Alaska was my 50th state to visit, and I had purposely avoided taking the airlines up to the “Last Frontier” in favor of a more adventurous arrival. I had grown up on my dad’s shaggy-dog tales of pushing an ancient Oldsmobile station wagon up the unpaved Alaska Highway of the 1970s. The Alcan, the Yukon—these were fanciful, faraway places that loomed large in an 8-year-old’s fertile imagination. Discovering their real-world counterparts for myself as an adult made for a joyous, memorable journey—all the better for sharing it with my frequent riding partner, Brad Phillips, and my wife, Dawn, on her first big trip on her own motorcycle. 

And yet there was an unexpected element of frustration. As I gained an appreciation for the grand scale and severe beauty of the landscape, so did it become evident that the few roads here are the slenderest ribbons of civilization that barely scratch the surface of the wilderness. All the really interesting bits seemed to start at the untracked horizon. The epic distances also limited the amount of backcountry exploration possible, even if we’d been equipped for off-road travel. This is vast country that begs to be explored by air. 

Indeed, the farther north we went, the more we found ourselves in airplane nirvana. Every Tom, Dick, and Harriet we met seemed to own a tricked-out Super Cub or a 185. Light plane traffic was a regular feature even above the loneliest stretches of road. When we got to Anchorage, I went bug-eyed at the vast rows of rugged taildraggers parked cheek to jowl at Merrill Field (PAMR)—a mini-Oshkosh without end. And then more of the same at the Lake Hood gravel strip, plus hundreds of seaplanes and amphibs around the lake. I’d found bug-smasher heaven.

• READ MORE: Finding That Right Pilot Buddy to Bid With

On the return leg of the trip, Dawn and I detoured from the Alaska Highway via the Haines Cut-Off, and then took the Alaska State Ferry down the Lynn Canal to Juneau. There we rented a straight-back Cessna 172 on bush tires, accompanied by a grizzled Alaska veteran of a flight instructor, and set off for several hours of exploration around spectacular Glacier Bay, including a low-altitude inspection of Muir Glacier. It was a highlight of the trip for both of us, and we talked about flying an airplane of our own to Alaska someday. 

Five years later, it almost happened. Having decided to sell everything, buy a sailboat, and escape to the Caribbean for a few years, we set off on one last hurrah with our 1953 Piper Pacer. We visited friends in New England, Florida, and Phoenix, explored Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, and revisited old haunts up the West Coast. But then, in Vancouver, Washington, our mid-time O-320 engine nearly self-destructed—I was lucky to land in one piece. Instead of enjoying one last adventure to Alaska and selling the Pacer there at a profit, I sadly gave her up as is/where is, absorbing the $12,000 loss philosophically.

Since then, I’ve spent quite a bit of time up north for work. On the Boeing 757 and 767 I occasionally flew to Anchorage, and since being based in Seattle as a 737 captain, both Anchorage and Fairbanks have featured heavily in my summertime bidding strategy. Of course, Alaskans will tell you that the best thing about Anchorage is that it’s so close to Alaska. I enjoy that proximity, the ever-present GA activity, the scruffy cast of interesting characters to chat up over a brew at Darwin’s Theory, and the occasional hiking or fishing adventure.

When Dawn and I bought our Stinson 108 in August 2022, there was no question of whether we’d fly it to Alaska. It’s a tail-dragging, tube-and-fabric natural for the north country. The question was when? Building our hangar and attached living quarters came first—and that project was largely finished by July of last year. More seriously, the plane was unproven after a complete rebuild. And while the restorer did an excellent job of returning the Stinson to 1946 factory spec (plus modern radios with ADS-B), there were some updates that needed to be made before taking it farther afield. 

Since then, I’ve put about 100 hours on the tachometer, with a few minor issues cropping up. My A&P/IA encourages owner-assisted maintenance, which has been great for getting to know the airplane. We’ve added an Airwolf spin-on oil filter, installed shoulder harnesses, retrofitted LED lighting, and swapped out the ancient, venturi-powered turn coordinator for a modern uAvionix AV-30C primary flight display. I’ll never fly the Stinson IFR, but inadvertent IMC happens, and I feel much better having adequate instrumentation to survive a 180-degree turn. 

• READ MORE: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air

Weather permitting, we’re taking the Stinson on a shakedown cruise to Northern California in a few weeks. It should be about 13 hours round trip, our first longer cross-country with the airplane. If all goes well, we’ll head up towards Alaska the following month.. The general consensus seems to be that late May to early July is the best weather period, after incessant lows stop roaring ashore from the Gulf of Alaska but before the thunderstorm and wildfire seasons get going. In reality, weather can be extremely variable any time of year in this part of the world, and our itinerary will stay accordingly flexible. 

I should be able to bid a work schedule with about three weeks off. There are a few potential routes north. Having regularly plied the coastal route in the flight evels, I’d love to go that way, but the chance of getting a long, reliable weather window (in an area with notoriously poor weather and few airports) is pretty slim. In all likelihood, we will clear Canadian customs in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and head north to Prince George via the Fraser River Valley.

From there we can head northeast to join the Alaska Highway, northwest to the Cassiar Highway, or straight up to Watson Lake via MacKenzie and the infamous roadless Trench. The last two are more direct than the Alaska Highway but feature far fewer airports and little weather reporting. The Stinson’s relative lack of range is a big factor here. We can only do about 300 sm in still air with one hour reserve. We’ll likely need to carry jerry cans.

Frankly, given the potential for lengthy bouts of poor weather, I’ll be happy to just make it to Anchorage, where we have several sets of friends. Anything beyond that is a bonus. We enjoy the Kenai Peninsula and wouldn’t mind exploring around there and visiting family friends in Homer. It would also be nice to get up to Denali in good weather. Time permitting, we’d like to land above the Arctic Circle at Bettles, though I doubt we’ll have the time to get all the way up to Deadhorse or Barrow. If we really hit the weather jackpot, I’d love to visit Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska coastline from Valdez to Juneau on the return leg. We’ll see how it goes. 

For the first time in ages, I’ve bought a bunch of paper charts and pubs, as we’ll be in areas too remote to depend on an iPad. Paper is also good for getting a feel for the lay of the land and war gaming various weather scenarios. The plane is nearly ready. I’ve ordered the FCC radio station license and CBP user fee decal. I’m currently getting together camping and survival gear and will shortly begin the weighing and winnowing process. I’m also spending a lot of time looking at flight procedures and weather sources for Canada and the various areas of Alaska. 

I’ll admit that I’m a bit nervous. This is a big trip that will definitely stretch my comfort level. It’s the most ambitious thing I’ve done in a light plane in at least eight years, perhaps ever. But most everything I’ve done in my life that was worth doing started out with this exact feeling. In every case I’ve been able to stay calm, take each challenge as it comes, think things through, and come up with solutions that get me through in one piece, usually with some more great stories to tell around the campfire.

With any luck, I’ll have a few more to tell you in the coming months. 

This column first appeared in the July/August Issue 949 of the FLYING print edition.

The post Love Affair: The Last Frontier Awaits appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I recently caught up my logbook in preparation for a New Zealand PPL validation, and I’m closing in on 16,000 hours. The country’s authorities also wanted to know my solo time—e.g., sole occupant of the aircraft. The number was surprisingly small, most from way back when I was a Part 135 freight dog. These days, all my work flying is multipilot, but even when puttering around in my Stinson 108, I’m usually accompanied by my wife or friends. I don’t mind flying alone, per say, but I do find it more rewarding when there’s someone with whom to share the experience.

In two decades at the airlines, I’ve come to appreciate that those I fly with really are one of the best parts of the job. Over the years, I’ve shared the flight deck with hundreds of pilots and enjoyed flying with almost all of them. Going through my logbook, I see so many familiar names—and some are still good friends. This is a small industry, and I have chance encounters with past colleagues all the time—in airplanes and airports, obviously, but also in crew vans and layover hotels and pilot-frequented bars, like Darwin’s Theory in Anchorage, Alaska, or Moose’s Saloon in Kalispell, Montana.

My last two airlines, Horizon Air and Compass, were small regional carriers, and it was pretty common to fly with the same person multiple times. This didn’t happen much during my first eight years with my current employer as we’re a huge airline of 17,000 pilots, and over that time I flew three aircraft types out of three large bases. Once I bid to the fairly small Seattle 737 base, though, I started occasionally flying with the same first officers, and it was nice to experience that familiar, small-airline vibe once again.

• READ MORE: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air

One thing I haven’t done, until recently, is buddy-bid with anyone. This is the practice of coordinating your schedule bidding strategy with a pilot in your base to fly as many trips together as possible.

My good friend Brad Phillips, who I’ve written about here, buddy-bid the majority of his 11 years at Horizon Air with just two captains. I’ve also written about Joe and Margrit Fahan, a married couple at my airline who, prior to their joint retirement, buddy-bid international trips on the Airbus A330 together. Over the years, I’ve had trips where I really clicked with my counterpart and probably should have broached the idea of buddy-bidding but always figured that variety is the spice of life. Besides, doing so with any degree of success demands a good bit of seniority out of both parties, and until recently this is something I usually lacked.

But then in summer 2022, I flew with Steve Masek, and we went salmon fishing in Anchorage and had beers at Darwin’s and got along famously. We bid several more agreeable trips together, our wives met and gelled well, and Steve and Daniela gamely helped Dawn and I lay down 3,000 feet of PEX tubing the weekend before our hangar floor was poured. But then Masek got himself awarded a B737 captain slot, far below me on the list in that dark, dank corner where poor junior slobs are forced into reserve, red-eyes, and four-leg days. It was a dumb thing to do, but I’m thrilled for our junior FOs because Masek is a super guy and an excellent pilot.

Before his upgrade last fall, we buddy-bid one last long Anchorage overnight. We wet our lines in Ship Creek on a midnight rising tide, chomped cigars, and quaffed Woodford Reserve in the moonlight—and, alas, the salmon treated us to not even one solitary nibble.

• READ MORE: Part 2: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air

By then I had already found Masek’s replacement, Heather Griffin. We flew a three-day trip together last July and quickly realized that we were going to be fast friends. Heather got her start flying skydivers and is a licensed skydiver herself, as am I. Griffin also flies paragliders, which is a goal of mine. She snowboards and I ski, we both sail, and we both ride dirt bikes.

On the last day of our trip, she realized that I’m the guy who writes for FLYING and used to live on a sailboat and spent years cruising the Caribbean, and she told me that she actually decided to pursue an airline career after her dad (also a pilot) showed her my columns as evidence that she could fly for a stuffy old airline and still live an unconventional, adventurous life. Aw, hell—with me, flattery will get you everywhere. Instant BFF.

Griffin and I were planning a flying, camping, and dirt-biking trip to Tieton State Airport (4S6) in the Cascades of Washington state for a few weeks hence, and she and her husband, Kevin, accepted our invitation to join. We had a great weekend, flying the Stinson at sunrise and sunset, riding Bethel Ridge in the mornings, splashing in Rimrock Lake during the sweltering afternoons, and talking around the campfire while millions of bright stars wheeled overhead. Dawn got to know Heather and liked her a lot.

Meanwhile, I developed a man-crush on Kevin, who’s as cool as his wife: an air ambulance pilot with a bunch of tailwheel time, a badass dirt bike rider, and a great storyteller with a wicked sense of humor and a colorful past as a Coast Guard flight mechanic, commercial fisherman, and Alaskan surf shop operator.

• READ MORE: Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation

With the spouses properly introduced, Griffin and I started buddy-bidding. When the PBS window opens each month, we peruse the bid package and text back and forth, debating the merits of various trips and crafting a common strategy that will fit both of our plans. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. When the schedule assignments come out, we dig into the reasons report, figuring out what we did right and where we went wrong. As our trips together approach, we confer again to make layover plans: playing pinball in Raleigh, North Carolina, skydiving in Phoenix, roping up at an Anchorage climbing gym, or skiing at Lake Tahoe.

In cruise, shared interests fuel our conversations, and future adventures are a frequent topic. It didn’t take much to convince Heather and Kevin to join Dawn and I on an 11-day, 11-person dirt bike trip down Baja California in January. Griffin’s dad, Scott Condon, came too—and at 65 turned out to be the best and fastest rider of us all. It was a fantastic time with a wonderful group of friends, and we’re planning another big ride in the Pacific Northwest this summer.

In February, Heather and I got skunked, our buddy-bidding strategy foiled by pilots just senior to us. I flew with a bunch of great folks anyway—several of them brand-new to the airline—and had a lot of fun. March brought better luck. I’m about to fly a five-day trip with Griffin that includes a long Cozumel layover, and later on we have an easy four-day with 26 hours in Cabo San Lucas, where Dawn and Kevin will join us.

Most days, this is a really good job, and I frequently wonder at my good fortune. And then, when I thought my work life couldn’t get much better, I gained a good friend to fly with—and it did!

This column first appeared in the May 2024/Issue 948 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Finding That Right Pilot Buddy to Bid With appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Describing these two hours required three pages crammed with significantly more words than my usual monthly allotment, and yet I promised to cover the balance of the tour in a single additional installment.

Well, here goes nothing.

I won’t even attempt to adequately describe the remainder of the first day, which involved a lot of probing around the Fiordland’s misty maze of mountains and glacial valleys with several minimum-radius turnbacks from socked-in passes before finally finding a clear one that dropped us into perfectly named Doubtful Sound. When I finally landed ZK-WAX back in Wanaka, our home base for the week, I was thoroughly exhausted, exhilarated, and emotionally spent. It was the most visually intense day of flying in my life, not to mention a great deal more work than I’m used to putting in these days. A good cigar, glass of scotch, and eight full hours of sound sleep were in order.

• READ MORE: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air

I was glad to find it wasn’t just me: Adam Broome, the North Carolinian piloting FlyInn’s other Cessna 172 (ZK-TRS) with his wife, Lissa, and FlyInn instructor Nick Taylor, confirmed that he was equally wiped out. And then McCaughan informed us that thanks to the weather window holding, we would be moving up our exploration of Mount Cook and the Southern Alps to the next day, never mind the wind forecast. This was akin to starting with the caviar and moving straight on to the crème brûlée—or perhaps more like competing in back-to-back Ironman triathlons.

The day began with calm winds, fair skies, and a short field approach into a 1,500-foot crop-duster’s strip in a cow pasture (very recently used, as I discovered soon after landing). From there we jaunted across to Lake Hawea and up the scenic Hunter River valley. The farther north we went, though, the windier and more turbulent it got.

At McCaughan’s urging, I moved farther and farther toward the downwind side of the valley until my right wing seemed to almost scrape the rocky slope— and then we were in a steady, powerful lift, riding the elevator upward at 1,500 feet per minute in relatively smooth air. My experience flying gliders came in handy, especially the bit of ridge soaring I’ve done. I became increasingly good at visualizing areas of lift and smooth air throughout our windy week and started to really enjoy surfing the ridges. Dawn, for her part, gamely endured the occasional solid thumping in the back seat, the price of admission for a whole week of world-class scenery.

• READ MORE: Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation

Now climbing through 10,000 feet, the immense, icy form of the Mount Cook massif rose ahead. This was familiar territory, as we had camped and hiked in Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park the previous week. Mount Sefton, which had towered above our campsite in the moonlight and blazed in the morning alpenglow, slipped inconspicuously under our right wing. The Tasman, Hooker, Fox, and Franz Josef glaciers, whose gravel-strewn terminuses we had glimpsed from below, revealed themselves for the colossal blue giants they are, emerging from one enormous ice sheet draped around the shoulder of 12,218-foot Mount Cook. Climbers’ huts clinging to desolate rock ledges gave perspective to the landscape’s epic scale.

As Dawn and I gazed around, McCaughan sent a constant stream of radio position reports since flightseeing is popular here, and Mount Cook lies within a mandatory broadcast zone. There’s a standard circuit around the sights, but we were deviating to stay out of strong rotors downwind of the peaks. In any case, there weren’t too many sightseers braving the maelstrom, the conditions of which reminded me a bit of the long-ago winter I spent flying freight up California’s Owens Valley. The Southern Alps are a lot lower than the Sierra Nevada, though, and the winds aloft weren’t nearly as fearsome as during a West Coast frontal passage.

• READ MORE: On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word

After landing for lunch at Glentanner, we headed west to Lake Ohau and started up the fertile, ranch-dotted Hopkins Valley. As we approached Mount Glenmary the wind started really kicking again. Turning up a side tributary, we surfed up the leeward slope to clear a low saddle under Mount Huxley then ducked into the calmer Ahuriri River drainage. Working our way south, beyond Lindis Pass we descended into a gorgeous, golden valley with green fields, farm buildings, and an airstrip at the bottom.

This is Geordie Hill Station, the 5,500- acre ranch where five generations of McCaughans have raised Merino sheep and beef cattle and where Matt and his wife, Jo, started FlyInn. Originally, guests stayed at the ranch. Now accommodations are in the lake resort town of Wanaka, a 10-minute flight west. Dawn and I came to really enjoy Wanaka, but I think we would have been equally happy staying in the beautiful, peaceful surroundings of Geordie Hill Station.

The next day, Matt McCaughan’s ranching duties took precedence, and we were paired with affable, experienced instructor Peter Hendriks for an overnight trip to the southeastern coastal city of Dunedin. The wind was still kicking, but at least lower terrain made for a less intense workout. From the central Otago crossroads of Cromwell we crossed into the Nevis River valley and followed it down to the verdant Southland Plains. We stopped at Mandeville’s pleasant little grass strip for lunch, checked out the Croydon Aviation Heritage Centre’s beautiful collection of vintage de Havilland aircraft, and made a quick flight with just Hendriks and I to complete the training requirements for my New Zealand PPL validation.

• WATCH: V1 Rotate: New Zealand by Air

Job done, Dawn clambered back into ZK-WAX and we headed south to the Catlins, a beautiful stretch of remote, craggy coastline straight out of western Ireland. We followed the wild coast northeastward, put in a good word with the controllers at Dunedin International Airport (NZDN), and landed at nontowered Taieri Airfield (NZTI). FlyInn put us up in a very nice hotel in central Dunedin, an atmospheric college town with a strong Scottish accent. Dawn and I had a good afternoon walkabout, then joined Hendriks, the Broomes, and Taylor for a lovely seafood dinner at an excellent restaurant tucked away by the seaport.

The next morning, we took a two-hour harbor cruise with local wildlife expert Rachel McGregor, spotting blue penguins, sea lions, and magnificent northern royal albatrosses at Taiaroa Head. A few hours later, we viewed the harbor from the air before heading up the coast to Oamaru and then inland via the Waitaki River and its series of impressive hydroelectric dams.

The weather window finally collapsed with a strong cold front bringing more wind, rain, and clouds than even a Kiwi pilot might care to tackle, giving us a Saturday off to poke around Otago wine country by car. Sunday dawned clear but windy, which we planned to mitigate by transiting Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu en route to Glenorchy. Queenstown Tower thought otherwise, given the steady stream of jets arriving down the Kawarau Gorge, so we were ordered to remain clear of controlled airspace. Alas, we bounced our way west across the mountains north of Queenstown, emerging from Monument Saddle to spiral down over the gravel-strewn Dart River on the way to landing on yet another beautiful grass runway.

After a ride into Glenorchy and a pub lunch, we headed back up the Dart River, this time via jet boat. It was a fun and beautiful journey, as the shallow draft and rapid speed took us 20 miles upriver into some rather gorgeous wilderness. It was well into the afternoon when we departed for the quick flight back to Wanaka, except there was so much interesting scenery that we dawdled and wandered, our track resembling a Family Circus cartoon. In particular, the spectacular Rob Roy Glacier near Mount Aspiring offered a perfect semicircular amphitheater to hang the flaps out and make a slow pass close inside the perimeter. ZK-TRS beat ZK-WAX back to the stable rather handily, and neither we nor Hendriks minded one bit.

Our last full day of flying circuited rural Otego, and I expected a fairly tame day out. McCaughan was back, his business with the spring lambs concluded, but he accompanied the Broomes while we nabbed Taylor, a very cheerful chap and laid-back instructor. After dropping in to visit the historic gold rush town of Clyde, we followed the popular Otago Central Rail Trail northeast to the Ida Valley and a little township called Oturehua. Now, Oturehua doesn’t have an airport, but there is a fairly level sheep paddock alongside the highway that Taylor assured me was fairly landable.

So much for a tame day out.

It seems the sheep had been absent for a few weeks as the grass was quite a bit taller than expected, but ZK-WAX handled lawn mower duties with aplomb. We visited 19th century farm-implement factory Hayes Engineering Works, with its fascinating water-powered, leather-belt-driven machine shop. Everything still works. The old-timer docent gamely powered up the shop and demonstrated use of the original lathe, press punch, shears, band saw, and more. After our visit, we enjoyed a beautiful flight surfing the ridges to Geordie Hill Station, where McCaughan gave us a longer tour, and Jo McCaughan cooked a fantastic lamb dinner. It was a really nice way to cap off our FlyInn experience.

We ended up moving our departure back by one day to do some more hiking near Wanaka and up around Rob Roy Glacier. The following morning we flew ZK-TRS to Queenstown to catch our airline flight home. True to form, New Zealand gave us a windier-and-cloudier-than forecast sendoff, with a slightly dicey ridge crossing and a good couple final thumps of turbulence.

I now hold a NZ PPL validation, which gives me solo privileges in New Zealand through June, should we care to return. We’re sorely tempted. My wife Dawn and I fell in love with the people, landscapes, and aviation scene in New Zealand, and I learned a great deal about mountain flying and NZ operations during our time with FlyInn.

If you have the time and money for a flying tour of New Zealand, I would highly recommend it. It’s a grand adventure, and a true bucket list experience.

This column first appeared in the April 2024/Issue 947 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Part 2: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Well, that obviously didn’t happen. The pandemic blew up everyone’s plans, and given the obvious jeopardy to my livelihood, the loss of our adventure barely registered. And then, as the world began to open back up, New Zealand stayed locked down longer than most. It wasn’t until Oshkosh 2022, when Dawn and I ran into Matt and Jo McCaughan at the FlyInn booth, that we dusted off our travel plans.

The McCaughans are friendly Kiwi sheep and cattle ranchers hailing from central Otago on the South Island, where they also run FlyInn, billed as “the authentic NZ self fly vacation.” They are also avid cruising sailors, which quickly became our main topic of conversation. Almost as an afterthought, we told them that while we’d be busy building our hangar/apartment for the 2022-23 season, we’d come fly with them in December 2023. Our revived New Zealand adventure would be our 20th wedding anniversary gift to each other.

We flew my airline from Seattle to Auckland on November 15, staying in New Zealand’s largest city for several days. On the 19th, our good friends Brad and Amber Phillips flew in, whereupon we rented a pair of campervans and headed south. The next two weeks would have been a pretty great vacation on their own. We spent six more days on the North Island, visiting the usual “must-dos” like Rotorua, Tongariro National Park, and Wellington as well as many more out-of-the-way locales.

Crossing the Cook Strait on a typically raucous ferry ride following a 40-knot blow, we spent another eight days road tripping through the South Island. We sampled excellent wine in Marlborough, tramped the fantastic coastal trail in Abel Tasman National Park, got rained on all down the wild West Coast, and set up camp in truly epic surroundings at Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park. All throughout, both the landscapes and climate frequently reminded us of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Montana.

• READ MORE: Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation

The roads were scenic and engaging, the locals exceptionally friendly and helpful, the cities few and far in between. This is a country slightly larger than the U.K. but with only 5 million people…and 75 million sheep.

In Christchurch we returned the campers and said goodbye to the Phillips, as their busy life back home precluded them from joining the flying tour—more’s the pity. Dawn and I took an Air New Zealand ATR-72 from Christchurch to Queenstown, New Zealand’s renown adventure tourism hot spot, which is where the FlyInn tour began the next day.

Soon after we landed, Jo McCaughan emailed to say that they were rejiggering the itinerary to go to Milford Sound and Fiordland on day one, thanks to a brief weather window. This made sense. All throughout our travels, the weather had been exceptionally variable, with low ceilings and pouring rain as well as bright sunshine being encountered more days than not. It was clear that flying in New Zealand requires a fair amount of flexibility. Still, from what little I knew of Milford Sound, I got the impression that I was being thrown right into the deep end, sink or swim.

At the airport the next morning, we were joined by Matt McCaughan, longtime FlyInn instructor Nick Taylor, and North Carolinian couple Adam and Lissa Broome, our counterparts for the next eight days. McCaughan and Taylor introduced us to our rides for the week, two 180 hp Cessna 172s, registrations ZK-TRS and ZK-WAX.

For safety purposes FlyInn tends to keep the airplanes together, so we got to know the Broomes over the course of the tour. Notably, Adam circumnavigated the globe with his Beech Bonanza in 2016, making for some very interesting stories.

Dawn and I drew the eye-catching, yellow-and-blue ZK-WAX for the week and started with Matt as instructor. We began with a short hop up to Wanaka, FlyInn’s base of operations, for a coffee and chat. Sufficiently briefed, we departed to the northwest over the serrated, deep-blue ribbon of Lake Wanaka and climbed to circle striking, glacier-draped Mount Aspiring, “The Matterhorn of the South.”

• READ MORE: On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word

Beyond its peak, the weather turned significantly cloudier than forecast—no big surprise there. We flew over the top for a bit, found a good hole, dropped into a wide, verdant valley, and followed the glacial, gravel-strewn Pyke River to the appropriately named Big Bay. After making a good inspection pass and landing on the broad, dark-sand beach, we went for a tramp a short way inland, where there’s a hiker’s hut and seasonal fish camp. This is a good week’s hardy walk from the nearest road, and all resupply is done via beach landing.

We soon departed over the crashing surf and turned out to sea, making our way south around a series of cloud-choked headlands. Matt duly noted St. Anne’s Point straight ahead, and then Dale Point to our left, our cue to turn into the rain-soaked entrance to world-famous Milford Sound. It looked VFR—only just. Matt noted there would likely be sunshine (albeit with a lot of wind) at the head of the fjord. I proceeded in, keeping my right wing hard against the northern wall of the gorge at Matt’s urging—the better to turn around if his promised good weather didn’t materialize. But it did, along with rainbows and a couple dozen waterfalls and steaming tourist cruise boats. It was a truly magnificent sight.

And then came the wind, streaking the head of the fjord with long ribbons of spume and giving our little 172 a good bashing. Unperturbed, Matt kept up his litany of mandatory radio position reports. I was glad he was there since it was challenging enough just flying. I turned up the Cleddau River valley and began my letdown, reversing course at a wide fork in the river to make a modified dogleg final to Runway 29 at Milford Sound Airport (NZMF).

The sea breeze was gusting at 30 knots. My landing was not pretty. It was safe and acceptable, that’s all. A short taxi later, we shut down in the shadow of a dozen tour operators’ Grand Caravans, Airvans, and Kodiaks. With the steep rock walls and silvery cascades of Milford Sound as a majestic background, it would’ve made the world’s best “Learn to Fly!” poster.

As we ate lunch, I reflected on a few things. First, Kiwi pilots appear to be pretty comfortable in marginal VFR (IFR not being very common here). Strong local knowledge of weather and terrain helps mitigate the risk, as does observing a few rules of thumb that closely mirror those that my old-school first CFI taught me as “the right way to scud-run.”

Second, there’s a lot of trust in the engine—though, admittedly, a lot of the valley floors are probably survivable in case of forced landing, with fairly stunted bush and plentiful gravel bars on the rivers.

Thirdly, the high density of world-class scenery coupled with a highly developed tourist industry make much of the New Zealand backcountry far more air-trafficked than comparable sites in the U.S., with accordingly more rigid procedures despite a relative lack of ATC facilities.

This would be a tough place for the uninitiated to go it alone—thus the appeal of an operation like FlyInn.

Departing into the maelstrom once more, we climbed over Milford Sound and ducked into the relative calm of the Arthur River valley. This impossibly scenic, waterfall-laced, glacier-carved hanging valley, traversed by the famed Milford Track, perfectly frames the 2,000-foot cascade at its head, Sutherland Falls, once thought to be the world’s tallest. It pours from what appeared to be a neat rock-walled thimble of a tarn, Lake Quill.

“Want to fly around it?” asked Matt with a wry grin. He knew I’d think this was a crazy idea, and at first glance I did. “There’s more room than it looks,” Matt said. “Just put out 20 degrees of flaps and slow to 65 knots.”

So I did, and it was absolutely spectacular, one of the neatest things I’ve done in an airplane. Once we completed our circuit, we dove out of the thimble and ZK-TRS buzzed in, and as I watched them my perspective suddenly shifted, revealing the epic scale of the landscape we were exploring. The effect was magical.

I’ve described the memorable first two hours of a weeklong tour in New Zealand, and I think everything we saw could fill a year’s worth of columns. I’ll content myself with two, cramming the balance into next month’s contribution. In the meantime, by the time you read this, my special V1 Rotate video episode, “New Zealand By Air,” should be live on FLYING’s website.

We recorded some 500 gigabytes of footage, much of it spectacular, and editing it down to 15 minutes proved to be a real challenge. There are worse problems to have.

This column first appeared in the March 2024/Issue 946 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Most certainly you still remember it—particularly for the salacious detail that said pilot had partaken in psychedelic mushrooms 40-some hours before his ill-timed psychotic episode. Already, “Had any ’shrooms lately, cap’n?” has supplanted the long-standing “Been drinking lately, cap’n?” as a moronic joke of choice among our more comedically impaired passengers. For much of our empathy-deficient, terminally online general public, a sad case of crumbling mental health that destroyed a family man’s life is little more than darkly humorous grist for the dank meme mills.

To those of us who make our living as professional pilots, though, and to others in this industry for which safety is religion but discussions of mental health have remained frustratingly taboo, this felt like something much more serious, another foreshock to an earthquake that’s been decades in the making.

This event hit particularly close to home for me because the pilot in question and I crossed paths when we both flew for Horizon Air. The name didn’t ring a bell until Horizon friends sent me photos from back in the day: “Oh, that Joe!” Furthermore, I flew several times with the quick-acting captain who subdued the renegade jumpseater, and after leaving Horizon I ran into him on a layover. It’s a very small industry.

It’s rare that intentional pilot actions cause accidents or serious incidents like this one—but not unknown. The most infamous is 2015’s GermanWings 9525, which was an open-and-shut case of pilot murder-suicide. Most are not so clear. EgyptAir 990 and SilkAir 185 were ruled suicides by the National Transporation Safety Board (NTSB) but are still disputed by Egyptian and Indonesian authorities, respectively. It’s the leading theory for the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia 370 but is unlikely to be proven absent recovery of the wreckage and black boxes. The final report on 2022’s China Eastern 5735 crash has yet to be issued, but media sources report that investigators believe it resulted from intentional action by one of the pilots.

• READ MORE: On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word

At a time when every other facet of airline flying has become astonishingly safe, these events have started to stick out. Just as Air France 447, Colgan 3407, and other loss-of-control accidents prompted aviation regulators to ask, “Are airline pilots forgetting how to fly?” now mental health events—including many that go unpublicized because they involve pilots on layover or at home—are prompting industry leaders to ask, “Are airline pilots mentally well enough to fly?” To which the more cynical among us respond smartly: “Sure we are— just ask us!”

Because that’s essentially the system that is in place. Every six or 12 months, we fill out FAA Form 8500-8 (Application for Airman Medical Certificate) and state whether we have ever in our lives been diagnosed with, had, or presently have any one of 23 potentially disqualifying conditions, notably including “mental disorders of any sort; depression, anxiety, etc.” It is well known that checking yes to this box will shunt your application into an opaque, byzantine process involving significant time and expense for evaluations and interminable delay by the FAA’s understaffed Aerospace Medical Certification Division (AAM-300), and that after a year or two in limbo, you may be brusquely informed that you are not fit to fly for pleasure or profit.

Additionally, you are required to list all visits to health professionals in the last three years, and listing anyone even nominally connected with the health of your noggin is most certain to invite additional questions.

If your healthcare was provided by the Department of Defense or Veterans Affairs, there’s no hiding anything. The FAA has access to your records. The rest of us are on the honor system. Most of us are truthful, particularly for physical defects (Crohn’s disease, in my case, for which there is a fairly easy, well-known special issuance process). The system, however, definitely incentivizes concealing mental issues. I have personally encountered three major airline pilots who openly told me they have diagnoses of anxiety or depression that they’ve kept hidden from the FAA and the airline. I’m sure I’ve flown with others who keep their cards closer to their chests.

But they are the exceptions. Most of us don’t hide mental conditions from the FAA because most of us have nothing to hide—and we make damned sure it stays that way by never getting within speaking distance of anyone qualified to make any sort of troublesome diagnosis. Mind you, pilots already tend to be the sort of folks who deny the possibility of any human weakness in their mettle, who tough it out and rub some dirt on it and grit their teeth while shoving the pain deep, deep down. When it comes to mental or emotional health, this innate reluctance to seek help is greatly reinforced by the professional consequences of doing so.

• READ MORE: Allure of International Flying Lies Across the Glittering Sea

And so, for the vast majority of working pilots, mental healthcare simply does not exist. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have invested in wellness resources for their employees, and my airline has been at the forefront. A while back, I flew with a new first officer who was feeling stressed over her personal finances and, seeing a blurb on our internal website for wellness coaching, thought, “Why not? It’d be nice to talk to someone about this.” That lasted for about two minutes before she was informed that, because of aeromedical-legal issues, the program was not available to pilots. Instead, we commiserate over layover beers—the only acceptable form of therapy available to us.

I’ve previously written about my experience moving off of Windbird and across the country to Seattle, sleeping in my own bed for three nights in a busy, 60-day period, and how I was in a rather dark place mentally. This raised some eyebrows, and I received several emails expressing concern—not over my mental health but regarding my honesty about it in print. The reality is that I was not suffering from depression, and I never have. But there have been periods in my life where financial, career, or life stress clouded my usual optimistic disposition, and friends and family noticed. The fact that it is considered taboo for a professional pilot to admit even this is disheartening.

We are apparently expected to be superheroes, or to at least play the part. What of those whose internal struggles greatly eclipse my own? Most suffer in silence, and every year we lose a few of these, the company email announcing their untimely passing with no reference to cause of death. A brave few seek professional help, either on the sly or at great risk to their career.

And then there are those who take the DIY approach. There is a significant body of recent clinical research to suggest that Psilocybin is effective in many individuals for treating anxiety and affective disorders. It’s now legal in several states and tolerated in others. Why wouldn’t a depressed person who has denied themselves professional treatment give magic mushrooms a try?

Alas, amateur dosing in a less-than-clinical setting will yield uneven results, and there may be unexpected side effects, notably including insomnia. I’m sure most of us believe we’d never attempt to gain access to an airline cockpit after several days without sleep—but few of us really know what we’d do in that state.

Industry leaders know there’s a problem. The FAA knows there’s a problem, having recently established a Mental Health and Aviation Medical Clearances Rulemaking Committee, which will be advisory but is expected to recommend major changes. There have been some small tweaks already, such as expedited approval of those with a childhood diagnosis of ADHD but no recent history.

But our industry and regulators have a great deal of institutional momentum and a fair amount of outdated thinking about mental health to overcome. It is my sincere hope that the recent Horizon Air incident provides the impetus and political cover required for our leaders to make the sea change that our system so very badly needs.

This column first appeared in the January-February 2024/Issue 945 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I’ve subscribed to this venerable periodical since my early teens and read it in the local library for a few years before that. I’d peruse the news and gawp at the air-to-air photos and soak up every word of the articles, but first I’d head straight to the columns, for it was there that my love of aviation and appreciation of good writing were most equally rewarded. My two favorites were Len Morgan’s “Vectors” and Gordon Baxter’s “Bax Seat.” Morgan was everything I wanted to be, with the fortune of having been born in a more interesting age. There was such grace and poignancy to his writing, infused with the wisdom of a long life well lived, and a little sadness as well, for his more interesting age was one in which an aviator regularly lost compatriots he called friends.

But my favorite personality in the old FLYING was Gordon Baxter. “Bax” wasn’t so much a pilot as he was a character, and he was very upfront about that. His columns were full of his foibles and inadequacies as an aviator, as well as various hijinks that made me wonder how he ever evaded the steely gaze of the FAA and various designated examiners. (Martha Lunken is his spiritual—and literal—successor. Somewhere Bax is looking down—or up—and thanking the controlling deity that he predated webcams.)

By the time I started reading him, Bax had grounded himself because of recurring seizures and only occasionally took flight with other pilots. But, in his own exaggeratedly down-home Texas fashion, Bax was able to convey, in a way few others could, everything that people like you and I find wonderful, magical, and captivating about flight, airplanes, and aviators.

• READ MORE: Allure of International Flying Lies Across the Glittering Sea

I think the other reason I liked Bax was that he so clearly had the gift of gab, something I decidedly lacked at that self-conscious age. Long before he wrote for FLYING (and Car and Driver), and even before he started writing for local newspapers, Bax was a well-known radio personality in Southeast Texas, famous since 1945 for his madcap style and on-air antics. He frequently moved stations, being fired each time “for the same reason they hired me. I’m Gordon Baxter, and there’s no cure for that.” Later he spent a fair amount of time on the speaking circuit, and he wrote about that too. He drove around the South to spin a couple hours of folksy humor to perfect strangers eating rubber chicken—they loving him, and he loving them right back. As a bookish, introverted teenager with a slight speech impediment, that sort of easy volubility awed me, and I was a bit jealous of it. Still am.

I’ve loved words from an early age, but for me they were things to be considered and weighed, massaged and delivered to the world in my own good time. By my teens I knew my strengths and weaknesses fairly well, and I counted writing among the former and speaking as one of the latter. Like most people, I’ve always tried to lead publicly with my strengths while privately working on my shortcomings. These included my lack of ability in practical matters (so I worked on my own vehicles, cruised aboard and maintained Windbird, and built our hangar-apartment) and my natural aversion to pain, discomfort, and risk (so I ski, motorcycle, dirt-bike, and

skydive). In my late teens, I made a conscious effort to come out of my shell and talk to people even when it was uncomfortable, and as I’ve aged, I’ve become increasingly extroverted and comfortable in my own skin. Dawn scoffs when I describe myself as an introvert, noting with some exasperation that “you’ll talk till the cows come home!” She’s not wrong. It helps that I’ve accumulated a pretty good cache of funny and/or interesting stories (some of them even true!) as I’ve traveled the world and embarked on various adventures. I love hearing a good story, and I enjoy telling one.

That said, I haven’t gone out of my way to seek out public speaking opportunities. The only one I’ve accepted until now, at the abortive ModAero aviation/music festival, ended up being somewhat disastrous, insomuch as I poured myself into preparation for a presentation that ended up being attended by all of four people (Taking Wing, June 2016). More recently, my videos for FLYING’s V1 Rotate web series have forced me, for the first time, to really hone my delivery. Seeing yourself in high-definition video is the most brutally honest form of feedback you’ll ever get. Making the videos has improved my pacing and rhythm of my intonations, cleaned up my enunciation, made me more conscious of my posture and facial expressions, and prompted me to become more liberal with gestures. It has actually changed my speaking to more closely mirror my writing. Fortunately, I’m usually filming myself and have the luxury of virtually unlimited takes—because a lot of takes have sometimes been required to get it right!

• READ MORE: Just Another Day in Airplane Heaven

So when Larry Buerk from EAA Chapter 818 emailed me with an invitation to speak at its meeting, I decided the time was right to take the leap. As a longtime EAA member (and a product of the Young Eagles program), these are folks I’m comfortable around. It’s about as low stress of an environment as I could wish for my debut. Indeed, once we land at Skagit, head inside the terminal, and start meeting folks, the nerves mostly subside. After an hour of chapter business and another guest, it’s my turn to speak. I cue up the accompanying photo presentation and begin my lecture on “Creating an Aviation Homestead in the Pacific Northwest.”

Buerk films the entire thing for the chapter’s YouTube channel, where you can find it if you’re so inclined. I’m pretty stiff at the beginning, hands drawn toward the lectern and eyes toward my laptop screen. As the presentation proceeds, though, my body language opens up considerably. I do a better job of maintaining eye contact and using gestures. The audience of 25 or 30 is agreeably engaged, laughing at my jokes and periodically interjecting pertinent remarks and questions. The interruptions to rehearsed flow actually help me loosen up. I speak extemporaneously at some length in response to questions. The members give me a nice round of applause afterward and stick around to chat and give Piper a scratch behind the ears. It’s a really nice experience.

Does my humble little presentation for a local EAA chapter mark the launch of a second (ahem, third or fourth) career touring the rubber-chicken speaking circuit, like our ole pal Bax? Probably not! That said, having faced a lifelong bugaboo and coming away without embarrassing myself and even enjoying the experience, I do think I’d like to stretch myself with a few more speaking gigs and see if I can’t get better with a bit more practice. If you’re desperate and need a freebie speaker to fill time at your EAA chapter, flying club, or airport association meeting, well, I’m a sucker for all those types of events and can probably be talked into all sorts of foolishness. Drop me a line and lure me in. I’m particularly susceptible to hints about rides in cool, old airplanes.

This column first appeared in the December 2023/Issue 944 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

As we settled into the Boeing 737’s cozy cockpit and started to build our nests, I recounted some of the more maddening episodes of my last four-day tour and told John that after this trip my wife and I were headed to Italy for 11 days of sightseeing, hanging out on Lake Como, and attending the Formula 1 race at Monza. John, for his part, revealed that this pairing would be his very last outing in the senescent, unloved 737 as henceforth, he was departing for the sunlit uplands of the Airbus A330.

John’s pronouncement induced a flood of conflicting emotions. On one hand, I hate to lose good first officers who I actually know, and John is not the only cockpit companion who has recently succumbed to the glittering charms of an international widebody fleet. But on the other hand, he’s been at the airline for six years, and in these heady days of explosive advancement, that’s considered quite a long time indeed to hang out in the right seat of a narrowbody aircraft. John’s promotion to the A330 will yield him a considerable leap in both pay and quality of life, not to mention a welcome change of scenery. I’m glad for him, and a little jealous too. I was a Boeing 757/767 FO for four years, and the fleet took me to five continents. I miss that flying. I’d like to do it again.

To pilots who haven’t done both, the differences between domestic and international airline flying must seem a bit frivolous, perhaps even ego driven: There is the prestige and romance of jetting across oceans versus the workaday squalor of flogging aging “little” airplanes up and down interstate corridors three or four times a day. To be sure, there is absolutely an element of that. Rolling down the runway in a 370,000-pound airplane, lifting off with ponderous ceremony, and embarking on a transoceanic journey of some 4,000 miles always gave me a really warm, stirring sense of contented excitement, a feeling of setting off on a grand adventure. Few domestic routes impart such a poignant sense of wonder. And to be sure, friends and strangers are always more interested to hear about your exploits in Barcelona than a 12-hour layover in Cleveland.

Aesthetics aside, though, there are real distinctions in the working environment between domestic and international fleets. “It’s like a whole different airline,” goes the common refrain. Things are far more relaxed, much more “gentlemanly” to use an archaic but apropos term. We have only one leg per duty period on which to concentrate our energies. There are three pilots to share the load (four on flights of more than 12 hours). We show up at the airport 90 minutes or more before departure and have all the time in the world to go through our preflight duties. Dispatch usually completes the release well ahead of schedule and is quite proactive in heading off potential problems. Likewise, there are multiple gate agents plus a supervisor to ably handle most passenger issues in conjunction with the purser. In domestic flying, it often seems that the captain is the default troubleshooter. With international operations, very few problems make it forward of the cockpit door.

With an augmented crew of three pilots, you spend one-third of the cruise time absent from the flight deck, resting on your designated break. Long flights are rather shortened by being broken up into thirds as pilots cycle in and out. I found that most international flights of eight or 10 hours practically flew by, in comparison to five-hour domestic transcontinental flights that seem to drag on forever. It helps that you change out cockpit companions every three hours or so, keeping conversation fresh. Even if you can’t stand the person—and I’ve found maybe two or three of these in 19 years of airline flying—you only need to stew in silence for a few hours before being relieved.

Relief pilot is not a predesignated position at my airline. Theoretically, the captain assigns duties at the beginning of the trip, but in practice they will usually fly the first leg and let the two first officers hash out the rest among themselves. The relief FO normally takes the first rest break and then relieves the pilot flying (second break) and pilot monitoring (third break) in turn. This made it an unpopular position on eastbound trans-Atlantic legs, where first break often coincides with a circadian high and an active meal service, making for difficult rest (most of our 767s lack a bunk room like the A330; we use a first-class seat with a curtain). As a lifelong flexible sleeper, I usually volunteered for relief duties on these flights, and, besides the gratitude of my fellow FOs, was often rewarded with a flying leg on the westbound return.

I took a lot of pride in being a good relief pilot, especially during high-workload periods at busy international airports, where a sharp relief crew can be worth its weight in gold. You see a ton from the jumpseat and can often help the flying pilots head off trouble before it ever begins. My crowning moment came during a takeoff from London-Heathrow (EGLL), when the captain’s oxygen mask started spontaneously free flowing, but the sound was masked by unusually loud packs. Just after rotation, I realized the source of the noise and, throwing off my harness and headset, flew across the cockpit to smack the errant mask into submission. We all glanced up at the crew oxygen gauge; it was barely above the minimum, saving us from a mandatory divert. The captain bought the layover beers that night.

You might suppose the primary draw of international flying to be the layovers, and in my case you wouldn’t be wide of the mark. I took full advantage of 24- to 48- hour Europe layovers and 36-hour South American interludes, cramming in as much adventure as was prudent. It’s instructive that I’ve written about many international layovers in these pages—flying a microlight in Germany and a classic Robin taildragger in France,

hang gliding in Rio, visiting a World War I aerodrome in Italy and a flying boat museum in Ireland—while spilling minimal ink over their domestic counterparts.

I also enjoyed the international crew dynamic. It’s not unusual for all three pilots and a majority of the flight attendants to at least meet for happy hour, if not for dinner or a night on the town. This is much rarer on the domestic side at my airline, though I’ve put good effort into rectifying that since upgrade, with better-than-average results.

• READ MORE: A Primer on Pilot Certificate Conversions

A lot of my compatriots, however, don’t necessarily care if they quaff Maibock in Munich or Miller in Milwaukee, and an equal number profess indifference to the cabin crew’s participation, or lack thereof, in layover fun. The real draw of international flying, for most, is that it’s supremely efficient. In John’s new category of Seattle A330, even junior pilots can easily cram a full month’s flying into only 12 days, leaving the rest free for family, hobbies, or second careers or businesses. The trips are also very commuter-friendly, with late report times and early releases. On international fleets, there’s very little the company can legally do to reschedule you to cover broken trips. One need not fear storms up and down the East Coast. At worst, you go home early with full pay.

All of which explains why the international fleets go insanely senior at my airline. John is just now able to hold A330 first officer status, but he could have held Seattle 737 captain more than two years ago. Likewise, I would be slightly more junior as an A330 FO than I am as a 737 captain. Despite that—and the prospect of a 20 percent pay cut—the idea of taking a downgrade looks attractive each time I see the A330’s monthly bid package.

Pretty much my entire career—and my life—has been divided up into roughly five-year chunks. Whenever I do anything for that long, I tend to become bored and knock over the house of cards to see what I can build next. I’ve been a 737 captain for three and a half years, and while I’m still reasonably engaged, I’ve started to eye my next move. The most optimistic projections show that I might be able to hold A330 captain in six years (be still my heart). I probably ought to go “learn French” on an Airbus product in the meantime, which in Seattle means A320 captain or A330 FO.

Which to choose? I won’t lie. I do enjoy flying with “my own favorite captain” every single week, and to be stripped of that fourth stripe does involve a certain subjugation of the ego. On the other hand, I’m writing this column at a table overlooking the Grand Canal in sunny, beautiful Venice, sipping an Aperol spritz and remembering a time not so long ago when this was my everyday work life. It’s tempting, very tempting, to go back to that. We’ll see, but John and I may yet fly together again somewhere across the glittering sea.

This column first appeared in the November 2023/Issue 943 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Allure of International Flying Lies Across the Glittering Sea appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It looked like airplane heaven.

Dawn and I had been living and cruising the Caribbean aboard our 42-foot sailboat, Windbird, for the previous three years. On long passages, we curled up in the cockpit at night, watching phosphorescence stream into the starlit combers sweeping under our stern and listening to the gurgle of water past the hull, and dreamed up our post-sailing life together. It would be centered around general aviation, we determined, but would also include terrestrial adventures like motorcycling, camping, and travel. It would involve a return to the Pacific Northwest, where we lived a decade previously and still missed. We’d get a quiet place in the country, with lots of room for our dog, Piper, to run and roam. We’d take an active role in forging our homestead, getting dirt under our nails and calluses on our hands while building upon some of the more practical skills we had gained in our years at sea.

This morning, almost exactly four years after I first laid eyes on our future home, I awoke to bright sunlight streaming through our bedroom window. It’s another beautiful summer day, with a light breeze just rustling the windsock past the handsome strand of cedars. I get up and put coffee on the stove then step out to the hangar. It’s a bit of a mess, with boxes and detritus from the move still scattered about, but I’m steadily building workbenches and custom shelving and getting things organized. I open the 44-foot hydraulic hangar door and sunshine flows over the Stinson, sitting rather incongruously gift wrapped in painter’s plastic. Last week, I noticed the finishing tape over the left wing spar was lifting and peeling back in two spots, requiring I take those areas down to bare fabric, iron the tape flat, reapply adhesive (Poly-Brush, as my airplane is covered with the Poly-Fiber system), and build the finish back up. Today, I’m spraying Poly-Spray, the silvery UV coating that likes to get everywhere (thus the gift-wrapped Stinson and tarps over everything nearby).

Just another day in airplane heaven.

Our 50-by-60-foot hangar is basically as I envisioned when I first saw the clearing it occupies, except it has an attached 15-by-60-foot, two-bedroom apartment that wasn’t in the original plan. The wooded building site up the hill is still undisturbed. We actually went so far as having an architect draft house plans based on a rustic design I’ve had in my head for years before COVID-19 and runaway construction costs made us choose what we wanted more: a house or hangar. But the apartment has turned out really well—better than I imagined, actually—and I think we’ll be happy to live here for some time. Both my life and career have tended to go in half-decade cycles, and I suspect that in five years or so I’ll start to get the construction itch again. For the moment, it is very well scratched.

The last time I wrote about our progress, in the April 2023/Issue 936 column, we still had bare studs in the apartment and a gaping hole in the front of our hangar. Over the following months, I assembled the hydraulic door with our contractor’s help, hired a drywall company to do Sheetrock and texturing, and painted the place myself. We ordered custom cabinets and quartz countertops, which contractors had installed along with the plank flooring. I installed the tub surround, toilet, and vanity, and did all the electrical and plumbing finish work, including installing the tankless propane hot water heater.

Outside, I trenched in the gas line conduit from the propane tank and drain hoses from the downspouts and catch basins to the county-mandated stormwater dispersion trenches, which were multiday projects in their own right. I used our immensely useful Kubota BX-23S tractor/backhoe (my first brand-new vehicle) to get everything filled and graded nicely, and our concrete contractor poured the apron, stoops, and side patio. I brought in three dump trucks of gravel to build up the driveway and four of topsoil for the yard. Seeding, covering, and watering the new lawn was a major project that is ongoing given the sunny, dry weather. We did all this, by the way, while I flew a full schedule at the airline and Dawn was busy baking and selling her popular dog treats at farmers’ markets around the area.

• READ MORE: Delays, Mistakes All Part of Building a Dream Hangar

For three weeks in June and July, we received a huge help in the form of Dawn’s parents, Tom and Marg Schmitz, visiting from South Dakota. Like my own father, Tom is a retired contractor, and Marg is quite handy as well. While I was installing appliances, working outside, finishing odd jobs, and attending to various county inspections, Tom and Marg hung all the interior doors and undertook the herculean job of painting, installing, and caulking trim. I wasn’t even planning on having much trim done before we moved in, but Tom and Marg just about finished it. And then, when I learned that the county required all 4,000 square feet of siding to be stained before final inspection, our friends Brad and Amber Phillips showed up from across the country to help us knock it out in two days.

We moved in at the start of July—initially just for the Fourth of July weekend, to get Piper away from the crazy fireworks in town. We loved being up here so much—and our productivity went up so much—that we stayed for good, occupancy permit be damned. We moved all the furniture from our previous apartment one week later. There was a delay waiting on backed-up state electrical inspectors, but on July 25 we finally had our last county inspection and passed with flying colors. Dawn and I celebrated with an outrageously good glass of Balvenie PortWood 21-year-old Scotch, which I had kept on the shelf unopened for the previous nine months as a little extra motivation. The celebratory Stinson flight is waiting on my fabric repair.

So ended phase one of the project that we dreamed up on those magical starlit passages aboard Windbird and put into motion when we bought an overgrown, brambly piece of airplane heaven. Phase two—next summer’s project—will involve improved landscaping, insulating the hangar, installing a boiler for in-floor heat, and incorporating a standby generator.

A little further down the road we’ll likely install solar panels and incorporate other off-grid improvements. And, yes, at some point we’ll probably want a bit more space to accommodate our far-flung friends from around the country and globe, and we’ll build our little three-bedroom cabin in the woods. When that happens, perhaps we’ll turn the hangar apartment into a fly-in bed-and-breakfast.

For now, we’re simply enjoying living on the strip, taking a breather from our labors, and embarking on some fun adventures while we plan our next moves.

This column first appeared in the October 2023/Issue 942 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Just Another Day in Airplane Heaven appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

But today I’m finally taking a day off. I’ve had an ultra-productive week, I’ll be flying for work tomorrow, and Dawn just headed to her parents’ place in South Dakota. It’s just me and my flying pooch, Piper, living the bachelor life. It’s time for a playdate to go explore those Cascade mountain strips I’ve been eyeing from high above on the CHINS5 and GLASR2 arrivals. This would ideally be done in the cool, still air of morning, but I got waylaid by another project, and it’s after noon by the time Piper and I finally depart and turn northeast. It’s not a terribly hot day, though, and we’re light, and the highest airstrip is at only 3,000 feet in elevation. The puffy cumulus over the Cascades aren’t looking too threatening—yet.

I skirt south of Paine Field (KPAE) and enter the mountains via the dramatic Skykomish River valley, with 6,000-foot peaks towering over both sides. Fifteen miles in, the town of Skykomish appears around a bend along with our first destination, Skykomish State Airport (S88): 2,000 feet of turf runway, 1,002 feet elevation, trees on both ends. The left pattern to Runway 24 makes for a tight downwind along the southern ridge and close by a granite outcropping before turning a blind base. Turning final, the runway appears again out of the trees, and I ease down a groove and land on the grass. With just Piper and I and partial fuel, I easily turn off at midfield without getting on the brakes.

Piper is a much less anxious flyer these days, but he’s still always glad to clamber out of the airplane and run his little heart out. The airport is deserted today, so I let him wander off leash while I take a look at the picnic tables and camping spots. The field is ideally set up for group camping by an EAA chapter or a gaggle of friends. The guest book reveals mostly old taildraggers like mine, the most recent some 10 days ago. There’s no reason you couldn’t take a Cessna 172 in here easily if you kept it light, but alas, many flight schools and FBOs in the area now prohibit landing at unpaved airports.

After a quick lunch, Piper and I load up again, start up, and take off on Runway 24. I fly a mile beyond town and then turn around in a wide part of the valley, climbing steeply to have plenty of altitude before approaching 4,056-foot Stevens Pass. I see the alpine lake to which Dawn and I snowshoed last winter and turn north to cross a 5,000-foot ridge into the Rainy Creek watershed. I follow it down to beautiful Lake Wenatchee and the Lake Wenatchee State Airport (27W), elevation 1,936 feet msl. As I approach, I can see the middle half of the 2,473-foot runway appears to be bare dirt and decide to do an inspection pass down Runway 9. I don’t see any big rocks, but on the next approach I touch down right at the threshold to get slow before the bare patch. Even at reduced speed, we bounce around a lot, and I can hear stones hitting the underside of the fuselage. Maybe I ought to have landed beyond the dirt—there was a good 1,000 feet of grass left. Soon after we arrive, a Cessna 182 buzzes the dusty strip and peels off into the left downwind. I film his landing, which is a dramatic plop right in the middle of the rocky zone. The hardy Skylane seems no worse for wear, and I’m soon talking to Bryce from Las Vegas. He’s flown all the way here for the Touratech Rally for adventure motorcyclists in nearby Plain, Washington. We talk dirt bikes for a bit before I eye the skies and decide it’s time to go. Those cumulus have built a good bit. They’re not ugly enough to chase us out of the mountains just yet, but Piper and I should get moving.

I purposely came into the mountains with partial gas, necessitating a fuel stop at Wenatchee’s Pangborn Memorial Airport (KEAT). From there, we climb out over Mission Ridge, dodging rain shafts. My Stratus ADS-B receiver shows some strong precipitation northeast of Mount Rainier and over the Goat Rocks Wilderness, but so far it’s staying clear of our next destination. Passing Cle Elum, Snoqualmie Pass looks very doable—that’s my backup option. As I work my way southwest, though, the weather holds. Crossing Bethel Ridge, I marvel at a fantastic ridgetop trail and file it away for a ride on my KTM dirt bike. From there, it’s a fast drop into the Tieton River valley, where Tieton State Airport (4S6, elevation 2,964 feet msl) is nestled on the shore of Rimrock Lake.

In late summer, Tieton State becomes a busy Forest Service firebase, but for now it’s quiet. The vertiginous dome of appropriately named Goose Egg Mountain lies just off the north end, making this a mostly one-way-in, one-way-out airport. The wind is nearly calm. I fly out over the lake, make a spiraling descent, and set up a dogleg approach to 2,509-foot Runway 2. There’s a decent bug-out option to the left down to about 150 feet, but below that you wouldn’t want to go around without a good bit of power. This time, speed and glide path are right on target, so I continue over the shoreline and make a wheel landing on the grass. Overall the strip is in great shape.

Tieton looks like a fantastic place to airplane camp. There’s plenty of shady parking alongside the strip, an indoor pit toilet, and nice views over the lake and mountains. It’s a short walk to the beach, where Piper frolics in the sand. For a minute, he’s a young pup on Windbird again. But now it’s 5 p.m., and those overdeveloped cumulus are getting a lot closer. I can see rain shafts cutting across the far side of the lake. Our playdate is almost over. The hourlong flight home will take us up and over White Pass, past Mount Rainier via the Skate Creek and Nisqually River drainages, and thence via Puyallup and the Tacoma Narrows. As a young pilot, this would have been a grand adventure, and now it’s all part of my backyard.

My 20th wedding anniversary is coming up, and while we’re celebrating with a monthlong trip to New Zealand later in the year, we didn’t have plans for the big day itself. When I asked Dawn what she’d like to do, she said airplane camping in the mountains. I think Tieton State Airport will be a great place to base ourselves for a few days of exploration. I’m a very lucky guy.

This column first appeared in the September 2023/Issue 941 of FLYING’s print edition.

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It was June 9, 1944, only three days after the greatest seaborne invasion in history, and Allied troops clung to a perilously slender strip of French coastline after failing to achieve the bulk of their D-Day objectives. Fighting for their lives against a tenacious and skilled enemy that was beginning to flow into Normandy, the Allied armies were depending on air superiority to slow the stream of German reinforcements. That night, as one of five RAF heavy bombing missions against French rail centers, 108 Lancasters were scheduled to attack the railyard at Étampes, south of Paris. Six aircraft would not return. If their crews didn’t have any particular sense of impending doom, if a milk run to northern France seemed preferable to interminable hellish hours over the heart of Germany, they nevertheless set out across the English Channel with eyes wide open. In five years of war, Bomber Command had absorbed staggering losses of airplanes and men, and Squadron No. 49 had few “old hands” left from the early days.

Seventy-nine years later, I happened upon the grave of Bell and four of his crew on a sunny spring afternoon. Set on the modern edge of an ancient Norman town, Bayeux War Cemetery isn’t as pastoral or as beautifully sited as the other Commonwealth, American, or even German cemeteries, but, shaded by blooming chestnut trees and neatly tended with a variety of plants and flowers, it very much has the atmosphere of an English public garden. White marble gravestones evenly spaced in neat rows contain regimental insignia, crosses, crescents, and Stars of David, as well as personal inscriptions from family members.

Amid the geometric perfection, there are several headstones that stick out for being immediately adjacent, with multiple names inscribed. These are all aircrew, and Lancaster ND533 has the greatest number buried together. Flying Officer Bryan E. Bell is joined in death by air gunner F/O Hilary D. Clark, 28; wireless operator/gunner Sgt. John Holden, 21; navigator F/O Duncan MacFadyen, 28, of the Royal Australian Air Force; and air gunner Sergeant Joseph J. Reed, 23. I wondered what happened to the two others and snapped a photo for research.

I had to come to Normandy to tour the landing beaches and battlefields with my father, three brothers, and history aficionado Uncle Mickey. We had enough time to explore many of the sites of lesser-known actions, such as La Fière Bridge, Le Mesnil-Patry, Villers-Bocage, and Hill 112. A lot of the focus on “Operation Overlord” is centered on the landing beaches—bloody Omaha above all—but even there fewer than 1,000 men lost their lives against some 40,000 Americans, British, and Canadians in the furious 10-week Battle of Normandy that followed. When you visit the area, much of it surprisingly little changed since 1944, you understand why. It is a close terrain of hills, vales, and dense hedgerows that strongly favors defense. The Germans made the most of it, fighting skillfully and bravely—fanatically in the case of the Waffen-SS—despite being greatly outnumbered and underestimated by the Allies as “boys and old men.”

The Germans were also aided by technically superior equipment, particularly the Panther and Tiger tanks that took a fearsome toll on the Allies’ relatively light Shermans, Cromwells, and Churchills. This advantage was greatly blunted by the combination of Allied air superiority and Adolf Hitler’s military ineptitude and insistence on total control. The Allies had successfully duped Hitler into thinking Normandy was a feint—that the main invasion would come across the Pas-de-Calais—and he refused to release many of the Panzer divisions that would have posed a major threat to the operation. When they were shifted southwest, slowly and piecemeal, the Allies’ destruction of the French rail network forced the German reinforcements onto the roads, where they were hounded endlessly by the P-47s and P-38s of the U.S. 9th Tactical Air Command and the Hawker Typhoons of the RAF’s 2nd Tactical Air Force. This strategy—the “Transportation Plan”—was what brought Lancaster ND533 to the rail yard at Étampes on the night of June 9 to 10.

This attack was a minor footnote in the annals of Bomber Command, which by this time was regularly mounting night attacks of 500 to 1,000 aircraft deep into Germany. The surviving records indicate the bomber stream formed and crossed into France over Dieppe at 11:15 p.m., and opposition on the inbound leg was light. The preceding de Havilland Mosquito path-finders successfully located and marked the target, and the bombing run commenced. The initial wave of bombers were on target, but then the bomb line started to wander, resulting in the destruction of some 400 civilian homes. Lancasters orbited while the “Master of Ceremonies” sorted things out, and German defenses were fully alerted by the time ND533 turned for home just after midnight. Awaiting in the darkness was the Ju-88R piloted by Hauptmann (Captain) Heinz-Horst Hißbach of Nachtjagdgeschwader 2 (2nd Night Fighter Wing). The night fighters and the flak of the Germans’ formidable FLAK-36 88 mm anti-aircraft cannon were the twin scourges of Bomber Command, and together with a third enemy, the weather, ensured a staggering 44 percent of RAF bomber crews from 1939-1945 lost their lives in the fight. Hißbach was a skilled pilot who would go on to command NJG 2 and amass 30 claimed kills before being killed himself in the final month of the war while strafing an Allied column. His fighter was equipped with a FuG-202 Lichtenstein UHF radar set, so it is likely that the crew of ND533 had no idea he was there until it was too late. At 12:38 a.m., Hißbach attacked the Lancaster with cannon fire, and it was shortly thereafter seen dropping out of the bomber stream in flames. Several villagers in the vicinity of Rosay-sur-Lieure were awake and observed the Lancaster crashing 2 kilometers north of town. They arrived the next morning, sifted through the wreckage, and collected six bodies for burial. Five of these were eventually exhumed and transferred to Bayeux War Cemetery; the sixth, flight engineer Sergeant Sidney C. Holmes, 28, is buried in nearby Marissel French National Cemetery.

The fate of the seventh crew member is interesting and quite sad. Bomb aimer F/O Philip D. Hemmens of Essex, 21, successfully bailed out of ND533 before it crashed. This was much rarer in Lancasters than other types because of the small size and placement of the escape hatch. Hemmens was sheltered by a local member of the French resistance, Huguette Verhague, along with four other airmen but was betrayed by a German collaborator and handed over to the Gestapo in Paris on August 9, only two weeks before liberation. With the collapse of the German front, 168 Allied airmen, including Hemmens, were shipped east to the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp on August 15 through 20. For two months they experienced a small sample of the horrors the Nazi regime was inflicting on Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, political prisoners, and other “undesirables.” Eventually, the airmen were transferred to a regular POW camp, but it came too late for Hemmens. He died on September 27 owing to medical neglect after seven days of rheumatic fever and sepsis stemming from injuries sustained during the bailout. His remains were never recovered.

• READ MORE: Downed WWII Lancaster Bomber Raised from Sea Floor

Having learned something about the crew of ND533, I decided to find the crash site and was able to do so the morning before I flew back to the States. It rests just inside a small wood surrounded by rolling farmland, a few kilometers west of the picturesque half-timbered village of Lyons-la-Forêt. A short path leads to a granite plaque with a French inscription erected in 2010 to replace the simple wooden cross the villagers had placed on the site in 1944. Two of the Merlin engines were also excavated—their craters are still visible. This is a peaceful, shaded place filled with birdsong. After a week spent visiting places where men fought, suffered, and died in the struggle to free Europe from the grip of fascism—and where even more died in the service of the Nazi regime—this is a place for quiet reflection.

We are nearing 80 years since the end of the cataclysm of World War II, and only a handful of those veterans are still with us. I fear the conflict—and its sources and lasting repercussions—is becoming increasingly abstract, something that happened long ago to grainy people in black-and-white films. As a pilot, pondering the fate of individuals like Bryan Bell and the young airmen of ND533 helps make the cost of WWII relatable. The war in Ukraine shows that propaganda, dictatorship, and aggressive militarism remain a threat even today. Many recent events demonstrate the renewed temptations of political extremism, intolerance, and demonization of “the other.” In such times, it is important to remember the high price paid by so many the last time such feverish currents ran rampant, and for each of us to vow to do whatever we can to prevent their reoccurrence.

This article first appeared in the August 2023/Issue 940 print edition of FLYING.

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