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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: 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.
Growing up in West Virginia
By Steve Weaver
It’s a really neat thing to spend your life living where you grew up. One reason this is true is, you are constantly seeing things around you that remind you of earlier times in your life. The other day something I saw reminded me of my early fascination with things that flew. As I thought of how I was then, I wondered if there could exist in our modern world, a child with the intensity of yearning for the sky that I had when I was young. I recall a passion for the air that I can only describe as blood lust for the sky and the machines that went there. I was wild to see an airplane on the ground; one I could touch and look inside and inspect from all angles as I walked around it.
But such a thing was impossible, because I lived far out in the country and my family had no car, so I was without means to visit an airport and get close to an airplane. I remember that my young dreams frequently starred airplanes that had crashed near my home. Strangely and far from being ghoulish, these dreams featured no broken people or bloody pilots, but rather they were about airplanes that had simply come to earth, seemingly with no people involved. Later I realized my subconscious mind knew that if I was going to get close to an airplane, this was the only way it could happen.
A Flight Down Memory Lane
By Steve Weaver
I was thinking during a flight the other day, as I watched the little airplane that represented my position over the planet earth, skimming over the towns, roads and other conveniently-identified objects on the GPS moving map, that navigation isn’t as much fun as it once was. Pilots who have cut their teeth on VOR, Loran and now GPS navigation must find it hard to imagine finding their way across the country with only a map and a watch, and nothing to back up those humble aids. It can be done, and many of us who wouldn’t dream of describing ourselves as “Old Timers” have done it, for hours and hours and miles and miles.