Radio-controlled flight

After a heart attack and ensuing triple bypass in 2009, I sold my little Cessna 150 two-seater and hung up the goggles and scarf. The impulse to fly, however, never quite left me, and last year I gave in to it by taking up radio controlled model aircraft, and now I go out and fly them at every opportunity.

The aurhor and his Apprentice S 15e training airplane.
(Photo by Deborah Abbott)

There was no need, of course, to relearn the principles of flight. On a much smaller scale, R/C airplanes obey the laws of aerodynamics in the same way as the real thing.

Piloting a model plane from the ground, however, is completely different from flying a grownup aircraft, and the learning process is tricky, strenuous and full of crashes. 

It’s easy enough, for instance, to guide an airplane from the ground while it’s flying away from you. 

When it’s flying toward you, though, things are backwards. When the plane starts to drift to your left (or right, from the plane’s point of view), your pilot’s muscle memory wants to counter the turn by telling your thumb to push the joystick to the right, in the opposite direction. But that just makes the plane sharpen the existing left turn. Quickly you’ve got to push the stick to your left. The resulting maneuver—first sashaying to the right and then pulling sharply to the left—looks like drunken overcorrection.

There’s also the size of control inputs. In a real airplane, using hands and wrists to push and pull the stick or turn the yoke is measured in inches. In a model airplane, thumb inputs on the joysticks of the transmitter are measured in millimeters. Micromillimeters, even.

A sharp turn in a real airplane requires back tension on the stick, using the elevator to keep the banking airplane from sliding downward in obedience to gravity. Soon your arms learn the right amount of pull so that the airplane neither gains nor loses altitude in a turn.

With a model plane, on the other hand, accustoming your thumb to a turn takes a lot—a lot!—of practice before you learn to avoid an upward or downward spiral.

I suppose it’s my advanced age, but it took me many, many flights finally to master the radio-controlled turn. It took many crashes, too, but fortunately the training airplane I use is built of foam and is easily fixed with a little epoxy glue. Eventually the airplane looked as if it had been run through a wood chipper and I recently replaced some important and much-repaired parts, such as the fuselage, wings and tailfeathers.

Those weren’t expensive at all, less than half the price of a new airplane. Radio-controlled model flying is a lot cheaper than the real thing. (And you get to walk away from a crash.)

I won’t claim that radio-controlled flying from the ground gives a pilot the same airborne exultation of soaring aloft through three dimensions. But learning those new ropes has given me the same satisfaction in accomplishing a fresh new venture that acquiring a private pilot’s license did.

Letters

Some days are better than others, especially when an email praising an old book—something that does not often happen—arrives. Yesterday the following came in from Oklahoma City:

"This brief note brings you a word of thanks for sharing your cross country flying adventure in Flight of the Gin Fizz.

"I first read the book in 1999 when as a new pilot I was grounded throughout a harsh winter in the upper mid-west. Again the following year, I borrowed it once more from the local library and soothed my winter-imprisoned aviation soul.  This past summer, I came across a copy being sold by one of the aviation booksellers at Oshkosh.  I immediately snatched it up, and have again traveled with you in your beautiful C-150.

"Thank you, Henry, for documenting the great joy that comes only from flying, and for sharing your wonderful journey. May one ask, do you still have the Gin Fizz?

"Here's wishing you tailwinds!

"With appreciation,

"Scott Dorsey"

My Cessna 150, named Gin Fizz in honor of Cal Rodgers' Vin Fiz, the first airplane to fly across the United States in 1911, was sold in 2009 after I had a heart attack, but there's still a photograph of her on my office wall.

Go-arounds

Yesterday the Washington Post printed a mildly scary story about an Alaska Airlines jet landing at National Airport (I know it's Reagan National, but all pilots call it "National") and suddenly zooming sharply away in what pilots call a "go-around," startling passengers and spectators on the ground.

Another airplane, the Post said, was on the runway. It had just landed but hadn't yet turned off onto a taxiway, so the tower ordered the incoming jet to abort its landing and go around the circuit for another try. Safety first, you know.

If it hadn't been for an air traffic controller falling asleep in the wee hours at National last week, the event wouldn't have been a story. But travelers are nervous, and newspapers have to make money, and an enterprising reporter capitalized on an opportunity.

The reporter admitted that at National Airport go-arounds happen a lot -- ten to 20 times a month -- because traffic there is so congested that the tower has to space incoming planes tightly. Sometimes the controllers' timing is slightly off and an incoming plane follows the preceding one a little too closely. Solution: If there's any doubt, any doubt at all, the tower (or the captain of the plane about to land) calls a go-around and things are rejuggled. Nobody is endangered -- not in the slightest.

Those incidents never make the news.

Some years ago I was aboard a United 737 on short final at National. Less than a quarter of a mile from touchdown, the pilot suddenly poured on the coal, cleaned up the landing gear and roared away. The woman next to me grabbed the seat rest and gasped, no doubt thinking we had escaped death by the skin of our chins. The guy across the aisle chuckled and shook his head. He'd been there before.

Nor was I perturbed, because as a small plane pilot I had repeatedly been trained to perform that maneuver almost from the first day of flight instruction.

"Always keep your eyes on that runway," said Tom, my instructor, "and expect somebody to surprise you. The second you think something's not right, shove in that throttle and get the hell outta there."

Again and again, even when the airport was deserted except for us, Tom would clap my leg just as I lifted the plane's nose to touch down on the mains and shout "Go around!"

Pilots are trained never to relax in the landing pattern but to stay alert, keeping a hand lightly on the throttle, ready to ram the ball to the wall at the slightest sign of potential danger.

During 15 years and more than 1,300 hours in the cockpit, I was forced to perform more than a dozen actual go-arounds. Once an airplane landed well ahead of me but turned around and back-taxied down the runway, its pilot oblivious to incoming traffic. More than once a student pilot holding in the pocket failed to look up to check incoming airplanes before taxiing onto the numbers for takeoff.

Several times animals -- deer, coyotes and once a magnificent elk -- sauntered onto the runway when I was on short final.

None of these go-arounds were close calls, although a passenger or two might have been a little perturbed. (I don't think I ever said "Oh shit!" with someone in the right seat. Pilots should never do that, even in mild irritation.)

And I was an amateur, a private pilot, a weekend puddle-jumper driver. Air transport pilots are even more on edge during landings, because they're responsible for scores of passengers. As I did, they train and train and train until go-arounds become second nature. (They don't have to wait for a controller's order, either.)

Go-arounds are safe. They're designed to keep you safe. Don't fret.

Another Mention in Dispatches

My ego is flagging on a gray, cloudy morning that brought four inches of overnight snow and promises all-day sheets of sleet.

It's not so much that I'll be stuck in the house all day with a gimpy knee and a touchy back -- it's the uncertainty of being a midlist author in a terrible economy for the publishing business. When will I hear from my agent that Hang Fire, the fourth Steve Martinez mystery, has either been accepted or rejected? It's been almost three months since I sent off the manuscript.

But there is a glimmer of sunlight in the gloom. One of my old books, Flight of the Gin Fizz, got a very nice mention in a roundup of aviation reading posted on General Aviation News.

There's nothing that bucks up a despairing writer more than a kindly nod to an almost forgotten book. Especially when his name appears on the same page as those of Lindbergh, Saint-Exupery and Ernest K. Gann. And when there's a copy of his book in the photo that accompanies the piece.

Let it rain.

El Al and airport security

"Why can't TSA be more like El Al?" you sometimes hear when people grouse about American airport security. "El Al hasn't had a terrorist incident on one of its planes for many decades."

True. El Al's security measures indeed are highly effective. Instead of examining shoes and toothpaste tubes, El Al agents -- all trained psychologists -- quietly interview each passenger at length, watching for telltale signs that all might not be well.

Years ago, when I flew El Al from JFK to Tel Aviv on a travel writers' junket, a pretty young Israeli sat me down in a cubicle and politely asked me about my business in Israel, where I was staying, with whom I was traveling, and so on. She kept her eyes on mine during the entire interview -- "interrogation" is too harsh a word for the deceptively soft questions she asked -- and presumably watched my body language for unconscious but revealing twitches of guilt and evasiveness.

It was clear that she knew exactly who I was and why I was traveling to Israel -- I was a guest of both El Al and the Israeli tourism authority and presumably had passed a background check -- but she pressed on anyway, until she was satisfied that I posed no danger.

Afterward, she thanked me for my patience and waved me and my luggage through the metal detector and X-ray machine and into the passenger lounge. I looked about. Three or four men and women in unobtrusive civilian clothes strolled quietly among the passengers, apparently observing their behavior. It was hard to miss them; they had the watchful look of cops.

Wouldn't it be nice if American air security could do the same?

But TSA agents could never follow this scheme. They barely have a high school education, let alone a degree in psychology. They obey a rigid operations manual; they do not make considered decisions.

We also have to remember that El Al is a minor national airline and is government-supported. It can afford the relatively small number of highly trained security personnel it needs.

And so for us, El Al's policy is way too labor-intensive as well as too brain-demanding.

Goodbye, Gin Fizz

My last view of N5859E in flight as Dana Holladay put her through her paces yesterday morning at Westosha Airport in Wilmot, Wis.

My half-century-old Cessna 150 two-seater, the one I flew coast to coast in 1995 for the book Flight of the Gin Fizz, is going to a new home in Massachusetts.

Her new owner is Bill Sanchez, an engineer at an energy company in New Hampshire who lives on a farm, grows hay and boards horses when he's not flying. He will be basing the airplane at Lawrence Municipal Airport in Lawrence, Mass., north of Boston.

I went up to my airport yesterday to prepare N5859E for her ferry flight east -- an old comrade, Dana Holladay, a veteran certified flight instructor, will fly her out today if the weather improves.

Saying goodbye was not easy.

Half the time during the 15 years I owned Gin Fizz, I thought of her as an assemblage of fragile and expensive aluminum parts flying in loose formation. (She is named in honor of Vin Fiz, the historic Wright Model EX that Cal Rodgers -- also a deaf pilot -- flew from Brooklyn to Long Beach, Calif., in 1911.)

The other half the time I considered her a living, breathing being full of affectionate idiosyncrasies, a good friend who took as much joy as I did cavorting in the air and going places low and slow. She is so light and responsive on the controls that sometimes it seemed that she had a soul.

But now it is time to cast off sentimentality and face reality, after a heart attack last August and consequent bypass surgery. My aviation days are not necessarily over -- I can still fly under the FAA's Light Sport Aircraft rules -- but owning an airplane is no longer practical.

Bill Sanchez and his son Bill Barker, who soloed on his 16th birthday last Sept. 24, will keep old N5859E warm, well fed and content.

That's good enough for me.

TUESDAY: Dana delivered N5859E to Bill at Lawrence Municipal last night at 7:30 p.m. after a 9.5 hour flight, with three pit stops. All is well.

Langewiesche flies again

William Langewiesche is one of our very best journalists (as well as a superb prose stylist), especially on matters of aviation. He knows whereof he writes; he was for a long time a "freight dog," flying cargo in drafty, crapped-out, barely airworthy airplanes from one godforsaken airfield to another, and the experience leached the treacly romance of aviation out of him. He sees blind hero-worship of pilots for what it is.

Today in the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Langewiesche's newest book, Fly By Wire, a revisitation of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger's storied landing of that Airbus 320 in the Hudson without loss of life.

It was a professional performance by a superb pilot, Langewiesche declares, but he also argues that the Frenchman Bernard Ziegler, who long ago devised the fly-by-wire system that really guided the Airbus to the river, may have been the greater hero -- if "hero" is the proper term for someone who executes the job he was painstakingly trained to do.

Garner sums up the book as "prickly and uneven but plainspoken."

That's good enough for me. I'm off to Barnes & Noble to get a copy.

For sale: 1959 Cessna 150

Own a piece of literary history, aviation division: the 1959 Cessna 150 that was used to re-enact Cal Rodgers' historic 1911 flight from New York to California for my 1997 book Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet.

Yes, old N5859E is on the block, and since her availability has to be advertised, that might as well start here.

For fifteen years and more than 1,300 logged hours, this little two-seater served me well, lifting me away from groundbound cares into the joyous freedom of the skies over Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Last month, as regular readers of this blog know, my ticker missed a few tocks and seized up like an aero engine run dry. That required a heavy-duty hospital overhaul involving considerable rearrangement of piping.

Since the FAA looks askance at cardiac cases in the cockpit, it's time for me to hang up the helmet, pass the airplane on to a new owner, and find pursuits closer to earth.

Old N5859E has been lovingly maintained all her 50 years of service. She's in great shape. For prospective buyers, her particulars, in proper airplane-speak:

FOR SALE: 1959 Cessna 150. TTAF 5830, TSMOH 993. Panel: Narco COM IIB, Narco NAV 12, RT459 Mode C transponder, Flybuddy Loran, clock, EGT. Engine: Spin-on oil filter, Tanis heater, carb overhauled 2008, last compressions 78-73-76-76. Cockpit: Four-point harnesses. Misc: Trimble Flightmate GPS with yoke mount, Bruce's canopy cover. All logs intact. Hangared since refurbishment in 1994. Repainted 1999. Next annual October 2010. $16,000. Based at 5K6 Westosha (Wilmot, WI). E-mail hkisor@yahoo.com.

Of course I'll throw in an inscribed copy of Flight of the Gin Fizz.

NOVEMBER 16: Old N5859E has been sold to a pilot in North Andover, Massachusetts. More on this later.

My first chopper ride

The Bell 407 in which I took my first ever helicopter ride (photo courtesy of Bruce Liebowitz)

Even though I've been a private pilot for 15 years, I'd never been in a helicopter before last Monday, when I got a ride in a Bell 407 from Ontonagon, Michigan, to Wausau, Wisconsin.

For an old fixed-wing jockey, there's a distinct difference in the experience of flight. A little old Cessna 150 slices through butter-smooth morning air, while a chopper actually chops away at the elements in a high-speed vibration that rattles the fillings in one's teeth. The landing flare -- the maneuver in which an aircraft transitions from forward to vertical flight -- is so much more pronounced in a helicopter that for a moment I thought we were stalling, falling out of the air.

But going low (2000 feet above ground) across forested Michigan and Wisconsin gave the same sense of soaring over the beautiful greensward that one gets in a small two-seater.

The Bell 407, a mid-1990s design, is a speedy (140 knots) little seven-place utility beast that has become popular with all sorts of helicopter operations: sightseeing, the cops, news, corporate transport and medical evacuation to hospitals.

The 407 I flew in is a medevac chopper for the Aspirus network of hospitals. And I was the patient.

To keep a long story short, I suffered a heart attack Monday morning in downtown Ontonagon, drove myself (two blocks) to the hospital, and within the hour was stabilized and on my way to Wausau Aspirus. Wednesday I had a triple bypass, and now here I am on the mend and telling you about the experience.

Not the best way to get in one's first helicopter ride, but it was sweet all the same.

The Hudson River corridor

The tragic collision of airplane and helicopter in the corridor over the Hudson River the other day brought back to mind my own trip up the Hudson in 1995 for my book Flight of the Gin Fizz.

Was it scary? You bet. But not for the reasons you might think.

I am a "no-radio" pilot, being totally deaf. I can self-announce my position, as I did early that morning when my little two-seater Cessna 150 skimmed over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and into New York Harbor. Whether anyone understood me I don't know. But there was almost no traffic; a lone sightseeing helicopter dashed by in the other direction on the west side of the Hudson. My flight up to the Tappan Zee Bridge and then westward was uneventful, although full of remarkable sights -- the World Trade Center still stood, for instance.

Except for the requirement to self-announce, the Hudson River VFR corridor is not controlled. No tower keeps aircraft at a distance from one another.

Is this inherently unsafe? I don't think so.

Compared to the storm of airplanes in the skies over Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during the annual fly-in there, Hudson River traffic is almost embarrassingly light. Yes, there is a tower at Oshkosh and the controllers are busier than armless paperhangers, but there is also a procedure for vintage aircraft without radio to land in the middle of the maelstrom.

Once every five or six years there is an accident, usually fatal, but when the numbers of airplanes in the Oshkosh airspace at any one time are compared to the number of mishaps, this fact emerges: Flying around Oshkosh during AirVenture is remarkably safe.

That's because the pilots there employ the Number One adage of Visual Flight Rules: "See and avoid." Their heads are constantly swiveling, searching for traffic, like World War I pilots straining to see the Hun in the sun.

They do the same thing in the Hudson River VFR corridor. It has a remarkably good safety record: just three helicopter accidents in 19 years.

Once in a long while -- a long while -- things go wrong despite everyone's best efforts. Exactly what happened last week is not yet known, but it seems possible that the pilot of the low-wing Piper Lance never saw the helicopter because it was in the airplane's blind spot. Something might have been going on in its cockpit; the Lance pilot did not answer radio calls before departing controlled airspace and entering the Hudson. We'll have to wait for the NTSB to rule.

Until then, let's not advocate drastic changes in the Hudson River flight rules. Doing so given its remarkable history is like demanding all the geese around New York be killed, as a Manhattan newspaper advocated when that USAirways Airbus hit a flock of them and landed in the river without loss of life.

Now why was my flight up the Hudson so scary? I was flying a tiny single-engine airplane very early on a holiday morning when people were still in bed. If an engine failure had forced me down into the river, it's possible that no one would have seen me and raised the hue and cry for rescue. That's why pilots of small planes are always looking for places to land just in case the motor decides to pack it in.

All the same, that flight was one of the great adventures of my life.

Oshkosh, b'gosh

Wingwalking acts have thrilled airshow fans for decades. Yesterday Gene Soucy and his wingwalker performed for onlookers at the big Experimental Aircraft Association extravaganza at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Click for screensaver-sized version.

Oshkosh is not Obama country, but what the hell.

Last week I attended the Experimental Aircraft Association's "Airventure," the marketing guys' idea of what the organization should call the huge yearly fly-in of thousands of airplanes, homebuilt or not, warbirds ancient and not so ancient, new commercial aircraft and many hundreds of thousands of aviators and flying fans. Everybody still calls it "Oshkosh" for the Wisconsin city where the event has been held for decades.

It is overwhelmingly white. Finding African-American, Asian or Latino faces in that crowd -- much of it elderly -- is an exercise in "Where's Waldo?"

This should not be surprising. Aviation in America has always been largely Southern good-old-boy, deeply conservative, worshipful of the military, avidly nostalgic and patriotic almost to a fault -- much like the NASCAR crowd. In fact, pilots and plane fans are simply an upscale offshoot of the old Gasoline Alley culture.

These folks do change, but they change slowly -- it was not until 2002, for instance, that the Confederate Air Force, the world's largest warbird restoration club, finally changed its name (born as a joke, not a statement) to "Commemorative Air Force," a bit harder to say but more accurate about its mission.

Airmen may not be evangelistic about diversity, but, these days, neither are they exclusionary. If you have the money (it takes lots of that) and the desire, they'll welcome you into the fold. Except for a few clueless louts, I've always felt accepted as a pilot who happens to be deaf. So in the main have the other "no-radio" pilots who with me attended Oshkosh last week during our little fly-in at Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

I had a splendid time talking tech stuff with kitplane builders, admiring the elephantine Airbus 380 and walking past and under big old military aircraft, including a World War II Avenger torpedo bomber like the one whose cockpit my naval officer father seated me in when I was all of three years old. That was when my yen to fly was born.

And, of course, rubbernecking at the air show -- an amateur photographer's dream. In days to come I'll be posting my best shots on the Whodunit Photographer.

Driving an airplane

On March 5 the Terrafugia Transition (can you say that fast ten times?) flew for the first time. It's the latest in a long line of dreams about a practical flying automobile. Whether it will bear fruit is another matter. Here, from the aviation website Avweb.com, is a video of its first flight:



The Transition is actually a "roadable airplane," not a true flying car. The idea is to keep it in your garage and then drive it out to the airport (the designer says it's street legal) for takeoff and landing. Just try that on I-94 during rush hour, however.

What makes it different from past flying-car concepts is the wings. They fold onto the car like a bird's. Earlier designs had detachable wings, such as that of the 1949 Aerocar, of which only six examples ever were built:



The dream of a flying car was born long, long ago. Sometime in the early 1920s a retired doctor named George Spratt, who had worked with the Wright brothers, designed and flew such a machine, and a film of it flying is here.

Frankly, car-airplane hybrids have traditionally made lousy airplanes and lousy cars, and I doubt the Terrafugia Transition is going to be any different. Full marks, however, to its designer for the audacity of his state-of-the-art dreams.

Yak

One of the nice things about going flying in the spring is spotting the season's first rare airplane among the antiques or former warbirds that had been hangared all winter. On the first pleasant Sunday in March, their owners often roll them out into the sun to preen and shake their feathers, getting ready for summer air shows.

Yesterday, shortly after rolling the hangar door down on my little Cessna 150 at Westosha Airport in Wilmot, Wisconsin, I spotted this colorful Yakovlev Yak-52, an aerobatic trainer that introduced many fledgling Red Air Force pilots to combat maneuvers beginning in 1976. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, scores of surplus Yaks were exported to the United States and sold for a song, as they still are (a typical price is $50,000, actually quite low as airplanes go). They're not at all uncommon in American skies, especially at aerobatic contests, but at country airports they're still rare enough to turn heads.

This Yak-52 -- apparently newly painted in her original colors -- looks a little like a mantis on steroids with that long and skinny landing gear, necessary for the big paddle-blade propeller to clear the ground. Her pilot had just started the engine in a huge cloud of exhaust, nearly blown away at the time I snapped the photo. The propeller's whirling briskly, but the camera stopped it with a 1/4000 sec. shutter speed.

Ta-pocketa-pocketa . . .

Derelict

There's one -- at least one -- at every grassroots airport I've ever visited: The rotting hulk of a dead or dying airplane, tires flat, paint peeling and fading, windshield crazed by sunlight and spattered with birdshit, engine intakes choked by animal nests.

What's the story? Did its owner tire of flying and just let his airplane sit and decay at its tiedown? Maybe he died and the estate never got around to selling the airplane. If the tiedown rent isn't paid, airport management can sue to sell the airplane and recover the costs. Maybe the cost of doing so -- hiring a lawyer to see the case through the courts -- far exceeds the salvage value of a corroded old wreck. It may just be easier to let the airplane molder for years until some natural disaster, like a housing tract developer, overwhelms the airport.

I have no idea how long that Cessna 172 has been sitting idle at Westosha Airport in Wilmot, Wisconsin. It has been there at least since 1993 when I started flight lessons, and it hasn't moved an inch. Neither has the equally bedraggled old Cessna 150 slumped at at a nearby tiedown.

They're awful eyesores, but after a while you just stop seeing them.

Their histories probably have been lost. What a pity. The tools and toys of men and women have stories to tell.

Happy 50th birthday to the Cessna 150

The author's 1959 Cessna 150 touches down near Los Angeles in October, 1995, after a six-week-long aerial odyssey that began over New York Harbor. (Photo by Bob Locher.)

The other day I sang "Happy Birthday" to the Boeing 747, whose maiden flight occurred 40 years ago Monday. Now I must do the same for the little Cessna 150, the 100-horsepower two-seat trainer that, beginning in 1959 and ending in 1975, launched the careers of many thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of amateur and professional pilots. The type is now officially half a century old.

Habitues of this blog know that I keep a 1959 model "Buck-and-a-Half" at a little airport in southern Wisconsin. She was one of the first of an eventual 23,839 150s to roll out of Cessna's plants at Wichita in Kansas and Reims in France beginning 50 years ago, and she is now a certified antique, like me.

She no longer cruises at 120 miles per hour, the optimistic "book" speed she supposedly enjoyed when new. On a good day she'll do 105. She can fly 300-mile-long hops with plenty of fuel to spare. On them she can carry about 500 pounds of avgas, oil and passengers, which means the Lady Friend and I can take a weekend trip if we pack just our toothbrushes.

Cramped Cessna 150s are not exactly the most comfortable touring airplanes; a two-hour flight is about all this arthritic geezer can endure before he has to land and get the kinks out of his legs and back.

They are, however, responsive, reliable and durable airplanes, famously easy to fly although difficult to fly well. They won't tolerate woolgathering at the controls but will quickly drift off course and altitude if attention isn't paid. This is what made them superb trainers.

My 150 is officially known as N5859E, her FAA registration number. Before she was refurbished in 1994-5, her previous owner's dyspeptic wife dubbed her "Shitty Little Fucking Airplane," and the owner liked that so much he painted the letters "SLFA" on her cowling.

For a while she was known as "Gin Fizz," a play on "Vin Fiz," the Wright Brothers airplane that was the first to make it across the United States, in 1911. In her I retraced Cal Rodgers's route for my 1997 book Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet.

This weekend, weather willing, I'm hoping to throw a very private 50th birthday party for old Five Niner Echo. She and I will climb to 3,000 feet and enjoy a little cake and exercise after her two-and-a-half-month layoff in a snowbound hangar.

We'll be a happy pair, she and I.

FRIDAY: We were, for an hour of touch-and-goes this morning. Every one of my five landings was perfect, a greaser. (This always happens after a long layoff. After that first day I always go back to involuntary tail-waggling crow-hops and teeth-rattling drop-ins. This causes the old-timers whittling in front of the hangars to slap their knees and cackle in glee.)

Happy 40th birthday to the Whale

One of my favorite airplanes, the Boeing 747, first flew 40 years ago yesterday, when I was all of 28 years old -- and it's still being built. More than 1,400 747s have rolled out of the assembly hangar, and 100 more are on order.

What memories the airplane evokes! Over the decades 747s have carried me to Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Israel, Japan and Malaysia. I once flew one first class (avec champagne et tournedos de la Foret) aboard Air France, thanks to a travel junket for the old Chicago Daily News, and that is the closest I have ever come to heaven.

For coach-class flying, no other airplane in existence brought travel costs down to affordable levels the way the 747 did. We may have complained about the cattle-car ambience of the airplane, but it got us there for low prices, and still does.

Few other airliners have been developed and redeveloped as much as the Whale, as airline pilots affectionally call the beast. This year the 747-8, a lengthened version meant to compete with the even bigger Airbus 380, will enter service.

Happy birthday, Whale.

(There's a nice story about the 747 at the BBC News magazine.)

Living with birds (and other critters) at airports

Yesterday the National Transportation Safety Board released preliminary findings that pieces of birds indeed had been found in the engines of Cactus 1549, the Airbus that landed in the Hudson last month. But this should not drive timorous passengers to conclude that birds are winning the battle for the skies.

In an interesting piece in Salon.com today, Katharine Mieszowski interviews the wildlife agent in charge of keeping critters off the runway at San Francisco International Airport. He uses devices like the "Phoenix wailer," a solar-powered electronic noisemaker that "periodically emits the predatory call of a red-tailed hawk, along with other alarming sounds, such as a helicopter followed by machine-gun fire."

In the very last paragraph, the bird shooer concludes that right now birds may be getting a bad rap, but they don't present a terrible danger to aviation so long as airports keep on shooing.

That's been my experience as a private pilot at airports too small to afford wildlife control. Many times I've sat on the runway waiting for formations of geese or clouds of starlings to clear the area. They go away eventually. All we grassroots pilots need is patience and a sharp eye, and sometimes quick reflexes.

We have to share our airports with four-footed critters, too. I once nearly had to do a go-round at a Wisconsin airport when a family of coyotes trotted across the runway just before my Cessna touched down, and I had to tap the brakes briskly. The airport manager said he used to send riflemen out to dispatch the animals, but coyotes are smarter than hunters and easily eluded them in the tall grass. "We just live with 'em," he said with a shrug.

Same thing at a northern Arizona airstrip while I tried to will an enormous bull elk that weighed more than my little airplane off the runway where he was preventing my takeoff with a belligerent glare. Finally I taxied back to the office and consulted with the manager, who hopped in his Jeep and charged the elk, honking all the way, while I followed at a close but safe distance, lifting off just after elk and jeep departed the blacktop.

A northern Illinois airfield tried to solve its deer problem by building a fence with a single electrified wire around the runway perimeter. It slathered the wire with peanut butter, reasoning that the deer, once shocked in the tasting, would depart. They found the peanut butter worth the zapping and kept coming back, bringing all their friends with them.

Yes, we just live with 'em. We have to.

Do Not Flush While Seated on Toilet

Most of us aboard an airliner would give such a sign a casual glance and hurry to do our business before the plane hits unexpected turbulence and the "Return to Cabin" sign flashes on.

But to Garrison Keillor, the sign suggests all kinds of comic possibilities, and that is what makes him different from you and me. (That and an extraordinary literary talent.)

The toilet-seat warning led him to write an entire column on the subject for Salon.com yesterday. Among his shrewd observations is the distinct possibility that the sign was devised by lawyers to soften the frightening truth:

"Flushing While Seated May Suck Your Colon Out Of You And Cut You A New Orifice While Changing Your Gender In Ways You Don't Even Want To Think About."

Ducked a bullet today

Whew. I haven't got a soft jug after all.

No, that's not what you think. To be precise, the No. 4 cylinder in my Cessna's aero engine isn't suffering from low compression.

Aircraft engine health is measured by many things, but the most important is the compression in the cylinders. To test the compressions, a mechanic removes one of the two spark plugs from each cylinder and pumps the cylinder full of compressed air at a pressure of 80 pounds per square inch, then turns the propeller so that the piston is driving against the pressure. Ideally -- but rarely, and usually with a brand new engine -- there is no leakage of air past the piston, resulting in a differential reading of 80/80 psi.

Usually, however, there is a teensy, tiny bit of leakage of air past the piston rings, so that the reading is, say, 78/80 psi. Anything in the 70s is considered fine, but if the reading drops into the 60s, then it's likely that you've got a problem that over time will only get worse. Below 60 means that your engine is losing too much power and it's time to break the piggy bank.

Maybe the piston rings are wearing out slowly and you're facing perhaps the installation of a whole new "jug," or matched cylinder and piston (about $2,500 for each of four jugs in the 100-horsepower engine of a Cessna 150, at right). If the readings are low in two or more cylinders, you might have to replace them all (a "top overhaul" in aviation parlance) -- or, at worst, have a complete major overhaul done on the engine, in which the whole thing is taken apart and anything that's worn beyond limits (almost everything) is replaced. That can cost $12,000 and usually does.

At my airplane's annual inspection in the beginning of September, my No. 4 cylinder compression read 62/80. Gulp. The engine had been run 971 hours since it last had undergone a major overhaul in 1994, or just past half the usual time before overhaul of 1,800 hours. Quite often one or more cylinders on a Continental O-200A engine gets unacceptably soft at the halfway point, and this is when aircraft ownership gets painful.

Fly the plane five or six more hours, Gordon, my mechanic, told me. Then we'll do another differential pressure test and see which way the problem is trending. If the pressure is still "soft," he said, we'll pull the jug and send the cylinder out for honing, or interior polishing, to get rid of any scoring that might be causing loss of pressure. Then we'll put new rings on the piston and reassemble the jug, then reattach it to the engine block. That'll be about $800 or $900, he said with an airy wave.

It might just be that the two piston rings have vibrated their way around the piston so that the gap in each ring lines up perfectly with the other one, yielding a tiny opening for air to leak through. If this is so, running the engine a few hours may cause the rings to rotate some more, closing the opening and returning pressure to where it should be.

I met Gordon at the airport today to run that pressure test.

First, Cylinder No. 1. Pressure: 78/80. Then Cylinder No. 2: 73/80. No. 3: 76/80. And, with a deep breath, Cylinder No. 4. "Look here," Gordon said. I let out my breath and peered at the gauges. 76/80! Yay!

The gaps in the rings had simply lined up at the time of the annual, then returned to their usual staggered positions.

The test cost $25 for Gordon's time. Not $800. Not $2,500. Not $12,000.

And so I shall keep Old N5859E a few more months at least, until the looming depression has either steamrollered my net worth or it hasn't.

Visit to the Vin Fiz

While in Washington last week, I stopped by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to pay pilotly respects to its historic aircraft, most notably the ancient Vin Fiz. This was the primitive Wright biplane in which a wealthy, eccentric and deaf aviator named Calbraith Perry Rodgers made the first flight across the United States, in 1911.

"Flight" is hardly the word to describe Rodgers' achievement. It took him six weeks and many short flights and crashes -- hop, skip, splat! -- to make his way across the continent. He wasn't a very good pilot, but he was a determined and ultimately successful one.

His story inspired my 1997 book Flight of the Gin Fizz, partly because, as Rodgers was, I am deaf. Re-enacting his aerial odyssey was a glorious exercise in middle-aged derring-do, although I flew a modern and far more capable airplane, a Cessna 150 trainer.

Vin Fiz is tucked nearly out of sight in a corner of the upper back hall of Air & Space, overwhelmed by the bulk of Amelia Earhart's cherry-red Lockheed Vega and the Lindberghs' Lockheed Sirius seaplane Tingmissartoq. But it is safe to say that during the next three years the old Wright will come out of the shadows when several latter-day pilots re-enact the saga of Vin Fiz on her centenary, at least one of them a fellow deaf aviator on a budget and at least one of the airplanes a well-funded and close replica of Cal Rodgers' steed.