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| Grumman AA1C "Lynx" |
In December 1977, right after Christmas, I was sent by my employer to Savannah, Georgia to pick up and ferry a new airplane to the flight school at Deer Valley Airport. It was a new Grumman American AA1C (a factory demonstrator), complete with pretty wheel fairings (later removed by the flight school) and a yellow and orange paint job. An AA1C is a tiny little airplane, two seats almost – with a 24 ft wingspan and a little 115 hp 4-cylinder engine. It cruises along at about 100 mph or a little faster if you don't care about fuel economy much -- and has a short range of only a couple hours of flight time – or maybe three. So this was a trip that took a little time…
I left Phoenix and flew to Indianapolis. I routed my trip in that direction deliberately – I wanted to see my Grandfather who was fighting cancer – and we all knew by then it was a fight he would not win. We visited in the airport for a few moments while I waited on my connecting flight. It was the last time I ever saw him.
My second leg was to Atlanta and then to Savannah – both flights were memorable for one reason or another. The first was on an Eastern Airlines jet and it was the first time I ever bought first class fare. I have only ever paid for first class (air) once since. But I was expecting a first class experience and to me that mostly means “what’s for lunch.” Imagine my bitter disappointment when I discovered I was only getting a wine and cheese plate. I don’t drink wine, period, and I don’t care for cheese that much. And the folks in coach? They were getting something hot and savory, I could smell it. What the hell is wrong with this picture! I wanted to change seats…
On arrival in Atlanta, I had only a short hop remaining down to Savannah. That was my first and only flight in a DC-8, and this one was a stretch model, so I was thrilled. We climbed up and out of Atlanta like a rocket! The whole journey would have been worth it just for that one flight on the big Douglas.
Arriving in Savannah, I got over to the Grumman plant– I believe it was simply on another part of the airfield. I stayed the night nearby and got to Grumman to take delivery of N9603U the next morning. Most of the paperwork was already done, since Lem (my boss and mentor) had purchased many other aircraft from them before – delivery was simply a formality of me inspecting the product and signing for delivery.
Unfortunately, after taxiing all the way out to the departure end of the field to do a test flight, the magneto check was no-go. So I taxied all the way back to the Grumman facility where they “fixed” the problem by replacing some of the ignition leads (or so I thought). Their poor ethics and shoddy workmanship caused me trouble again later.
This delay cost me most of the morning and I got underway westbound at about noon. The day was sunny and while there was a little bit of haze, the visibility wasn’t too bad and I got a great view of the middle south as I plodded along. I had never been to the Deep South before, and what I saw was a rolling landscape and a few farm fields here and there. I don’t remember it as all that spectacular, but who cares, I was flying on someone else’s dollar!
I landed at Americus, Georgia for fuel, and flew on to Montgomery Alabama where I stopped for the night. Americus is Jimmy Carter’s “home airport.” They used to land Air Force One there when he was president – Plains is nearby but they have no large airport there. At any rate, President Carter wasn't visiting Plains that day anyway.
My route the first day was about 308 miles, west and then slightly northwest from Savannah. I passed south of Columbus and the airport in Montgomery (Dannelly Field) is southwest of the city. This was about 2.5 hours flying time in the little Grumman, mostly at fairly low altitude so I had a great view of the countryside. That’s part of the joy of flying in light aircraft – you are part of your surroundings, not whooshing along in a sterile environment high above them. You can smell the rivers at 3,000 feet, you can see the creeks and the fishermen, you can smell the fresh-plowed earth baking in the sun. It’s good, and pilots have a hard time explaining it sometimes -- there is a sense of freedom in flying, of exhilaration; of being more in control of your destiny than is warranted, really.
I should have pushed on that day, probably, but then again it would have been a bad idea for other reasons of which I yet had no clue. So things worked out. The next morning, I headed out to the field to get an early start. I did my planning in the airport’s pilot lounge, preflighted the airplane and started the long taxi out to the runway. This taxiway was a mile or two in length, or maybe 50. Once out there in South Bumfuzzle, I set the brakes and did my run-up… and the mags were bad again.
A light aircraft with piston engines has magnetos – these take the place of distributors and coils like automobiles of that era had – and since an airplane has redundant systems, there are two mags. The idea of course is that if one quits, you still have a second one (although at somewhat reduced efficiency) to keep you afloat. So as part of your pre-take-off routine, you make sure that both are working by switching one off and observing a small drop in engine RPMs while the other one is providing your spark. You check the left one, then both again, then the right one. The engine should run smoothly, but a little bit slower. But if a mag is bad, you get missing, coughing, sputtering, rough, unevenness, this is not good, @!*t. *&%@! This was exactly the same problem I had the day before in Savannah.
So I taxied all the way back to the hangar, shut her down and called Lem in Phoenix, who seemed to be a bit put out that I was having a problem – and acting like it was my fault somehow. But I stood my ground – I never took an aircraft aloft that I didn’t think was airworthy, and this one clearly was not. This is the difference between an unseasoned airplane driver and a pilot... With experience, lots of experience, you learn that many small problems aren't really going to kill you (unless of course they happen all at once), that you can still fly the airplane, get there, and actually walk away from the airplane. I have in many years of flying learned that with a calm, thoughtful approach, a remembrance of lessons learned and an unswerving focus on flying the airplane, even seemingly insurmountable problems can be overcome - sometimes you can accomplish the "impossible." The problem with this is that this knowledge can lead to fatal complacency occasionally (and the real trick is knowing the difference). Some of the very best aviators get caught by this mistake and crushed into bio-aluminum. Lem Cook was a consummate aviator - and my timidity as a young pilot was, I am sure, frustrating to him. It WAS his own fault though - he was one of the aviators who taught me how to be a careful pilot -- and a perfectionist in that pursuit.
Some think I am overly-cautious and I am sure Lem Cook was thinking exactly that – but it was my neck, not his. His reaction said more about him, in my opinion, than it did me. I never cut corners (of which I was aware) when it came to safety. Bob the Flight Instructor says… that was one reason I survived aviation when many others I have known did not; getting there was never as important as surviving the day. Even so, I recognize that a certain amount of that was luck. On those occasions when I made mistakes, luck and circumstance was ever as present as skill in getting it down shiny side up - and I tried to learn from those lessons so they were not repeated.
Lem had me call a warranty station at a nearby field (Wetumpka Aerodrome), about 25 miles northeast of Dannelly Field. The FBO there offered to come down and get the plane, if I would fly his back (a similar AA-1C).
The fact that he was willing to fly 9603U when it was not functioning properly should have made me wonder about the airworthiness of his plane – but I went along with the plan – he flew down, and I followed him in his little buzzer as he flew mine to Wetumpka for repairs. I should note that I did inspect his aircraft very carefully before I flew it. Anyway, the repair work took the rest of the morning – and I didn’t get out of Wetumpka, Alabama until after lunch.
It turned out that the repair shop at Grumman had simply "glued" the partially disintegrated ignition leads back together and re-installed them, rather than replace them with new ones. It wasn't long (about three hours, actually) before the little Lycoming engine shook them apart again. Their neglect and incompetence was unforgivable, especially since my life depended on their work. I rarely ever encountered that kind of behavior in many years of dealing with aviation people - most of them take their jobs very seriously. Fortunately, this time things fell apart on the ground instead of in the air - so I didn't have to struggle to make it to an airport on reduced power, or land it without power in a ditch somewhere in east Mississippi. The Wetumpka hero got me back in the air with new ignition leads in about 3 hours.
By now, with a half day missed the first day, and a half day missed the 2nd day, I was an entire flying day behind where I could have been… and that made all the difference in getting home quickly or not, because weather was brewing around Dallas, as it often does that time of year. There is a perpetual low pressure area over DFW. The little plane I was flying was not an all-weather machine – it was not set up for instrument flight and neither was I (I had no instrument rating in those days). I flew from Wetumpka to Jackson, Mississippi where I stopped for fuel. To the west, storms were encroaching on my path. My plan "B" was an attempt to fly to the northwest toward Oklahoma in an end run around the north side of the rain and the low clouds involved. But I ran out of daylight before I could get the job done, landed at Texarkana and overnight things closed in on me and buttoned it down tight for visual flying (VFR, to those in the know). I spent the next three days in lovely, socked-in, wet Texarkana. Sigh.
The time in Texarkana wasn’t entirely wasted. There is a town nearby, where the legend of Bigfoot lives. I had seen a movie at a cheap drive-in called "The Legend of Boggy Creek," based on a book by a man named Smokey Crabtree (I kid you not!), who claimed to have seen a Bigfoot creature in the swamps around Fouke, Arkansas. So I rented a car and moseyed on down there. I stopped at Crabtree’s store, bought his book (sucker!) and hung around for a little while, sightseeing, looking behind bushes, etc. I never did see the “Fouke Monster.” He was probably there though – my eyesight is not that good - only 20/15 in those days. But sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest, you know?
After three days, the weather finally threatened to leave town. I was just waiting my chance. On New Year’s Day, 1978, I stepped out the door of my deluxe room at the Motel 6 and there was a little tiny hole in the clouds above my head. I grabbed my bag, hoo-rah’d the motel’s driver, and had my big balooka and satchel delivered to the AIRPORT, whipping the horses all the way, or the driver I can’t remember which. I preflighted, planned, all in about 45 seconds and pointed the nose of that Grumman at that little itty bitty hole. I got myself about 500 feet on top of that cloud layer (or 1000, or whatever the FAA required…) and I stayed there until I was somewhere west of Wichita Falls. I don’t recommend anyone ever do what I did that day.
I think I must’ve stopped for fuel at Wichita Falls but I cannot remember that particular stop. The rest of that day was perfect flying weather and I went all the way home in clear skies. My route for a good while was along the Red River, and there was drama unfolding beneath me somewhere. Some folks had been out hunting or fishing along the river and they had disappeared -- and I think the river was in flood stage because of the rains. The search parties, coordinated by the local sheriff, were having trouble communicating by radio because the rolling terrain was causing interference. They were smart enough (probably they had done this before) to use passing airplanes as relay stations. The Flight Service Station contacted me (I was the only one around at the time, I suppose) and I acted as a go-between for radio communications between the search parties as long as I was in range. I don’t remember even the nature of the conversations but I do remember being pretty excited about it at the time. It felt good to help. I think I even offered to circle around for a while but they apparently didn't need me further.
West of Wichita Falls, it is west Texas with all that west Texas entails. It’s long, brown, dry, kind of flat, or maybe gradually rolling Great Plains. No one much has ever settled there - in old movies they call it the Staked Plains and the "West Texas badlands." Any day flying is a good day, but that was a long afternoon… I stopped for fuel at Lubbock and then my next fuel stop was Sunland Airport on the west side of El Paso. I skirted the southeastern corner of New Mexico and flew along the face of the Guadalupe Mountains. A direct flight from Lubbock to Phoenix was not possible because of the restricted airspace over Holloman AFB and the White Sands Missile Range. You have to go around, either to the south or to the north via Albuquerque. I arrived over El Paso in late afternoon, passed by the huge fuel tanks brimming with 80/87 octane at El Paso International and landed at Sunland, where… everything including the baño was closed up tighter than Dick’s hatband. Oi! It was New Year's Day after all and the airport folks were taking a holiday, I guess.
Probably the smart thing to do at that point would have been to back-track to El Paso’s BIG airport and buy fuel there. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to pay for the same air twice… so I went on toward Las Cruces. It’s only 50 more miles, right? The little Grumman doesn’t have fuel gauges – it has sight gauges. There is a clear plastic gravity tube that shows you exactly how much fuel you have left in each tank (left and right, the fuel is stored in the wing spars) – so there’s no guesswork. It isn’t an electronic measurement (or “guess”) of how much go-juice remains, it is simply a view of what is actually IN the tank. Pretty simple. And that afternoon, for that last 50 miles, it kept getting lower and lower as I watched in anxious alarm. By the time I made it to Las Cruces’ airport, west of the city along I-10, I was sweating and wishing I hadn’t pushed it quite so far. That was nearly 400 miles from my last fuel stop at Lubbock, and way farther than I ever should have tried to go in an airplane with such small fuel tanks. Occasional flawed judgment can even afflict a genius like me.
By now, it was getting late, but I had decided that this was the day I would be getting home. No more overnight stops. Flying west along I-10, I passed by Deming and Lordsburg; a direct route crosses I-10 several times along the way. I crossed I-10 for the last time at Willcox (except once more over Tucson) and flew directly west across the Rincon Mountains, skirting Davis-Monthan AFB and landing at Tucson International for my last fuel stop just after dark. I got to watch the sunset over the mountains of southern Arizona! Up to that point I hadn't done any night flying over terrain that was strange to me -- but my last couple of hours was over my own neighborhood, so to speak, so I continued on in the dark.
I remember being treated like a king at the Tucson airport. They gave me a ride to the terminal on an airport cart so I could eat, they fueled my plane and even cleaned the canopy. They were definitely a first class operation. I left Tucson and headed north along the direct route to Deer Valley airport, flying along in the dark and following the lights below on the highway that paralleled my flight path. My family all turned out to greet my arrival. I suspect they all had thought they would never see me again when I left home. Personally, I don’t see anything in cross-country light plane flight that is even as risky as an automobile road trip – but sometimes people are afraid of things they don’t understand. Like most things, flight is as safe as you make it. For sure though, it is a thinking person's game.
Overall, this was the longest light-plane flight I ever completed, about 2,000 miles, and it was a great experience. That last day out of Texarkana was the longest flight in one stretch I ever completed as a private pilot - about 11 hours of flying and 1200 miles, just about 1/3 of the time and distance Lindbergh flew when he soloed the Atlantic! This makes me appreciate what he accomplished - hell, I slept for three days after I got home! I saw our country almost coast to coast the same way Wiley Post or Amelia saw it fifty years before. My only regret is that I didn’t take my wife along to enjoy the experience. Perhaps we felt we couldn’t afford it, but we should’ve done it anyway. It would have been even better shared and that low-speed, low-altitude cross country flight, for me, was a once in a life-time experience.
The little Grumman became a workhorse trainer at Deer Valley with Professional Aviation and was finally sold to one of my former flight instructors (Ed Pierson) who rebuilt it with a 150 hp engine – this transformed it into a genuine fighter plane, a real barn-burner. While it was still at Professional, it was one of my favorites. I used to buzz around town for fun with my two-year old daughter as my companion - and it is the airplane I usually used when I flew as a traffic watch pilot for KTAR radio. I always considered it "mine." Zero-Three-Uniform and I had a lot of history together.
