Chapter 35

Haley’s turn:

Wheeeee! I have soloed the Stearman! Six sessions with Cindy, she signed me off. I headed off to play.

Play. Hundred and five pounds of me in this big ol’ biplane. I tooled around the countryside for a while, climbed to five thousand feet, pulled the throttle, set up best glide speed and thirty degrees of bank and watched the altimeter to see how much altitude I lost in a gliding turn. Stored the info in memory.

Did the ‘slow flight’ thing, running through the regimen of turns. In the little Cessna when I’m doing this, the stall warning whines erratically. Stall warnings are NOT part of the Stearman’s options, so there you are with your nose in the air and if you get close, there’s a bit of buffet. If you ignore it, she stalls. If you ignore and she stalls in an unbalanced turn, you find yourself looking down at a swirly world, spinning. I can DO spins, but they’re not on the list of maneuvers I need for my private test.

Okay, down to a thousand feet. There’s my favorite spot on the ground. Practice ‘turns about a point’ because that IS on the test, and we have a pretty good wind so I get a bit of a workout flying in a circle equidistant from that spot, maintaining altitude plus or minus a hundred feet.

It’s a little different with a stick and an airplane that expects a more vigorous input of both rudder and ailerons to coordinate the turn.

I’m my biggest critic. Six or seven, though, and I think I have this.

Now, what’s that three-sixty overhead approach thing Cindy showed me?

Punch the ‘transmit’ button. “Regional Tower, this is Stearman eight six five four tango, touch and goes at Dukes.”

“Five four tango, roger.”

And eight hundred feet over the threshold, pointed south, chop the power, left turn, thirty degrees bank, remember that ‘turns about a point’ thing because… round and round and I come over the threshold ten feet off the ground, a little higher than I’d like, but I have plenty of runway. Wheels on the ground, hold the tail off until it comes down on its own, the throttle and go around.

Two more regular patterns, then I tell our neighbors I’m ending this, and I end up at the hangar where there’s Cindy, MY Bill, my Deena, Sandy and Matt, and her dad and Nina.

I climb out of the cockpit and take a deep bow before my audience.

“You think you’re ready?” Matt asks me.

“Yep. And I’m taking this old girl for the test. Wanna ride?”

He looked at Cindy, then Bill, then me.

“Cindy, I know you said you’d sign ‘er off, but she’s sort of my problem too, so…”

Cindy laughed. “I totally understand. I oughta fly up there and watch ‘er show up for her test, but that’d telegraph the punch.”

“He’ll call me and tell me about it. Then y’all oughta fly that Pilatus up there and tell ‘im Haley’s the pilot…”

“That’s evil, Matt!” Sandy squeaked.

“And you’re seriously gonna sign Sandy off for solo?” Matt asked.

Cindy’s head bobbed. “Gonna sign her tail-dragger endorsement. That meant that she just did three landings on YOUR runway. Concrete’s tougher than grass. I’d tell you to go ride with ‘er…”

“I ain’t tailwheel qualified, dammit,” Matt said. “But I was gonna sign ‘er off for solo this week anyway.”

“Okay, then, Sandikins,” Cindy said. “Take me around a couple of times just to make sure you got it.”

I noticed that Sandy was wearing an old cotton shirt, probably her dad’s. Prepared for the honor.

“Y’all go inside,” Cindy said. “Don’t want ‘er to have performance anxiety.”

Dan 1.0 winced. Cindy’s a hoot.

We trooped inside. I stopped at Maddie’s desk. “You just as well, Maddie. Sandy’s doin’ it.”

“I will succumb to a single ride in that dinosaur, darlin’,” she told us. “Might snag a ride with somebody in that Pilatus, though.”

“You oughta take a trip to Montana with Jo and Stoney,” I said. “You and your hubbins can have a mountain cabin for a few days.”

“Now that’s a thought.”

“Just say when,” Bill said. “You and Jo and Cindy work it out. We’ll cover for you while you’re gone.”

“Yeah, you and Dan 3.0 and Dave… I’ll get back and have to bale the stack of paperwork.”

“We’ll work extra hard to keep things straight in your absence, Maddie,” Nina said. “Since you didn’t lump me in with THEM, I got your back, sister.”

Brindy and Carlita showed up at the end of the day. We caught them up on events.

“We need to get serious, Lita,” Brindy said.

“I know it is so,” Carlita replied. “We need to sort out which irons need to remain in the fire. Now, let us look at our new hand.”

We’d printed up some new components for our version of a robotic gripper and we’re doing some things with pressure-sensitive resistance elements to give it a sense of touch. I know – other entities are doing things for touch, too, but this one’s ours and it’s what we think is an inexpensive and innovative approach.

It senses temperature and pressure. Coupled with a smart bot’s video inputs, we have the makings of a very useful semi-autonomous device.

Plus, it makes us feel useful. Nice thing is that we can send OUR 3D printer files to Alabama and they can print our mechanism the same day, and we’re working with electronics that they’re already using.

So part of that involves a video conference. Terri’s head pops into view.

“Hey, Terri,” I say. “Haven’t talked to you since you got back. How was the honeymoon?”

She smiled broadly. “Decorum keeps me from telling you exactly HOW wonderful it was.”

“Next time we get over there, you can tell me,” I laughed.

“Either that or Jerry’ll fly us over there for a meeting.”

“Y’all need to do that,” I said. “I mean, since you can hold hands in public ‘n’ stuff.”

“We need to trade fly-ins,” Terri said. “Y’all have one. We’ll come to yours. We have one. Y’all come to ours.”

“That’s gonna be interesting. We have a Cessna 152 and a Stearman. I get one, Bill gets the other. Somebody drags Deena along…”

“Heyyyyy,” Deena squeaked.

“… and what do we do about everybody else?”

Giggle. “Sounds like a job for Super-Cindy.”

“You do know they’re working on getting a couple of Cessna 185s. One of ‘em’ll end up there, for sure.”

“I heard. But I heard that’s a bit down the road.”

“Well, I think next week’s gonna be one of those big aviation events,” Terri said. “Cindy, one of the Pilatii, fly up to North Dakota, fly two 185s back on ferry permits. Looks like either you get crazy with one long day or have some sense and break it into two days, flying those things home.”

“Wow,” I said. “Almost want some of that myself. But I’m still short my private license. That’s MY next week goal.”

“Yeah, sure,” she feigned sadness. “Be another one who can get a license before me…”

“Oh, you got your own pilot. I’m imagining that Jerry stays by your side.”

“Yeah, there is that… Now, let’s talk about tying the hand’s senses into the CPU to interact with the visual suite…”

“Two sets of data,” Deena said. “Tactile. Visual.”

“We need to add ‘chemical’,” I said. “Difference between dog crap and a Snickers bar.”

“That’s pretty good,” Terri said.

“We try,” Deena giggled.

So we’re still in the R&D business. Carlita’s researching some chemical sensor technologies. We need a bit more flexibility. A lot of the sensors we see are pretty good at detecting a small range of chemicals, like flammable gases or chlorinated hydrocarbons. We need something more equivalent to a nose or a tongue.

Just don’t mention ‘tongue’ around Deena in one of her moods. She gets all giggly and needs to be attended to.

“I don’t know why. Just that sometimes YOU just trigger ME.”

“I don’t mind that a bit,” I told her that time, “but I’d really like Bill to be in on this.”

“Oh, me too. He definitely brings a dimension to the party.”

“A positive Z axis,” I laughed.

Meanwhile, back here, Cindy and Matt walked back in.

“She’s doin’ it,” Matt said. “Probably the first student to do her first solo in a Stearman since the early 1950s.”

“She’s got one on you,” Deena said.

“Yeah,” Matt admitted.

I watched his face. There appears to be a bit more to his look than ‘my student’ when Sandy’s the topic.

“And next Tuesday is going to be MY private test,” I said. “And it’s gonna be in the Stearman.”

“Yeah,” Matt laughed. “I talked with Mike Mitchell.”

“The guy who gave Bill his license.”

“Uh, Mike doesn’t give anything away. First thing he asked was how I signed you off for a Stearman. He knows I don’t have a taildragger endorsement. Then he asked if I was serious, and then he asked who Cindy was. I sent ‘im pictures and links to some news articles.”

“And he bought it,” I said. “I’m gonna do a couple of hours a day until then, just to be really comfortable.”

“She’ll do just fine,” Cindy added. “I have no problem with signing her off. I wanted Matt’s signature on the sign-off, too, because he’s done a lot of the work.”

“Yeah, and I wish I had vacation coming, Cindy,” he said. “I’d like to get a tail-dragger sign-off myself.”

“Yeah, a real job can restrict your scheduling,” she said. “Not that I’ve ever had a REAL job.”

“Oh, bull,” I said. “You got several. It’s just that not one of ‘em had preset hours. You’re hooked. You just HAVE to have something going on.”

I’m like Cindy in that respect. Happily, ‘something going on’ often means friends and family.

One thing is starting to show up – the ‘community dinner’ thing, for sure on Saturday evenings. We have Carlita for the exotic flashes of Central American cuisine, and we have plenty of Cajun, and everybody can do the American staples with various little tweaks to make it personal. And of course there’s the American standard ‘throw meat on the grill’ thing.

“Ain’t so much ‘American’, Dan 3.0 says. “Men have been throwing bits of beast on an open fire since time began.”

“May be true,” my Bill retorts, “but the tenderness of beef produced by the agro-industrial complex is tender and juicy.”