In January, I landed and parked the Mooney in my friend Kelly’s hangar. Hightailing it for home, I figured I’d be back in a week or two to fly again. Between a frustratingly wet spring and the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the poor gray bird gathered dust for almost three months before Kelly sent me two words in a text that triggered an itch I had managed to suppress. “Come fly,” he said.
After avoiding his hangar for a while, I welcomed the nudge.
It had been a month since I had touched the jet at work, and I was probably within days of losing landing currency in the Mooney. Having quarantined for two weeks because I shared the cabin with an infected passenger, then going straight into a shelter-in-place order, I had hardly bothered with shoes in weeks, much less a razor. I had quipped to Amy that but for a winning lottery ticket to swell the bank account, I was very nearly a modern Howard Hughes. A cool spell had settled across the southeast, and as I headed to the hangar, I looked more the part of a flying lumberjack than Hughes during his later years. I can’t go to work with a beard—dated regulations about oxygen masks and such need rewriting for that to work—and a flannel shirt in April seemed only to highlight just how off-the-rails our world had gone.
The pollen was caked on thick, and I had to clean the windshield before I even opened the hangar door. The bird droppings and green powder on the wings drew a quiet apology from me as I did my preflight inspection. Pulling a fuel sample from each tank, I drew a slow, deep breath with my nose just above the rim of the glass, savoring its sweet aroma. The wind whipped around the hangar, rattling the doors. With that wind out of the northwest at 12 knots with some hefty gusts, I had already decided that going somewhere was a better option than tearing up the pattern. The plane sitting for as long as she had, I expected the battery to give out as soon as I hit the starter. Instead, the Lycoming caught on the second blade, and her only stumbles the whole day were mag checks after I let the plugs foul a little. I let the main wheels roll a little longer than normal on the grass until I had a few extra knots before nudging the nose skyward and tucking the wheels into the wells.
It was bumpy as all get out, and the Positive Control wing leveler was working hard as I immediately set to digging up frequencies. Carrollton, the home ‘drome where I grew up, is no more than an eight-minute flight away. I could land there blindfolded, probably, but they changed the runway numbers and the Unicom frequency sometime last decade. I always check the chart to make sure I’ll be calling the right folks and using the correct runway numbers because looking bad at the home field just won’t do.
I rolled on a respectable enough landing, exited at midfield and taxied back for departure. After a quick runup, I looked at the chart and had an epiphany. I had flown from this strip of asphalt for 25 years, and there were public airports within a half-hour’s flight that I had never visited. Piedmont, Alabama, loomed just over the state line and seemed a likely suspect. I hit “direct-to” and took off with a mission. From the runup pad in Piedmont, I realized that Fort Payne was just a short hop to the northwest, and again a simple “direct-to” selected the next objective of my mission.
While I had not been to the Fort Payne airport, it did play something of a role in my formative years. One summer, at the nearby Camp Comer Scout Reservation, I earned my aviation merit badge from a few volunteers who shared flying stories and told of a Stinson they were restoring. I don’t know if I had started hanging around the airport yet or not at that age, but I was already hooked on this flying thing. What these guys did was help me to swallow the hook, line and sinker to ensure there was no escape. As I winged my way over Lake Weiss toward the airport, I wondered: Might there be a hangar standing open with a beautiful maroon Stinson sitting pretty and a couple of old-timers just itching for a reunion with one of their Scout Camp pupils?
I knew there was a ridgeline east of town but had never eyed it from above. With the wind out of the northwest, it gave a pretty decent push upward as I crossed it on descent to join the pattern, which, like all of the sky so far, I had all to myself. I eased back to near idle as I joined downwind, and the speed slowed enough to drop the gear as I started a turn to base and slowly milked two pumps of flaps in as I continued the turn to final.
Half flaps was plenty, since the wind had not gotten the memo that a crusty pilot and a dusty plane were in the area. The wheels didn’t so much kiss the asphalt; it was closer to a heavy makeout session. There were moments the tires came up for a quick bit of air as the gusts played us like a fish on the line. But with neither damage nor witnesses to my arrival, we taxied back. The parasol wing of a Baby Ace waved hello from an open-bay row of hangars, dancing in the breeze. The FBO looked deserted. Nothing was moving. There was no Stinson peeking from a hangar for the impromptu reunion. The odds for that were long, even if folks weren’t sheltered in place, counting their wealth in rolls of toilet paper and bags of flour. They could have all the TP casseroles in the world. I had an airplane, fuel in the tanks and an empty sky.
I gave up on the reunion, dialed the heading bug for home plate, and pushed the power up. Kicking up a rooster tail of pollen, I broke ground and flew a wide 270-degree turn, spiraling in the climb before aiming back to the ridgeline. I looked below and caught a glimpse of a river meandering along the floor of a small canyon. I followed it loosely, looking for a waterfall and swimming hole we used to frequent as kids. A couple of deep pockets of water and their accompanying cliffs had served as my first runways, those particular flying lessons cut short by a buddy blowing out his eardrums when he forgot to hold his nose for one landing. The setting of many youthful exploits fell behind, and I reached for a water bottle that caught my eye. The cap was still sealed, and the water was clear; I turned up one of the most expensive sips of water in the world. It only cost me 40 gallons of overpriced AvGas, overnight ramp fees and a security fee. The bottle was cold to the touch, fitting since it had been there since December at the very least.
Self-serve at Carrollton was the cheapest I’ve seen in a decade, and I waved to the line boy from across the ramp as I pumped. He was the only person I had seen moving on an airport since taking off a couple hours before. Some might argue that my little romp aloft violated the spirit of sheltering in place, and I’ll give them that. But as social distancing goes, crisscrossing rural Georgia and Alabama at 3,500 feet and 140 knots seemed just about the perfect way to do it.
