from the right seat

This afternoon I’m going up for a short flight with my friend Mike to review the avionics and other systems in the Cirrus SR22 Perspective. It’s been a few months since I’ve flown a Cirrus and I’m looking forward to getting back into one. Hopefully the button pushing will come back to me easily.

6 p.m. update — Well, the flight was postponed (Mike had to do an unexpected charter flight) but I did manage to get some Perspective today, anyway. This morning I attended a public meeting of the NTSB. The topic was the safety of glass cockpit general aviation aircraft compared to conventional or “steam gauge” aircraft. It was an interesting discussion, and a great opportunity for me to connect with subjects that are near and dear to my heart: flight training, advanced cockpit avionics, and general aviation safety.

The cherry blossoms are starting to show signs of life in Washington. I took a walk on the Mall today, past a familiar park bench, and noticed that the trees are adorned with tiny soon to be leaves. The world is constantly changing around us, isn’t it?

You can’t always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
That you get what you need.
– Mick Jagger

I am a pilot, and I need to fly. I am a teacher, and I need to feel the sky and share it with others. I gave my first instrument flight lesson today in a very long time, and it reminded me of why I do this, of why I always come back home, even when the world tries its hardest to drag me away.

“It’s a small world” is the chorus of a song that’s looped incessantly at Disney amusement parks, and so it became the theme of this year’s Women in Aviation International conference, held in Orlando, Florida at the Disney Coronado Springs resort. I came to Orlando for the conference in a rather foul mood and not much interested in being captivated by the Magic of Disney, but otherwise very interested in talking with other pilots about the work I do.

The “big sky” theory of flying was quickly dispelled for me this weekend, because just when I thought I was adrift in a wild sea, I found friends I didn’t even know I had, people I could count on, very close to home.

Yesterday I flew to Tangier Island with a good friend, a true friend, a real friend. I went to reclaim it nearly one year after my first magical visit, to touch my wheels softly on the runway, to walk along the footbridge past the water tower and the dilapidated boats, to inhale the soft suggestion of spring, to listen to the salty bay, to search in vain for a souvenir, to savor the remains of last season’s crab cakes, to remember — because I can never forget.

It seems that most people here in the Washington, DC area are on the verge of “going Postal” over this blizzard situation. I calmly telecommuted in my pajamas all day today (what day is it anyway? I’m losing track of time…) and then, around 4 p.m., decided to maintain a modicum of civility by showering, putting on long underwear and trudging into town for a beer. Or two.

Here’s what my neighborhood looked like at around 6:30 pm today. It was a challenge stepping through the tall snow banks, but once I got there, it felt good to be around other people, even strangers, even for just an hour or so, laughing about the absurdity of it all.

The sun is shining, the air is warming up and the snow is starting to melt a bit. I’ve been digging out all morning but taking breaks here and there to have some fun playing with M2. Standing in the driveway looking at the mounds of snow I’ve piled up in the yard, I noticed that the pristine, untouched surfaces of snow reminded me of a sandy beach. If I closed my eyes I could hear the soothing lap-lap of water on a dock and the hungry cries of gulls. Frostbite induced hallucination? Perhaps. But I couldn’t resist setting up and taking this shot, as a reminder to smile and enjoy the moment.

“When the fog horn blows, I want to hear it. I don’t have to fear it.”
– Van Morrison

Well, it’s another snow laden Saturday here in the Washington, D.C. area, but conditions are far worse than last weekend, when at least some people were apparently able to go fly while others were stuck behind snow banks. The developing situation today is what everyone’s calling Snowpalooza, worthy of maximum font size newspaper headlines. What’s a lonely pilot to do on a day like this? Think about flying, eat soup, pour a glass of wine, read a book and maybe clean the house. Not much else to do.

So here’s my flying thought for the day. (I have plenty of other flying related thoughts, actually, but I’ll keep them to myself, for now.) Looking at the weather radar, if I did not know that it was February and my car was covered with nearly two feet of snow, I would look at this radar picture and think that it’s just a moderate rain shower that might be passable on my way to a fun afternoon on the Eastern Shore. Sigh. I guess that will be my happy flying thought for the day.

And I do mean that in the most literal sense possible. The National Weather Service for the Baltimore/Washington area issued a winter storm warning at 2:10 p.m. suggesting that we are in store for more than a foot of wet snow to fall upon our homes and runways, starting tomorrow and continuing on through Saturday, with gusts building up to 30 miles per hour.

Lovely. I really should have moved to Florida when I had the chance.

Maybe one day someone will develop a reset button labeled LIFE. A do-over button for the whole damn thing. Wouldn’t that be nice? Sure it would. Right? But it would never work. Because we’d keep pressing it over and over, getting so fixated on the stupid button that we’d forget to fly the airplane in between reboots, and crash. All they’d find among the smoldering ashes is a calloused thumb.

You can never completely reset your life, because you cannot erase the past. The baggage compartment never gets emptied, just reorganized to meet weight and balance limitations. You land every now and then, refuel the plane, grab a cup of bad coffee and a bag of junk food from the vending machine in the FBO, and take off to join the next leg of the journey. I think these engineers got it right when they labeled this button LVL, which when pressed, will recover the airplane back to straight and level flight from whatever unusual attitude it was in.