Flying To My Grandfather's Wedding

[susang777]

I thought I'd share another (long) story with y'all, so you'd see what we've been up to in the airplane since the last time I shared stories. It needs some more editing work, and then I'm going to try to actually get this one published, as I think it might have some small commercial potential ($100 if I'm lucky). The flight down was February 15-16, 2003, and the flight back was on the 18th.

How I Learned To Be A Better Copilot: Flying To My Grandfather's Wedding

We waited anxiously at the Lawrenceville Airport (KLZU) on February 15th for the ceilings to lift just a little higher so we could start on our trip to see my grandfather get married again in Fort Pierce, Florida. John had just gotten his private pilot’s certificate on January 11th. It was the first time John and I would take our two boys on a trip together in our small Cessna taildragger. The 1955 170B is a well maintained classic airplane originally owned by John’s father, and one I had known and flown in occasionally for over 20 years.

I took ground school early in 2002 because I knew how important flying, and this plane in particular, was to my husband. I even started on flying lessons, 11 nervous hours, before John’s schedule got too hectic and my lessons conflicted too much with his.

It definitely wouldn’t have been my choice to learn to fly an airplane, as I have always found flying to be a nerve-wracking experience. To put it bluntly, I’m afraid of flying. I don’t like it when the airplane jerks crazily around in less than perfect air, and a steep turn cranks up my adrenaline flow to fire hydrant proportions. The best I could come up with to lessen the sharp fear was to compare the abrupt motions to riding a horse. The turns still scared me. At least I don’t get airsick.

On this trip, it was my job to be the copilot and pilotage navigator. Finally, around 2pm John took the plane around the pattern to check the ceilings and pronounced them navigable. We took off at 2:30pm, and made it about halfway before nightfall. I had urged John to stay higher than he would have liked for the majority of the first half because of the bumpiness lower down. And frankly, it made me a lot less nervous to be higher so we would have more landing options if anything went wrong. As usual, however, the relatively new engine purred along with nary a hint of trouble.

I helped by comparing what I saw outside to the maps. I’ve always been pretty good at navigation, and the more I did on this trip, the better I got. I tried to help with the checkpoints, but was hopelessly lost at first trying to figure out where to write things down. I had let John handle the flight planning, and had found excuses not to help with it or look it over. I realized that was not a good choice if I was going to help with the checkpoints, but there was plenty to do with the pilotage and helping to look for other planes.

The radios were too confusing, so I gave up on that pretty quickly and focused on what I could help with. A couple of times, John gave me the controls so he could take a longer look at the map, his notations, or make a calculation. At first, I wasn’t so great at keeping it headed in the right direction, or at the correct elevation. All I could do was keep the wings level, and try to figure out the rest. But after a little while, I got better at both.

I first looked at the altimeter and tried to keep it on target. Then I looked at the course heading, which was much harder to figure out. It always seems backwards to me. Elevation, since we were headed east, was an odd thousand plus 500. “People in the east are odd.” John told me that was silly and wasn’t a logical way to remember it. But it was silly enough that he couldn’t forget it, and soon afterward, he said that was the way he remembered it, much to his chagrin.

The headwinds had put us a whole hour behind schedule, and we stopped just inside Florida at Lake City instead of Gainesville. That was unexpected, but in hindsight when we went over the sequence of events, it shouldn’t have been. There was no possibility of making it all the way to Fort Pierce before nightfall with the headwinds. This was not something I was used to dealing with. After all, cars don’t have to deal with headwinds! So I tried to think of a good analogy, came up with unexpectedly heavy traffic, sighed, and found a motel for us to stay in.

The next morning, we had to start early to get to my grandfather’s wedding by noon. Four years after my grandmother passed away, my grandfather had finally decided to marry a friend who had also lost her spouse recently. We were so happy for him. What was particularly charming about it was that he had decided to get married on the day before he turned 90, because, he said, “I don’t want her to marry an old man!”

John and I were well aware of the dangers of the “have to get there no matter what” syndrome, so we put the family already in Fort Pierce on alert that we might not make it in time, and might have to stop and rent a car for the last leg. The weather was marginal VFR, with lots of thick, low clouds around Orlando. John didn’t file a flight plan this time, choosing instead to go from airport to airport, looking and listening ahead for weather and visibility reports.

We always had a backup plan. Our parameters were: broken clouds or better, an alternate landing place available at all times, and improving weather ahead. At every moment, we knew exactly how we could get down through the layer of clouds while maintaining VFR minimums.
We skipped from Lake City to Gainesville to Leesville. At Leesville, John called Weather Services and got an encouraging update about Kissimmee. The clouds to the left of us had Orlando well socked in, and to the right of us, Winterhaven was no VFR pilot’s friend. But Kissimmee was fine. We made it through the weather gauntlet, then had another challenge immediately ahead.

As we swung around in a precise dance between the Orlando airspace and a military base to the south, John got on the radio again with Weather Services and verified that Fort Pierce was clear.

On our last leg, thick clouds were straight ahead of us which extended from 2500 to 6500 feet. We ascended to 7500 feet to get over them, but then got too close to our destination and had to make a choice about where to come down. John made the decision to go under them, picked a particularly large hole, and spiraled down. One of the boys was upset and asked John to stop tilting the plane so much, and the other one was gleefully laughing at the fun.

By then, I was so involved in the details of the flight, and had been explaining things to the boys through the headphones, that instead of the usual clenching of stomach and hands, I calmly explained that it was a controlled descent, the engine was normal, everything was working the way it should, and we had to do it this way to get to Fort Pierce. When we finally got down under the clouds, we were at 2000 feet and it was rather bumpy over the swampy orange grove fields. Again I was so busy helping John prepare for the landing, and reassuring the boys, that I wasn’t as scared of the sudden attitude shifts as I normally would have been.

We landed, got to the wedding, and thoroughly enjoyed seeing the obvious happiness between my nearly 90 year old grandfather and his 75 year old bride. At the reception, my youngest son and my sister’s youngest daughter blew bubbles above the happy couple as I snapped an unforgettable picture. Then we drove to the bride’s home for the birthday party, where my grandfather and new step-grandmother danced to organ music played by the music teacher who was responsible for getting them together on a cruise. My parents joined in the dancing, and another unforgettable moment was captured in our memories.

We expected to be able to go back home the next morning, but of course weather doesn’t always cooperate. We finally gave it up as a lost cause about midday, went to the local Wal-Mart for swimsuits for the boys, and went to the beach. The boys played in the surf, while John and I fed seagulls, encouraging the boldest ones to come just a little closer each time.

That night I talked with John about what I had learned as a copilot on the way there, and how I might help him better on the way back. We did the flight planning together, picking out the checkpoints and calculating the distances, times, and VOR distance and degrees. I told him it would help if when he handed over the controls that he first tell me what our heading was, and it did.

On the way back, we decided to go up the coast. We were at 4500 feet almost the whole way back, stopping over in Waycross, a very friendly place. Since the weather was so much better, John didn’t hand over the controls as much, and I was able to learn and help with the radios and navigational aids much more. The headwinds weren’t as bad on the way back, so instead of adding a total of two hours, we only had an extra half hour. We eased into a nice routine, an efficient method of working together that has helped during shorter flights since then.