Back in the Sky (at last!)

I had a great flight this evening. The weather has cleared out leaving blue skies and very little wind. The sun doesn’t set until after 8, so there’s plenty of time at the end of the day to make a plan and go for a flight.

Today I left Boeing Field (KBFI) around 6 and did a little airwork over Vashon Island before making a landing at Wax Orchards (WA69)– a lovely grass runway surrounded by pasture and lined with fruit trees. This is my favorite place to practice landings. There’s a nice image on GoogleEarth, but it was taken before the orchard was planted. You’ll just have to imagine the trees lining the runway.

From Wax I was off to Tacoma Narrows (KTIW), located just to the west of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The bridge is visible in the airport photo but what’s missing is the brand new suspension bridge being built right next to it. They’ve completed the caissons and are now in the process of stringing the cables between them. It’s a massive project – an obvious checkpoint on the downwind for landing. The view of the jobsite from the sky provides a sense of scale that the project webcams can only hint at from the surface (you can find them at wsdot.wa.gov/projects).

The other fun thing about KTIW is that it’s perched on a cliff nearly 300’ above the water. Landing to the north goes like this: call the tower from the south end of Vashon Island and enter a right-pattern downwind, cross over the suspension bridges and keep going to turn base out over the water, then turn in on final to land at the top of the cliff. (Taking off to the south is even better as the land drops out from under the plane as you soar into the sky!!)

As I headed back north from KTIW I waggled my wings for my niece and nephew who were keeping an eye out for a yellow plane just before bedtime. Then back to Boeing Field where the heavies were heading out for the night shift. I landed after a UPS 767 took off (leaving plenty of room for wake turbulence) and just before a DHL 767 took the runway. Those planes are absolutely mammoth compared to the J3 Cub!

In all, it was a really great flight. It feels good to be back up in the sky after so many gloomy days and way too much navel-gazing. And I find myself really glad, once again, that the Flying Fish thought up the Big Adventure that convinced me to get my pilot’s license.

Time Out

We just got back from the Cook Islands where we stayed a week at a little cabin we'd found on Aitutaki. It's the only cabin on an island that is othewise a day trip destination for snorkelers. Apart from a few hours in the middle of the day when three boats pull up for lunch we had the island all to ourselves. Schedule: watch the sunset, watch the moonrise, sleep, wake up and watch the sunrise, circumperambulate the island, snorkel, eat, nap, swim, eat, watch the sunset... repeat. It was lovely. It reminded us what it is to live.

Also, it was really good to get out of the country. This american society has so many self-inflicted neuroses - and what's the point? Social control through manufactured fear? More and more I've come to believe it. It was nice to get away from news, from americans, from the rat race, and spend some time in a much simpler culture where worries are of a much more immediate nature and the attitude is "Everything's going to be all right" as opposed to "Everything's going to Hell."

So now we're working on another long term plan which is in essence, to flip the proportion of rat race and vacation in our lives. The goal would be to have six weeks of engagement with the RatRace, and the rest of the time feeling like Everything's going to be all right - ideally in an environment or culture that supports such feelings.

Risk

I can’t say that I’ve done a lot of specifically dangerous things in my life. But I haven’t exactly been averse to risk either. Flying, though, is an order of magnitude above and beyond anything I’ve done before. It’s like climbing without a rope. There’s no one to catch me if I fall.

I learned a lot about fear, confidence and trust rock climbing.
Every sane person has a fear of falling from a great height and getting hurt. Part of learning to climb a cliff involves learning the mental discipline to minimize the fear. You do that by learning to trust your equipment, your partner holding the other end of your rope, your own physical skill and judgment. And you practice. Ultimately you get over it.

That’s not to say that climbing rock faces wasn’t ever completely terrifying. On occasion it was. Even so, I don’t think I ever walked away from a climb thinking, “I’m going to kill myself doing this one of these days.” More like, “I might get hurt, but I won’t actually die – so how hard can it be?”

Not so with flying an airplane. There’s nobody holding the other end of rope to keep me from hitting the ground. If I misjudge or if my equipment fails the stakes are infinitely higher – I very well just might get myself killed. Get too close to that jet that just landed, fly into clouds and lose all bearing, carb ice, structural ice, a bird, a power line, engine failure… So many ways to die. It’s actually a little scary.

Stick says you start out with a bag of luck in the right hand and a bag of experience in the left. And you hope you get to fill up the left bag before the right bag is empty.

He’s kinda right, but there’s more to it than that. There’s learning, planning, and practice, practice, practice. I gotta do a couple more flight plans and then (whenever the damn rain clears) I gotta get up there and do some more practice.