F
LYING NORTH OUT OF
O
RLANDO AT 1,200 FEET
I
AM CLAD IN
only a knit shirt and shorts. I am physically comfortable and worried. The air is too hot and too humid and in these climes at this time of year that means thunderstorms. Unfortunately it was 11:25 in the morning before I got the big Lycoming fired off, and nine minutes later before the tail came up as I added power.
I put Nancy and the children on the airliner at Orlando International at 9:15. Then the plane sat on the sun-drenched ramp until 10 while I stared through the window at the puffy clouds probably destined to grow into thunderbumpers and hopped from foot to foot. Finally I asked one of the airline personnel what the delay was. “Nothing mechanical,” she told me.
I just nodded. If not mechanical, then what? Air Traffic Control? After they just got their big TCA that took half of central Florida? Apparently she sensed her answer was unsatisfactory, so she went to ask her own questions.
In a moment she was back. “They are emptying the toilet tanks.”
I returned to the window where I could look at the Boeing 737 and watch the sky. I began to feel uneasy. Emptying the toilet tanks after a flight is undoubtedly on somebody’s checklist, yet it didn’t get done. What else didn’t get done? All the kids and ex-wives I have in this world are on that plane. I scrutinized the crew in the cockpit. The pilot was middle-aged and had a bigger waistband than I do. He was sitting on the arm of the captain’s seat shooting the breeze with the copilot and a flight attendant. Had he checked the fuel load, the oil?
At 10:05 they drove the honey wagon away, closed the hatch, and pushed the plane back. I started for the monorail back to the main terminal. By the time I boarded and it left on its little trip to the terminal, the 737 was taxiing out. He would be above this weather soon and cruising westward into dryer skies. The Disney adventurers should have a good flight home.
Eight miles north at Orlando Executive the
Cannibal Queen
was flashing her yellow skin at me as the line boy drove me across the ramp to where they had her tied down. Her bath had been worth the money.
I borrowed a stepladder and got out my screwdriver. The oil filter for the Lycoming engine does not have a disposable element, but rather has a scraper that needs to be rotated periodically to remove the accumulated crud from the filter element. I have resolved to perform this essential task this morning since I have already postponed it once before. Unfortunately, to get at the oil filter, an accessory on the back of the engine, one must remove the AT-10 nose cowling completely, then open the left engine accessory access panel. I sweated on the hot ramp and managed to get pretty greasy. A fellow came over and helped me reinstall the cowling.
That done, I finished packing the plane, broke down the tie-downs, walked around her once and climbed into the cockpit. There I inspected the charts and looked again at the sky. Puffy clouds. I wiped my face on my shirttail and strapped in. Time to fly.
Still in a hurry, not yet concentrating on the business at hand, I then made a mistake. While working on the cowling I was wishing David were here and wondering what it was going to be like flying without him. When I finished that job, I should have gone inside, washed my hands and had a cup of coffee and a smoke while I shifted gears and thought about flying. I didn’t.
With the engine running I flipped open my airport book, found Orlando and dialed in the ATIS frequency. It was scratchy. I resolved to personally rip this radio out with my bare hands and smash it when I got the
Queen
back to Boulder this fall.
Information Yankee. Runway 17. Winds calm. Altimeter 30.07. Okay. I called Clearance Delivery. They were garbled. Someone talking. Finally I found a quiet spot and made my call. No answer. Two calls later I told them who I am, where I wanted to go and got a departure freq and a squawk. Now I called Ground. “Ground, Stearman 58700 wants to taxi with Yankee.”
Ground was equally scratchy, practically unreadable. Blast Marconi, anyway. Ground finally gave me permission to taxi, and I rolled the Queen. Then they asked just where on the ramp I was.
The light dawned. I stared at the page in the airport book. That airport didn’t look like this one. God, I’d been talking to Orlando International! No wonder they couldn’t find me on their ramp—I’m not there. I’m at Orlando Executive!
I applied the brakes, stopping the
Queen
dead. Turn the page, begin the exercise in radio departure all over again. Now the radio was clear as a bell.
Coonts, you’re a damn fool. You’re worrying about an airline pilot flying your kids around and you can’t even fly your own piddley little airplane.
During engine runup it occurred to me that Orlando International Ground was probably still looking for that dingaling Stearman pilot who said he was there, somewhere. I asked Executive Ground to give the other airport a call and tell them what happened. But first I had to explain to Executive Ground and everyone listening on the frequency what an idiot I am. I bit the bullet and did it.
I consoled myself with the thought that I was not the first one, nor will I be the last. I am merely the latest.
Floating along over central Florida in my knit short-sleeve shirt, I am finally concentrating on the business at hand. I’ve been embarrassed before and know that it isn’t fatal. Embarrassment doesn’t even need stitches. I forget about past mistakes and study the clouds. It’s too hot. Too humid. Gonna get bad. And I got a late start.
I want to get the hell out of Florida. Today if possible.
The clouds are covering more and more of the sky. North of De Land I fly through my first little rain shower. On the other side the water clings in beads to the clean fabric of the ailerons and I amuse myself by picking one up, then the other, letting the air push the droplets off the trailing edge.
I fly through another shower just south of the St. Johns River estuary where it turns north and widens out. I follow the rule, Don’t enter a shower unless you can see through to the other side. Ignore that rule just once in Florida and you’ll think you’ve flown into a waterfall. In Colorado you’re liable to fly into granite.
It looks pretty dark up toward Jacksonville. I give Cecil Tower a call and ask to transit the southern half of their airport traffic area westward in order to remain clear of a restricted area south of Cecil.
“Cecil is IFR,” the tower controller says. “Remain clear.”
Okay, now I know. That dark stuff is a boomer. But it looks lighter to the west and the ceiling above me is fairly high.
Studying the chart and getting it blown around while I hang on to it for dear life and try to fly the plane with my knees, I see that the restricted area south of Cecil has an 1,800 foot roof. I think I can get over that. I add power and climb.
At 2,200 feet and still almost a thousand feet under the clouds, I head westward with the blue-black wall of clouds over Jacksonville off my right wing. Approaching the Florida state prison, I am tempted to continue west to Lake City. The sky looks good that way. But I remember that grass field at Hilliard. I elect to swing north to hit Interstate 10 at MacClenny, then slightly northeast to St. George, then on to that little grass airstrip at Hilliard—the route David and I took last week on our way to Fernandina Beach—where I will stop for fuel and call Flight Service for a weather update. That’s the plan and it works. I pass around the western edge of the storm over Jacksonville and motor northward in fairly decent conditions.
Hilliard doesn’t look as inviting as it did the first time I saw it. Water is standing in several places on the runway and I can’t see anything that looks like a fuel pump. I need gas. As I make a circuit I look again at the fuel gauge, a float device that sticks down out of the tank in the upper wing. Still a smidgen over a quarter of a tank. I’ve been airborne for two hours and twenty minutes.
So no fuel at Hilliard. The nearest airfield is Davis, six or seven miles up the road. I swing the plane to the northwest and fly up U.S. 1. Five minutes later I am inspecting the Davis Airport near the little town of Folkston, Georgia. It has a paved runway but no fuel pump.
Now where? Clouds look iffy to the northwest, up toward Waycross, Georgia.
I examine the chart again. St. Marys is nearer than Waycross. It’s down the river on the intracoastal waterway. The weather looks iffy that way too. Still black toward Jacksonville. I mull it over for fifteen seconds. St. Marys is darn near at sea level if I have to sneak in. And if it’s under a rain shower, I can go across the river to Fernandina Beach.
East it is.
Five minutes later east doesn’t look like a very good choice. Fog rises in tendrils from the pine forest, an endless expanse of green broken only by a meandering river. Visibility coming down. I call St. Marys Unicom and get an immediate answer. “Wind out of the northeast at four. No other reported traffic.”
I drop to 400 feet over the river as the ceiling comes down, but it is merely a thin wall of cloud that I quickly pass under. On the other side the sky is almost clear, the visibility excellent.
I drop into St. Marys, Georgia, and shut the
Queen
down at the fuel pump with a sigh of relief. Two-point-seven hours in the air and a lucky break on the weather here. I should have gone to Lake City. At least the landing here was decent.
This is the first time I have ever flown an airplane cross-country with no electronic navigation aids. I’ve done my share of flitting about the nation in a cockpit, but all of it was in airplanes capable of instrument flight—usually on an IFR flight plan—and all of it was done at altitude, not at 1,500 feet above the ground with one eye on a sectional chart and the other on the clouds. So I’m making mistakes. And, I hope, learning, so the mistakes will not be repeated. Over Hilliard I should have called St. Marys and asked about their weather. If it was bad I should have landed right there at Hilliard.
In the future I will try to be more careful, think further ahead and make better use of the radio, but I will have to continue to fly under cloud systems. If I fly only when the weather is perfect this trip will take a couple of years.
Mistakes are inevitable in aviation, especially when one is still learning new things. The trick is to not make the mistake that will kill you.
Experience, the wise man said, is a hard teacher. First comes the test, then the lesson.
Forty-five minutes later I lift off and fly westward five miles to pick up Interstate 95 northward. The wall of cloud that I slipped under coming in has drifted away to the south. I am at 1,000 feet and everything looks fine. Flight Service says the weather improves significantly to the northward, and the fields in South Carolina are reporting 4,000 scattered. The trick will be to get there.
It won’t happen today. In minutes I am forced down to 400 feet above the ground. I turn around and head right back to St. Marys.
The lady at the desk gives me a ride into town, where the motel only wants $39 for a room. The room is as nice as the one at Disney World and a whale of a lot cheaper. Within an hour the rain is pelting down. My room is on the second floor, and when the air conditioner is off I can hear the rain pounding on the roof. I lie down and try to relax as I listen to the rain.
Sleep doesn’t come. I review the flight again and list my mistakes, analyzing them. The rain continues to fall.
My wake-up call comes at 5:30
A.M.
It is still dark outside, but with the curtain back I can see that rain is still falling. An hour later, as the sky lightens, it stops. Clouds up there, but high.
The airport lady picks me up at 7:15. Her name is Stephanie Harmon. Her two young sons are in the car and will spend the day at the airport with her. When her husband, Loren, retired from the Navy several years ago, they fulfilled his lifelong ambition—they bought an FBO. Then Loren got a job flying for Continental and now he’s based on Guam, in the Pacific, so guess who gets to run the FBO. That’s what I call true love.
Listening to Stephanie, one gets the impression that she can handle anything that comes up at the airport. A couple months ago she returned from a tour in the Persian Gulf with the Naval Reserve. She’s a loadmaster on one of their C-9 cargo planes and routinely flies all over the country when she’s not running the FBO at St. Marys.
When I taxied out in the Queen, Stephanie was getting ready to gas a Piper Aztec that had just landed. She was on top of the above-ground fuel tank checking gauges and turning valves, and she looked up and waved. I waved back.
The Harmons are dreamers, of course, investing a small life’s savings plus sweat, blood and tears in an effort to make a little business go. America was built by dreamers like these, dreamers not afraid of work or big government. I hope the Harmons make it. In a few years I’m going back to St. Marys to see how it worked out.
I watched the Aztec circle the airport as I strapped myself in. The ceiling is obviously well above the 800-foot traffic pattern, maybe at 3,000 or 4,000 feet, which jibes with what the weather briefer at Flight Service told me on the telephone. He was optimistic, full of good news about 4,500-foot ceilings north and east.
Stephanie suggested I fly along the coast taking advantage of the sea breeze that is evident here in St. Marys. The cool air coming in off the ocean will be laden with moisture, but usually it doesn’t turn to cloud until it is well inland. That doesn’t quite fit with the grand plan, but I mull her suggestion now. If I am going to land in all forty-eight of the contiguous United States, I should strike straight north, then swing over into Tennessee and Kentucky. But the weather guy said the Smokies are gooey and have been like that for three or four days. And I would have to cross them twice.
Flying north at 1,500 feet with the ceiling at least several thousand feet over my head, I decide to follow Stephanie’s suggestion. The heck with Tennessee and Kentucky. I’ll make my haj to Kill Devil Hill where man got off the ground and visit the Wright Brothers Museum. That’ll be more fun than Opryland.