The Start of it All

After reading some of the flying related posts in this blog with friends in aviation and others, they sometimes ask, "when and how did you get into flying?" That always brings a smile to my face as I recall the flying lessons that took me off course academically, and those that took me into the wilderness.

The flying bug was injected by an old friend I met at Alpha Delta Phi. He was an old friend when I first met him in the sense that he was an alumni ten years senior to the rest of us in the fraternity, who  always joined us for party's and dinners (more on Fergie in a future post, as he recently passed away - indirectly from injuries suffered in a horrific airplane accident years ago). He was a general aviation pilot connected to aviation through his deceased father, a former Northwest Airlines executive, and he was a good story-teller. Introducing me to a few engrossing books by aviation authors, and giving me an introductory flight in a Piper Cherokee 140 at the University of Minnesota flight school, he set the hook hard. Could I afford to learn how to fly? Sure, if you took a few part time jobs to earn that kind of spending money (above and beyond the living and tuition expenses provided by my parents, of course.) Looking back on the tow truck driving, boiler maintenance, and airport security jobs I maintained for about eight hours of each day, you could say the flight school became an auxiliary education to the regular University curriculum I tried to maintain. You could.

Legendary Minnesota Aviation Hall of Famer Waldo Anderson, who taught or conducted the FAA flight exam with hundreds of University flight students over his 37 years at flight services, issued me my license to fly in 1975. Do you have smells that take you straight back to something from the past? The smell of that U. of M. flight school office still lingers in some corner of my nostrils. The people and activities of that time can be rekindled simply by visiting that building which still stands on the south end of the Anoka County airport.  Which has happened quite a few times in the last few years, as the Sawbones Air Racing meeting is held in a hangar on that field every Wednesday. The administration building serves as offices for Golden Wings Air Museum, which bought the property from the University when it closed the flight school in 1996. A fellow Sawbones team member ran that office and the museum hangar until recently, and gave me a full tour. We visited the old classrooms which still  looked as they had when I took ground school in them. As part of that tour, we went to the basement I never saw before and found old logbooks from those days. The University kept them on site to store for students until they graduated. Obviously many did not finish, as more than a couple of hundred books were stacked in neat order. I found one from my motorcycle riding buddy who took lessons way back when, and gave it to him as a memento. He was very happy for the memories.

The hook was further set by my father in law, Jim Marshall. Also a general aviation pilot, he proposed to me that we buy a float plane together. He had seen one for sale up in Finland, Minnesota. A 1946 Aerona Champ 7DC. It was winter at the time we went to check out the plane, owned by an old Finn (of course). We fought our way through the snow to the lakes edge where he had dug the plane out of two to three feet of that snow. On one of the floats was laid a canoe, with paddles jammed in the float struts. Does the canoe come with the plane, I remember Jim joking?

"Oh no. I'll still need that for fishing. I'd always haul it with me on the Champ to get to those lakes you can't get to by car," is how I remember him putting it.

"You mean you flew with a canoe strapped to the float," I asked?

"Sure. It's amazing what you can haul with that little 90hp motor," he replied.

But what about aerodynamics, and parasitic drag, and weight distribution? It became clear this old coot didn't bother himself with such technical matters. He just flew the plane, for more than 30 years by then, by stick and rudder. I wanted that kind of feel for flying - minus the canoe, of course.

We bought that plane and, after a thorough inspection and tuning by an A&P in Hibbing, parked it in front of the house where we were living on Pike Lake, near Duluth. After getting my seaplane rating from the legendary Wisconsin Aviation Haul of Famer Bill Amortty of Superior's Bong airport in 1977, I flew that Champ on floats and ski's all over northern Minnesota and the south shore of Lake Superior. Some of my favorite flying was on ski's, hopping down to visit Cornucopia, Wisconsin and the sea caves in the middle of winter.

One flight I remember distinctly for the challenges it presented was when the ice gods tried to strangle my little Champion. In ski flying you learn that water under the snow can be a real hazard. That's why if you see shades of white and gray in the snow as you prepare to land, the procedure is to gently touch down on the snow but don't actually land to see if there's water under that snow. Water can grab the ski's with excessive drag. If you feel that drag, you need to hit the throttle and get out of there. The reason for that is the kind of experience I had when I didn't make that check in landing on Siskiwit Bay on Lake Superior, in front of Cornucopia. It didn't become apparent until we sank a bit at the end of the landing, when the water started to form over the ski's. Too late. It took a couple of hours and a few long planks placed under the ski's to finally get back up on top of the snow and take off before the water started to freeze. All the while I imagined chipping the plane out of the ice in the coming spring, keeping me motivated through the effort.

Unfortunately, leaving Duluth for a job with 3M in Tulsa, Oklahoma meant I had to leave the Champ behind. Trying to maintain currency became increasingly difficult, and after a few short years I abandoned the hobby of flight. Only to return to it 27 years later. I still miss those stick and rudder days.