Chapter 3

I suppose flying is fun. I suppose...

I was amazed; that blue sky with those pretty white puffballs and the birds so effortlessly flinging themselves hither and yon ... well ... I’ll tell you about it.

When Joe Pilot finally got my hands peeled away from the half-moon grab bar, he pulled on my seatbelt and said, “If you have to grab something ... grab this. Don’t touch the yoke.”

So ... the half-moon grab bar is called the Yoke. Watching him, I noticed he turned the yoke ... his yoke ... not mine; mine did everything his did but look Ma, no hands. At my feet there were two pedals ... with kinda like cups for feet ... I guess he saw me inching my shoes towards the cups; I have a mountain bike, a Kona ... it has cups for my feet that look a lot like the cups there in the airplane ... anyway I was thinking...

“Keep your feet off the pedals!”

Well ... that stopped that. Derailed my train of thought, he did.

Watching him work the pedals and the yoke, I saw movement on the rear of the wings. Huh? How about that?

He moves the yoke and pieces of the wing move too. Hope they don’t fall off. Then he threw a switch, or a lever and the whole damn front of the wing slid forward ... I grabbed the half-moon grab ... yoke. I realized that he couldn’t fly the airplane with me holding on.

“I’m not letting go until you fix the wings,” I said.

He shut everything off ... the propellers stopped and all the lights associated with the engines turned RED. Well ... when the engines stopped, the fella that had the fire extinguisher came running ... with that red bottle. The tower started asking all sorts of questions.

“Get out of that seat!”

“Yes, sir!” And I did.

So ... he got out of his seat and led me outside.

I got a flying lesson ... on the ground.

He was terribly patient. Told me about wings and how they worked and why propellers pushed air ... and slats and flaps and tail-feathers... Empennage he called them ... and rudders and ailerons and trim tabs.

When I was as confused as I could get he put me back in the right seat and handed me the laminated sheet ... again ... and told me to read it ... again.

We took off, circled once, landed ... he called it ‘touch and go’ and I never grabbed the half-moon grab bar the whole time. I did feel my asshole snatching at the leather buttons on the seat a time or two.

We got straight in the air ‘one degree east of north’ and then the lessons really began.

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re going to need to know how to fly.”

Well, that was cryptic.

You know I mentioned the blue sky and puffy clouds? Those puffy white balls of condensing moisture are full of holes and hills. And birds? You have never been thrilled like the thrill of flying into a gaggle of geese in the middle of one of those puffballs. They weigh 14 pounds ... a flying bowling ball. Hit one of them at two hundred miles an hour.

“My airplane!” said Joe Pilot. I let go of the yoke.

He immediately declared and Stewart’s was less than five miles away. Cub Stewart told Joe Pilot that, sure he could fix it ... and he did.

A simple three hour flight from Knoxville Tennessee to Belleville Michigan took four days.

I learned to fly a Cub at Stewart’s.

When Joe Pilot called Bill Hagerty about the accident and where we were, Bill said, “Well, he’ll need to know how to fly anyway.”