[hirundo]

> It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite.

Years ago I was doing pilot training in a Cessna 152. A coworker of mine was a retired Navy captain and instructor at the TOPGUN program, with hundreds of carrier landings in an F-14. He looked at me like I was crazy. He said those little planes were deathtraps and he'd never go up in one again.

Not long after that I had a lesson that coincided with some turbulence from the nearby coast. The plane janked around by seemingly hundreds of feet in every direction. I was scared (almost literally) shitless, and that was my last lesson. I haven't been in a small plane since.

[mdip]

I'm glad my Dad's not flying any longer. He was doing very long (multiple stops for re-fueling, flying on some form of breathing tank[0]) trips. He can go on for hours (and we let him) about stories of how he almost didn't make it home due to X or Y[1].

And he joked that every gauge/gadget on the dashboard that didn't come with the plane was there because "if I had it when X happened, X wouldn't have happened" (...or I wouldn't have left the ground knowing the condition existed, or it would have warned me with well enough time to get to safety before I have to be met by emergency vehicles on the tarmac).

Funny enough, he would get a little uncomfortable flying commercial. I'm not sure if he was putting on a show for us kids or if he was serious but he'd say he "didn't like someone else in charge of the plane". My Dad flew GA (alone) a few times a week most weeks, so he was unusually experienced for a small plane pilot.

[0] He had a breathing apparatus that allowed him to fly at higher altitudes in the unpressurized cabin, IIRC, but I'm not a pilot.

[1] Except, when he tells it, he was never in any danger. Doesn't matter if he's hanging an arm out the window trying to manually spin the prop, "it was always under control.". Uh huh.

[davidgould]

This sounds like my dad. He was a skillful pilot but enjoyed risk too much to be a “good” pilot. Died of lymphoma 30 years ago, so it never caught up with him. He flew a lot for a private pilot, over ten thousand hours,so had a few of those stories too.

I flew with him as a child enough to have experienced some of them myself. I remember:

- An inflight electrical fire, at night, over the Sierras.

- A very tense IFR final into Monterey, at night in fog, in a twin Comanche just ahead of a Learjet when the controller had a power outage and lost radio contact.

- A test flight in a STOL Maule Rocket that ended with stalling and bouncing in the rough just short of the 7600 hundred foot runway at Stead AFB. The gear collapsed during roll out and damaged the wing and prop, but there were no injuries. Sadly, Maule went out of business and the aircraft was never repaired.

[mdip]

  > He was a skillful pilot but enjoyed risk too much to be a "good" pilot.

To the extent that anyone who is willing to fly GA enjoys too much risk, that's my Dad. But I'd say he became a uniquely skilled small plane pilot[0]. For a solid 15 years he was flying multi-leg trips weekly (regardless of weather). I've joked, in the past, that I've never actually seen my father play a game on a computer -- the only thing he's ever done that resembles a game is "Flight Simulator" which he used to train (he was IFR and weather rated if I've got those terms right).

One thing that kept me comfortable being a passenger with my Dad had little to do with his externally exhibited confidence (which was absolute, and usually reassuring to others). It was the fact that I knew how deadly seriously he took what he was doing. I watched him pull out the clip-board and perform every step on the check-list. We've been stranded overnight and missed vacations entirely because my dad decided the trip would not be safe enough.

The strangely reassuring thing, though, was my Dad's opinion of stunt pilots/air shows[1]. They make him visibly, and vocally angry. My Dad isn't one to create controversy or even one to lecture much so I was surprised when we went to a hydroplane race and they had a biplane pilot doing stunts how completely pissed off he was about it. It was years ago and I don't recall his exact reasoning, and it might have even been something specific to the aircraft involved but his opinion was that the pilot was being reckless/irresponsible, that pilot skill, alone, cannot guarantee the safety of the pilot, aircraft or spectators because they're not designed to be used that way. In anger, I remember him nearly spitting something like "I have no respect for a pilot who puts peoples lives at risk for entertainment." I was a snotty teenager at that time so I probably rolled by eyes at him. I also know that he'd never do anything like that with his plane -- he gets seriously motion sick spinning around in a circle more than once or twice. ;)

I think the biggest fear we had with my Dad, though, was him falling asleep in the air. He worked long hours and my mom often had to poke him awake on long drives. I remember discovering his cure for this was a 1,000 ct container of Atomic Fire Balls (cinnamon hard candy that "tastes like burning").

[0] The "good" being in quotes, I assume, isn't implying that he's an unskilled pilot, just willing to accept risks that can only be reduced by pilot skill, which he had plenty of, but one cannot practice/become skilled in some situations without being put into them.

[1] I'm not referring to The Blue Angels/Airforce related shows; I don't know his opinion on that because we never went as a kid -- I suspect they might be similar but he has enormous admiration for military members so I wouldn't be surprised if he drew an exception. :)

[mistrial9]

thirty foot jump as a passenger in a 4-seater here at 10,000 feet in the mountains - I hear you! :D