I Was a Litle Late Getting to Work this Morning...
By Roger Kellogg
(Editor's Note: Many of us can't fly around this time of year. So, I saved up a couple of submissions from when it wasn't quite so cold outside. Enjoy the "armchair flying!")
I was a little late getting to work this morning. The alarm clock worked as planned. I rolled out, staggered to the shower, and got dressed as planned. However, as I was walking out to the pickup truck, it occurred to me that the weather was remarkably warm and clear for November in Illinois. Sudden reassessment of plans: flying might be a real possibility… With a sense of urgency, I headed to the airport, checking flags and other wind indicators en route. Looked like a steady 10 mph wind from the due south, perfect!
The sun was just clearing the horizon as I opened the hanger doors and rolled the plane out. After a thorough preflight inspection, I donned the snowmobile suit and related flying gear. To the mature pilot, this would have been less of a thrill, but I have just 40 hours in the logbook, and each flight is still memorable.
After going through the takeoff checklist, I turned to the center of the strip and rolled on the power. The steady headwind quickly lifted the plane free of the grass strip. Was this the same thrill that Orville and Wilber experienced a hundred years ago? I pondered the magic of the blue sky that spread to infinity in all directions. Freshly harvested Illinois cornfields followed the sky. There were cars and trucks on the highway below, racing to keep commitments. The sun was beginning to warm the earth below. I reflected on all the effort that went into making this moment possible, the flight training, the search for a plane, the repairs and upgrades to make the plane airworthy.
As I gained altitude it became apparent that there was a significant wind at altitude. At 500 ft AGL, I was still less than half way to the barbed wire fence at the end of the strip. Pulling the power back and watching ground track indicated that there was a 40 mph wind from the south. Holding a relatively low airspeed, I continued to fly over the strip, in the glassy smooth carpet of air that was rushing northward beneath my wings. It took almost three minutes to get to the fence at the end of the runway. Bud’s grass cutting monster gets to the end of the strip faster than that.
Flight training books clearly explain that a plane is flying in a moving air mass, and that ground speed is only significant when you are landing, and maybe when you are late for an appointment someplace else. It was fascinating to execute and experience turns in a wind that was stronger than any I had seen previously. The rush of making a downwind turn and watching the earth zip past beneath at a high rate of speed. The hanging-in-space feeling of turning upwind and watching a 100 mph groundspeed drop to almost nothing in just 15 seconds. So cool!
After a landing and takeoff, I climbed to 1200 ft AGL, and throttled back still centered over the grass strip. I recalled reading about taxiing a float plane in a wind, about the technique of tacking across the wind to drift downwind, without ever turning the nose of the plane downwind, I dialed in about 30 degrees of crab to the right, and immediately felt a backwards drift relative to the airstrip beneath me. A minute later I turned to the left to tack back toward the center of the strip. Repeating this procedure once more put the plane over the north end of the airstrip in position for a rather steep final decent. Reducing the power level established a glide path that felt more like a ride in a glass elevator. Wish I had a GPS track of that flight!
Firmly back on the turf again, I reconsidered the other commitments on my schedule, and taxied to the hanger. It was very satisfying to include a half hour of morning flying in the day’s schedule.
I was a little late getting to work this morning, and I have been grinning all day!
Where to now?:
For Sale: One Airport, Low Miles!