By Steve Weaver

Steve Weaver in the early ’70s with his Cassutt. (Photo provided by Steve Weaver)To anyone who has been stranded, immobile and silent on the side of a busy interstate, the whoosh of passing cars and the blasts of air from speeding tractor trailers rocking your vehicle is familiar. You sit in your crippled automobile on the verge and you change not a whit the traffic that ignores you and continues on its way. I can tell you though, when the stalled vehicle is an airplane, things change completely. Apparently, jaded though the public is, the sight of an airplane beside a busy road is enough to stop traffic. Within minutes multiple cars and trucks had stopped and I had dispatched one volunteer to phone the airport and tell my friend Jake to come to my aid. 

In twenty minutes or so Jake arrived, a wide smile plastered on his face. Thankfully, with the cell phone still an invention of the far future, the police had not also appeared, and we began to noodle the problem of getting the airplane back into the air.