out reoccurring dreams, but no doubt something from our waking hours has touched us. A hope or a fear that we’ve given thought to, or perhaps a reminder from our past has sent an unseen signal that calls for a rerun of the dream.
Contrails: Adventures in Vertigo
By Steve Weaver
Being unsure of your aircraft’s attitude is one of the most stressful situations that one can encounter in an airplane. Whether the occasion is due to failure of the aircraft’s instruments to accurately give situational information or due to your own false sensations, it makes short work of one’s peace of mind in the air.
I have been lucky in my flying with only two occasions when I wasn’t sure exactly what the aircraft was doing. The first time was during a night approach to a mountain airport, done very early in my instrument flying career. At a critical moment on that flight, every nerve and sensation in my body screamed that the Grumman I was flying had decided to finish the approach while lying on its right side. Only the stern words of my instrument instructor echoing in my head saved me. “This will happen, and when it does, ignore everything else and believe your instruments!” I did that and soon the airplane returned to flying with the right side up.
Contrails: A Hand Me Down Flying School
By Steve Weaver
When I think about the aircraft that populated our flying business in the late ‘60s, I realize what an eclectic mix of airplanes it was. We had two, four, and six place airplanes, very old airplanes, one almost new airplane, and even a twin in the person of an old Aztec. Each had a role in the business, and each one had a distinct personality that I still remember.
At birth, except for colors and optional equipment, airplanes are pretty much identical to the brethren that share the production line. In 1977, while working for Cessna, I parked my new 310 demonstrator on the ramp at Allegheny Airport in Pittsburgh while I went inside to meet with someone. I returned a half hour later just in time to see a gentleman thoroughly pre-flighting my 310. I watched from a distance while he did a textbook preflight inspection. He drained all the sumps and inspected the fuel sample for dirt or water, he checked the oil in both engines, then slowly circled the airplane, poking this and wiggling that.
Contrails: Getting Ready For War
By Steve Weaver
The design of the government built hangars was standardized. This hangar is identical to the one still standing at the abandoned Lewis Field in Buckhannon, West Virginia. (Courtesy of Steve Weaver)Most who are interested in WWII aviation history are aware that one of the reasons the United States won the war was her amazing record of aircraft production once we were in the fight. From producing scarcely more than 2,000 military aircraft in 1939 to over 96,000 in 1944, the record year, the U.S. produced a total of more than 303,000 military aircraft during the war years. But where did we get the pilots to fly them?
In 1939, the Army had a total of only 4,502 pilots, including 2,007 active-duty officers, 2,187 reserve officers, and 308 National Guard officers. The number of new Army-trained pilots grew rapidly each year as war seemed more likely, from 982 in 1939, to about 8,000 in 1940, to more than 27,000 in 1941–but many more were needed, and the Army by itself could not train the huge numbers of cadets desperately required. But we had a plan.
Contrails: Twisted Humor Stalks the Skies
By Steve Weaver
I’ll admit it, during the years that I was instructing, as much as I loved to fly and to teach flying, there were times when I needed a break. The years that I was running the little country flight school in the late sixties and teaching eight to ten hours a day for weeks without a break, I sometimes longed for a change of pace. It was hard, unrelenting work.
But the schedule of the flight school dictated the hours that we flew and in the summer, we tried to take advantage of the long days. We harvested every hour that we could to help us stand against the long, dark winter that was to follow, and summer days when I could just relax were few.
So sometimes I did dumb things that amused me, just to break up the routine a bit. It was nothing that I could go on the road with, but those incidents served to give me chuckles and most of the time, they gave them to the whole airport.
Contrails: Looking for Bubba
By Steve Weaver
He was, way country. I was a West Virginia country boy too, back there in the late ‘60s when I met Bubba, but this guy was light years ahead me. He exuded the aura of his mountaineer heritage, and you could hear his roots in his speech and see ancient times in his countenance.
In age, he was a few years beyond my own late 20s when I met him. He had been raised by his grandparents on a mountainside farm, where the folds of the Appalachians first rise up out of the foothills of Central West Virginia and begin their march to the Piedmonts.
He had enlisted in the service after high school, more to have a job than as a career choice. In those opportunity-starved years, the old West Virginia saw of ‘coal mines, moonshine or movin’ on down the line’ applied to almost every boy unable to go on to college after high school. And so Bubba moved on, into the blue uniform of the U.S. Air Force, and after basic training was stationed at a Strategic Missile site in North Dakota.
Contrails: Oh, The Places You’ll Go
By Steve Weaver
When most pilots consider the hours they have logged in the air, the time usually remains just hours to them. The recorded flights are remembered as a cross-country, as an instrument flight, or as the hour spent learning recovery from unusual attitudes. But as time aloft accumulates, it can also be viewed using other measurements. By the time a student pilot has qualified for his or her private license, he or she has gained a bit of experience and is ready to begin learning to fly the airplane on instruments. He or she has probably spent about a week apart from the surface of the earth. That would be a total of seven 24-hour days spent hanging suspended above the earth or 168 hours total. Later, at the 500-hour milestone, our pilot has been missing from the earth for over two and a half weeks, and on the day he or she logs his or her one thousandth hour, he will have spent a total of more than 41 24-hour days some place other than on the planet where he was born.
Those of us who have flown most of our lives as a profession, rack up a prodigious amount of hours in the air, and the high timers among us have lived aloft literally for years.
Contrails: The Winter of Our Contentment
By Steve Weaver
Morro Bay, California. (Steve Weaver)’m having the same problem with time that you often hear older people complaining about. It seems to pass faster each year than it did the year before, and about a dozen times faster than it did when I was in school. Then, a school year stretched ahead like a life sentence and once winter arrived it seemed that it probably wouldn’t leave until I had passed away from old age, still seated obediently at my desk.
Now I’m looking at the end of my six-month sojourn in California and in terms of elapsed time, it seems as if I arrived from West Virginia only a month or so ago, and that I should still be settling in for a pleasant winter on the Central Coast.
Contrails: First Flight
By Steve Weaver
First Flight
Once when I was little and played on the hill,
One wondrous evening, I dream of it still–
Mom called me to dinner, impatient, I knew–
So I lifted my arms up and flapped them and flew.
I lifted my arms up and flapped them, and lo!
I was flying as fast as my short legs could go.
The hill swirled beneath me, all foggy and green;
I lit by the yard fence, and no one had seen.
I told them at dinner, I said, “I can fly.”
They laughed, not believing. I started to cry
And ran from the table, and sobbed, “It is true–
You need not believe me; I flapped and I flew.”
I told them next morning, I told them again–
For years I kept telling; they laughed and I ran–
No one would believe me; I ceased then to tell;
But still I remember, remember it well–
One soft summer evening up there on the knoll,
Before life had harried the reach of my soul,
I stood there in twilight, in childlight, and dew–
And I lifted my arms up and flapped them and flew!
This was written by Southern author and poet Louise McNeil, West Virginia’s Poet Laureate for many years. It was written late in her life and while she was never a pilot or even so far as I know a passenger in a small airplane, she speaks eloquently of the yearning that lives in the breast of all humans, to defy gravity and soar above the earth.
Déjà vu All Over Again
By Steve Weaver
Without question, the U.S. aviation fleet is growing long in tooth. While new aircraft are being built, their numbers are infinitesimally small when compared to the huge number of aircraft the industry pumped out in the 60s, 70s and very early 80s. The bulk of those earlier aircraft still exist, most of them on U.S. registry and the average age of registered aircraft goes up yearly. Today, those old aircraft actually make up the largest percentage of the aircraft population in our country.
Yet it seems like I’m always taken by surprise when I run into an airplane that I’ve known from the past, and especially if it’s from a much earlier time in my life.
Sometimes it’s a familiar registration number that sparks recognition, and other times an examination of the logs reveals an event that I remember. Once in a while I even come across my own name in the aircraft log books, a younger me signing off an item of maintenance.
Contrails: Bird Dogs
By Steve Weaver
Any of us who have spent much time around general aviation airports have probably witnessed an arriving light airplane, where when the door opened the first person out was a dog.
Dogs are adaptable creatures and for those of us whose life is made complete by the constant presence of our four legged best friends, taking them along in an airplane doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary.
Dude, the Yellow Lab that had me before my present Lab Austin got me, came into my life when I was doing a lot of flying to destinations scattered all over the U.S. On his first flight, I just patted the wing walk and he leaped up and strolled into the cabin like he’d done it a hundred times before. He looked a little puzzled on takeoff when the scenery started slowing down and shrinking, but after contemplating this for a few seconds he curled up in the same comfortable ball that he used in the car and that was the end of it.
Contrails: Dragging Nylon
By Steve Weaver
Whether you’re a pilot or not, you’ve seen the ubiquitous tow plane, clattering along over the beach or circling the stadium, pulling the banner exhorting you to Get the Crab Special at Phil’s, or some such message. As pilots, many of us have observed the banners being picked up at an airport, but the general public and even many pilots have no idea how the process works.
I joined the stream of hard working tow pilots who for one reason or another flew the banner aircraft back in the seventies. Unlike many of these sign draggers, I didn’t need to build time, I was just trying to avoid starvation. During this era I would have taken on any flying chore that wasn’t overtly illegal or positively lethal. To keep myself fed I was already doing instructing, charter, survey flying and sightseeing rides, so it was not a big step to add one more hopeful income stream and order a banner kit from Mr. Gasser down in Tennessee and then teach myself how to use it.
Contrails: Yesterday’s Treasures
By Steve Weaver
Beacon tower at U.S. Air Mail field at North Platte, Nebraska. (National Air and Space Museum Archives)If you’ve ever flown into the Elkins, West Virginia Airport (EKN) on a clear night you may have noticed during your approach to the airport that the rotating beacon became visible much sooner than you might expect. And if you stopped to consider that the airport is tucked into a broad valley guarded to the east and west by fifteen hundred foot ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, you might have wondered how you could see the beacon at all. The answer of course is that a beacon is located near the airport, but at the very top of the eastern mountain ridge. That in itself isn’t so unusual, but I find the origin of that beacon to be very interesting.
Aviation history has always had a great fascination for me. I love reading about it, and examining preserved items in aviation museums across the country is one of my favorite things to do. However, the thing that really fires my imagination is stumbling across the bits and pieces of yesterday’s aviation that still exist outside of museums.
Contrails: An Errant Airman
By Steve Weaver
This shot of the Beechcraft Twin Bonanza was taken at the Aurora, IL airport in 1987. (Glenn E. Chatfield)In my early days in aviation, many of the errant airmen that I happened upon were WWII vets and sometimes ex Army Air Corps flyers; as a young pilot, their age and experience seemed to me to afford them a certain license to be… well, different.
One of those types that come readily to mind would be Richard. Richard B. was the owner of a Beechcraft Twin Bonanza and he and the airplane were memorable to me, since they were the only twin/pilot combo that dared to frequent our 1,600-foot sod strip. He was from Elkins, just a few miles to the east of us and he flew the mighty Twin Bo in pursuit of his business as a lumber broker. He also flew it in pursuit of a covert heart’s interest that happened to reside in our town, hence the frequent visits by the big twin.
Contrails: Busting Sod
By Steve Weaver
Lewis Field in 1969 (Steve Weaver)From my present perch of experience and years I sometimes think about the early days of my flying career and I have to say I often give myself goose bumps with the recollecting. Casting my thoughts back and reliving some of the dumb things I routinely did with airplanes in those halcyon days, I wonder how I could have gotten away with it. I shouldn’t have, you know.
One of the things that give me shivers is recalling the airports that we were flying from during this period. I wonder what in the world I was thinking when I flew the airplanes that I did from the short grass strip that was our runway at Lewis field where we ran the flying school. The strip was 1,600-feet long, with the ends stoutly defined by fence posts and barbed wire, so there were never negotiations available about the boundaries when summer pushed the density altitude up.
Contrails: Bending Metal
By Steve Weaver
The one occasion where the retail worth of the plane in which Weaver was flying was rapidly and substantially reduced. The Ercoupe was later repaired and flown by Joe-Joe for another 20 years. (Courtesy of Steve Weaver)In recent years, even I have had to acknowledge that I have entered, albeit reluctantly, the category of the mature airman. As such, I have joined the ranks of those with a successful (read survived) flying history spanning fifty years or so and it is natural for the August members who inhabit this strata to be occasionally asked by our younger brethren about things that they consider worrisome in their own flying career. Crashing would be one.
How many times, they will ask, have I been involved in occasions where the retail worth of the airplane I was flying was rapidly and substantially reduced?
It’s a complicated question to answer, especially if you take the Clinton-esque approach to it and say it depends on what your definition of crashing is. I choose to do that, since it reduces my record of shame by 50 percent if I don’t count flying the Super Cruiser through the top of a large oak tree as a crash. My point there being that the airplane did not come to a complete stop, which I maintain is a basic requirement for a certifiable airplane crash.
Contrails: Escape From Plenty
By Steve Weaver
Autumn in West Virginia. (Steve Weaver)Autumn has worked its way down the slopes of the Appalachians and colored the leaves in the foothills of West Virginia, the place where I was born and where I now spend the six warm months each year. Looking down the bank outside my window into the slow drifting waters of the Buckhannon River I can see flotillas of gaily colored leaves making their way downstream to the place they will come to rest and slowly turn to soil.
It’s said that autumn is a time to reflect and I think that must be so, because I find I do most of my deep (deep being a relative word here) thinking about life in general, and my life in particular, during this time of year.
A few days ago in such a state, I started pondering how the business of selling airplanes has changed in the last dozen years or so and about how completely my life has changed during the same period.
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.
Contrails
Flying With the Newly Dead
By Steve Weaver
I don’t know, but when I look back at the almost 50 years I’ve spent in aviation, it seems to me that my career didn’t unfold as it really should have. Rather than the orderly, planned and supervised tempering of my peers, my progression into and through the various aviation endeavors always seemed to happen in spasmodic bursts that often left me with Alice in Wonderland-like bewilderment. Looking around at my next role, as a flight instructor, or a survey pilot or whatever new phase I found myself in, I found myself totally clueless about how to properly proceed.
For one thing, I had no real mentors, other than the odd instructors that popped up at vital times, and then were gone. I was a restless student pilot with my own airplane, and by keeping it at small, out of the way strips I managed to stay under the radar for about 300 hours of dangerous wandering before settling down enough to get my private license. Adding the commercial license seemed like a natural thing to do since my logbook was fat with hours, and when the examiner told me I flew well enough to pass the flight instructor’s exam I decided to get that rating too.