About Sully

So, what do I think about Sully?

That question has been fired at me from all quarters lately. (Sully is US Airways Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the “Hudson Hero.”) Here's what I think.

Sully isn't a hero. He’s a highly trained, experienced professional who sits up in the executive office of his jetliner and does his job. His paramount goal is not to crash because he knows he will be the first to the crash scene. He knows the first and last things that will go through his mind at the point of impact will be his instrument panel. He has a keen awareness that there are two kinds of pilots: those who know they are going up for their last flight and those who don't. The trusting souls sitting behind him are not his main safety concern; he knows if he takes care of himself his passengers will be the happy beneficiaries of his prioritization efforts.

What do I like about what he did? Two things. First, he quickly assessed his options and methodically sorted them. 

When one option fell through he had another one waiting. The river was the last resort. This is the result of decades of thinking miles ahead of fast moving jets; of double and triple checking every switch position, every setting, every plan and bit of information; of recognizing when something isn't right by the way that little bristle of hair on the back of his neck feels.

None of this is taught in classrooms or textbooks and not all of it is intuitive. It's picked up in the cockpits of Phantoms, Hornets, C-130s, B-52s and the like. It's also painfully earned in the lonely cockpits of small single-pilot cargo planes carrying packages at night in storms and icing with absolutely no one but yourself to rely on. Most of us earn our tickets to this profession. That day on the Hudson all those years paid off. He knew what to do.

The other thing I like about him is his demeanor. He shrugs off the hero hype—my kind of guy. In age, background and experience we're practically equals. We both have pretty wives so used to living alone they can't understand what the big deal is when their friends ask them how they cope. And we're both old ugly geysers. The younger pilots wish we would step aside and let their seniority improve. Despite our likenesses I don’t pretend that I could have done as good a job as he did.

In the wake of Sully's experience I'm getting more attention from people. As I strolled through the plane, as I often do before push-back, one of my passengers recently said, “You look like Sully!” He was smiling approvingly. I think that perception gave him confidence.

A couple of days later another one teasingly asked me if Sully trained me. My immediate teasing answer was, “No. I trained Sully.” That brought on a round of laughs from several rows away. Everybody knew who Sully was.

Still another man politely beckoned me to his first class seat and said, “People are looking at you captains in a whole new way now.” His smile indicated the “new way” was something positive. I wondered why anyone would think of us in any other way. But then there was the “Summer of 2000.” Oh. 

Forgot about that. That's another story.

I hope you've got a Sully type up front next time you fly. The statistics say your chances of having one improves with the size of the plane you're on. That's just a fact of life we have to live with. Smaller planes pay less (way less) and draw entry-level job seekers.

I do one thing now, as a result of Sully's unscheduled swim, although it may at first seem minor. We get a final weight and balance report that comes out of our printer just before take off. We enter any last minute changes in that information into the performance pages of our computer. This tweaks our expectations of what the plane can and can't do when we put the spurs to her. A little note on the bottom of that page tells us the exact number of people on board including crew. It's called the SOB count. It means Souls on Board (I'm certain some of those souls are a subset of SOBs). That's information I might need if I find myself standing or laying beside a bent bird talking to rescuers, so I put the little sheet in my shirt pocket.

I remember once explaining to my mother what SOB meant in the people count. She looked astonished and said, 

“Souls!?” Then she uttered a painful grunt.

So, I lift my glass to Sully. He's an SOB but not an SOB. He's one of the good guys. So is his first officer, his flight attendants and every other airline professional out there plying the skies. They're not lucky, they're good.

Here are a few cool (no pun) pics from the last few trips.

The Hush House at O'Hare. They test engines here.


Gate C9 in Denver with reflection in the window. The de-icing
boom is on the right. The colored lights are the auto park system.
Under the lights you can see a poster in the terminal of
Katie Couric framing me.


Descending into Denver, you can see where the plane
ahead cut a hot slice into the cloud deck as he went down
through it.



Heading east across eastern Montana you can see
a contrail on the right side of a flight ahead and
below us. On the left is the shadow of his contrail
on the snowy ground.



Again in eastern Montana, the shadows of contrails.
The vertical one is crossing traffic. The horizontal one
is ours.


One of this blog's followers asked for a shot of the
terminator (read the MAR 11 2008 post for more
info on the terminator).


Are we there yet?



One recent day in Denver the airport was assaulted
by zillions of tumbleweeds. It was bizarre. Watch this video
taken at the gate after we blocked-in.

New Look

So, how does the new header look? Sorry I had to sanitize it. This age of retribution and litigation is such a curse. None-the-less, my purpose is not to disparage my company.

Am I frustrated with it? Yes. But with the top brass, not my co-workers who, for the most part, work hard and earnestly trying to do a good job. Am I a union man? I belong (got no choice), and I think it has done a great deal of good along with some measure of bad. I wish we didn't need it. But enough of that.

Those of you who commented on I, the Pirate and asked to be forwarded a copy, I would be happy to do it if you will give me your e-mail address.

For this post, only a funny observation: Surely you have gotten one of those e-mail Forwards that lists amusing military and airline maintenance records. (The gripe is the pilot's write-up, the action is the mechanic's action to fix the gripe.) You remember, for example the one that reads, Gripe: Lost right engine. Action: Couldn't find right engine. Well, here's a real life funky gripe/action for you. It appeared in the maintenance records of a 757 I flew last week. Click to enlarge it.

The Desert Southwest

I love flying over the desert southwest because the weather is almost always good and the geology is magnificent. I know I bore people who I fly with talking about it but most of them express great interest.

We were turning left and right over the Canyon and I was explaining the geology of the Canyon to my first officer, Chris. He was loving it. He said, "What a job we have! Days like this make me think I'd do this for free!" I cautioned him not to say that to the company management.

An hour later we lined up on final for Orange County/Santa Anna-John Wayne Airport and started to slow down. Chris was flying. We noticed we had a 49 knot tail wind but the tower said the wind was calm on the surface. We worked like madmen to get the 757 configured for landing and slowed. The gear goes down at a relatively high speed but the flaps have airspeed limitations and we must go through six incremental positions before getting them to the landing setting, and each position has a progressively restrictive airspeed. That's why the slowdown takes time.

And the Santa Anna runway is only 5700 feet long. You've got to be on airspeed there or you go off the end. That'll get you a trip to the kick butt room, if you survive it.

Passing through 500 feet we were still 20 knots too fast. I said, "Chris, take her around."

He powered up and hauled the nose up. I raised the gear and started the flaps back up. LAX approach control took us out over the Pacific. We re-ran the landing checklist, made the necessary announcements (the passengers get nervous when you abort a landing), notified company dispatch, and recalculated our landing speed, based on the new gross weight after the missed approach burn-out. I looked over at Chris. He was sweating bullets. I asked, "You still want to do this for nothing?" He shook his head vigorously.

We made it in the second time.
Today is inauguration day. I didn't vote for Barak O'Bama but I hope and pray that he succeeds in taking our country down the right paths in these scary times.

Click to enlarge:

Arizon'a Kaibab Plateau, heading west. Altitude 38,000'


Monument Valley, Arizona, where they filmed Stage Coach,
Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and the greatest of
them all, The Searchers

East (nearer) and West Spanish Peak, Colorado (elev. 13,700).
I have been to the top of the west peak 5 times.
The indians called them Ahoyatoya ("Breasts of the
World")

The Colorado River flowing toward the Grand Canyon


A caldera in southern Colorado. This is a collapsed
volcano.

Sunset at Denver airport seen from United Flight
Operations

Sailing over Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains

Aruba

This time of year we fly a lot of families, which means a lot of kids. I try to go back, if I have time before the flight starts, to invite kids to see the cockpit. Most of the teenagers shrug and shake their heads. (How can a 757 cockpit compete with X-Box?) But the smaller ones usually jump at the chance. Here's a quick kid story from a couple years ago about a rug rat that tried to destroy us.

The feisty toddler eyed our cockpit as we were doing our pre-flight set-up. We glanced back at him, smiled and asked his name. His mother, standing behind him, told us the name, but I didn't catch it because at once the tyke charged into the cockpit on a mission of madness. He assaulted the center console with a vengeance and started throwing switches. 

The first officer and I looked at him, mouths agape. Saying nothing, he twisted every knob he could reach, threw every switch that beckoned at him, and pushed every tempting button that sat before his lustful eyes. Horrified, his mother grabbed him at the waist and started to pull him away, but I stopped her. “Wait! He’s having a ball. Let’s see how far he’ll go.”

He worked his way to the front of the console, never looking at us, tongue slashing side to side, lips slobbering, reaching farther and farther. But he couldn't quite stretch to the juicy throttles and the enticing flap handle. Undaunted, he began working his way back again clicking, twisting, punching, toggling until his mom could no longer stand it. She pulled him back, apologizing profusely, certain he had doomed our flight to a smoking crater. It took us about five minutes to accomplish damage control. He was too young, probably, to ever remember the day he tried to sabotage a passenger jet.

Not much happened last trip except that I had a grand time in Aruba. It was my first trip there. I believe I'd go back if my arm were appropriately twisted. I looked for Natalie Holloway. I would love nothing more than to bring her home to Alabama. But she wasn't there.

Thanks for the suggestions I asked for in the last post. I have been putting some of them to good use.

Happy New Year!

Here are some pics from the trip (click to enlarge).

Arubian beach

Cool pool

Arubian Sunset
Haitian Coast


Rainy day in San Diego

A 737 angles across us 1,000 feet below

Cookin' With Gas

You line your plane up on the runway. The checklists are done. You’ve got your clearance. All is ready. You push up the throttle and roar off. Right?

Not.

Every takeoff in your life is an important event. Lives are at stake; not just your own either. One of my favorite adages goes like this: When a pilot walks out to his plane, he faces one of two possible fates: This will be his last flight, and he knows it. Or, this will be his last flight, and he doesn’t know it.

So that makes every takeoff a profound event. It’s no wonder then why some pilots mark the beginning of the takeoff with some sort of self-assuring verbal utterance. It doesn't seem to matter if their machine is a garage built winged gizmo or the latest behemoth off of Boeing's assembly line, they have this irresistible proclivity to say something as they release the brakes and whip the engines into a mad frenzy.

Some pilots say―with precise professional bearing―“Cleared for takeoff.” Others just say “Here we go!” Some Navy pilots, braced and awaiting the cat shot say, “Lord, please don't let me―“ (You know the rest of that one.)

For no apparent reason, as I got ready to take off a few days ago from Sacramento bound for Denver, I remembered what Hack Cross, one of my old buds of the Mississippi Air Guard, used to say when he let go the brakes and put the spurs to a Starlifter. He said, “HERE WE GO, SINGIN' IN THE KITCHEN!”

I wondered what in the world that meant. Must be a song. Coming from Hack, it sounded cool. And that brought back more memories. I recall how “Flat Land” Moore would release the brakes, push up the throttles and yell, “BOYS, WE'RE COOKIN' WITH GAS NOW!”

Where did that come from?! I think that was a TV commercial, or some sort.

Then there was Mississippi Air Guard icon, George Fondren, the “DOD” (a highly inside acronym that does not mean Department of Defense), who, without fail, announced to his crew as the jet heaved down the runway, “May the force be with us!”

Although I am one of those “Here we go” kind of guys, I decided that morning in Sacramento to honor my old Guard buddies by using one of their takeoff utterances. I chose Hack's. I turned the 757 onto the runway, pushed up the power and said, “HERE WE GO, SINGIN' IN THE KITCHEN!”

But this wasn't the Magnolia Militia anymore. This was the Big Airline world. There are certain things you say at critical times, and you are expected to say nothing else. My first officer blurted, "WHAT?”

“Nothing” I said as I steered the jet down the centerline stripes. I stole a quick glance at him. He was looking at me with this incredible question mark on his face. “Nothing!” I said again.

After we got up higher and our work load dropped off he said, “What did you say when we were taking off?”

I said, “I said, 'Here we go, singing in the kitchen.'”

He looked at me with a blank stare. I grinned and shrugged. I had to admit to myself it didn't sound near as cool as when Hack said it.

I do miss the camaraderie of the Mississippi Guard. Those guys, by the way, are now pushing ultra-modern C-17s and are flying some of the most challenging global missions of our time. I don't know many of them any more, but I sure hope they haven't lost at least a touch of the Southern flying man's tradition for projecting their personality into the task at hand, and making professional flying fun, as well it should be.

I'm tired of saying, “Here we go.” I need a repertoire of cool takeoff utterances. Give me some suggestions. Post them to the blog, or e-mail me if you're cyber-shy. As long as it doesn't make a fool of me, I'll use your submittal on an actual 757 or 767 takeoff, and I'll let you know when and where I used it.

Until next time: We're off to see the Wizard.

"What?"

A Greatful Man

Suppose you had an unusual guest at your Thanksgiving table—a refugee from a dangerous and troubled land. One where opinions that run counter to the establishment can be unhealthy if they are found out. One where you will dress as you're told. One where the only thing you get to vote for is what to have for dinner, and that choice may be severely limited. One where the only due process you can expect is a kangaroo court where the government's witness is always truthful and you are always guilty. But you'll be lucky if you get even that because most who are accused go straight to prison or worse.

If you had a person like this at your feast-laden table would you be a bit more thankful of what we have here in our great country? I did. And I am.

Ali (not his real name) is waiting for his wife to arrive in December. After that I can use his real name. She is waiting for the US embassy in a neighboring country to approve her visa. Because we don't have an embassy in her country, she will have to go there first, as Ali did, then fly here. Our home has has been Ali's fourth stop in about a month since he's been here.

The first three were with other friends of his—and mine. We all learned to fly together in USAF pilot training class 73-06 at Vance AFB, Oklahoma. When Ali was training with us, his country was friendly with ours. 
Shortly after he returned it had a revolution. Now its government hates us. Come to think of it, its government hates everybody.

Soon after the revolution Ali became involved in a long, devasting war. He flew Phantom fighters. He saw many friends die. No one won that awful war, and honestly, none of us in 73-06 thought he survived. But after the war he wrote letters to his former classmates and one of them made it through. The recipient forwarded it to all of us. Ali was alive! He had taken a job as a crop duster pilot.

Three years ago 73-06 had a reunion in Las Vegas. Ali applied to the neighboring embassy for a tourist visa. They required him to have letters of sponsorship from 73-06 members. We responded promptly, but by the time the visa was processed the reunion was over. Ali came anyway and visited a few of the classmates. I didn't see him then but spoke with him on the phone.

When he returned to his country a local government official heard of his trip to the US and began badgering and threatening him. One day Ali lost his temper when the man came to his home to pester him. Ali told the man that the country's government was corrupt top to bottom, immoral and idiotic. He knew then he had crossed the line. The man took the matter to higher authority. Prison, or worse, was in the offing.

Ali quickly applied to the US for tourist visas for himself and his wife. His was approved but hers got caught in a red tape screw-up. They promised to correct their mistakes and get her visa done by December. Ali could not afford the risk of waiting for her. He came ahead and was welcomed by his old classmates.

The first family he stayed with sold him a car for one dollar. With that he drove to the home of a second classmate, then a third, staying from a few days to a few weeks at each. Before coming to our house he ventured a trip to California to visit friends from his country who had immigrated here. At each place he has used some of his time to research opportunities to get a permanent work authorization (green card) or seek refugee status and to find leads for a job. With the current financial crises we are in, he has a long hard road ahead.

When he drove up my driveway and got out of his $1 car a lump crawled into my throat. I had not seen him in 35 years. My old friend was back; back to the land of freedom and opportunity he had discovered in his youth. Ali is a man without a home, a man without a job. He has placed his future in God's hands and is at peace. And he's here to stay; can't go back.

One way or another, this is his country now. If you know know of a way to help Ali in getting his green card and/or a job, please contact me. He is an expert crop duster pilot and an experienced flight instructor and flight school manager, but he will work at anything.

We sat for several evenings and listened to Ali tell us about the goodness of his old country—its people. And he told us about the bad. His stories are a revelation. Fascinating too, and maybe I'll relate some of them in a future post.

Ali is Muslim and is an intensely optimistic man. He believes with all his heart that God has prepared a place for him in America. As to Thanksgiving, this is his second one. His first one, 35 years ago, didn't mean too much for him then. But now he told us, “I give thanks to God for all things. All things are good. Nothing is bad in God's great plan. When I breath my last breath, I will still be giving thanks.”

For Them, for Us

This time every year (Veteran’s Day +/- a few days) I do something special, and I enjoy it immensely. After getting full agreement and promise of cooperation from the flight attendants I make an announcement on the PA system during our long climb to our cruising altitude.

I tell all veterans to reach up and push their overhead orange call button. This will make the button light up and a “ding” will sound. I tell them to do it so that their fellow passengers and the flight attendants can recognize and thank them for their service to our country. I don’t tell them yet that we will be treating them, lest liars will ring up.

After that I pause. If the recirculation fans are not too loud I’m usually able to hear a few dings from near the front of the plane. When all the vets have had a chance to chime-in I go back on the PA and tell them the flight attendants will now serve them any drink they wish from the ship’s bar, courtesy the captain and crew. It makes them feel special.

I like making people feel special. Sometimes, before the flight starts and when there are a few first class seats open, I invite military and retired military people to come forward and take them. This is tricky because it takes a few extra minutes to make the announcement and re-seat people. ID cards have to be checked to prevent scumbag imposters from coming up.

I always clear this with the chief flight attendant first. I’ve only had one refuse to cooperate. I could have ordered her to do it but I didn’t because I knew she would not have been pleasant to them. I also get the first class passengers’ approval, because they paid dearly for those seats. I have never heard a single one express disapproval.

The last time I did this, one of the flight attendants came to the cockpit with teary eyes. She said people were applauding as the soldiers and airmen moved to the front. Some even cried. She said it was the most awesome experience she has ever seen at the airline. Yeah, I like to make them feel special, because they are.

Another time I had only one first class seat open but several soldiers of different branches were seated in coach. The chief flight attendant said, “How are you going to handle this?” I got on the PA and asked who the ranking service member was. I saw fingers point to a Marine major. I said, “Major, you choose.” I expected him to get up and come forward, but I saw him look around. He picked a private and sent him forward. That, my friends, is called Leadership.

And one other anecdote needs to be told here. One day while greeting my first class passengers I discovered one elderly man, who was traveling with his wife, was a retired United captain. He had been retired about 10 years. I pulled the forward flight attendant aside and asked her to address him as “Captain” when she served him. She smiled. She knew it would mean something special to him.

It did to me too.

Cadillac of the Skies

A compelling scene from a non-aviation movie made in 1987, Empire of the Sun, still sends chills down the necks of those of us who love flight and its history. Who can forget the sight of the British lad Jim, played by Christian Bale, standing on the rooftop of his prison barracks, after years of incarceration by the Japanese, seeing a vision of freedom coming? Remember the scene? What form did the freedom take? Click this link and watch: 



For today’s generation, it’s a symbol of the finest aviation can be: a flying machine that guaranteed our right to enjoy the freedom of flight; a machine so beautiful, simply seeing it is like kneeling in front of an altar. And for a blessed few, owning and flying one of the few that are left must be like stepping onto Heaven’s threshold. Okay, maybe that’s a bit over the line, but is it too cheesy to assert that the Mustang is a gift from God to a people who needed a good fighter? 

Personally, I think it’s the apple of His eye, too.

Denny Hickman, of Reform, Alabama is one of those blessed few. Denny worked hard to amass his fortunes and he deserves every cent. He used some of it to buy a Mustang, one that actually saw service with the 8th Air Force in Europe during WWII. And yesterday, during Fayette Alabama’s annual Airport Day, Denny invited me and three other Yak and Nanchang pilots to join up with him.

Denny pulled his throttle way back so that we could catch him, and I eased up along his right side. The others took his left and rear positions. I settled on that stubby wing, about three feet from it, and tried to control my breathing. The sight of the Mustang sitting there, inches away—the same sight countless WWII fighter pilots had seen—made my pulse race. How many pilots had ever done this? Had ever seen what my eyeballs were seeing? Dudes, I was entranced! This was a lifetime experience.

As we clung to Denny while he made a couple of passes down the runway for the crowd, I noticed my visual sense wasn’t the only one enjoying a king’s feast. I was hearing something other than my engine. It was a steady buzz, with a faint undertone of a growl. I took my hand off the throttle and pulled a side of my helmet away from my ear. It got louder. It was the Merlin! All 1,500 horses!

It was horsepower you could see at work. Denny had a bright yellow band painted on the tips of his prop and that huge thing spun so furiously it burned a brilliant yellow circle in the blue sky, a circle so big and bright it looked like Saturn’s rings.

The 15 minutes with Denny passed in a tizzy and we were back on deck, slapping each other’s backs, thanking Denny to the extreme. He wished we would quit thanking him. He took off and headed for home, but made a fly-by first. I saw those immaculate wings swing to the horizontal and that yellow circle pulling that magnificent airframe along behind it, zipping, pulling up in front of us, wings waggling so-long, the Merlin bathing the airport with its song. I wanted to jump up like Jim, and yell, “P-51 MUSTANG—CADILLAC OF THE SKIES!”

What a day it was. If I never fly again, I’ll be content to let that be a crowning culmination of a great life of flight.

I couldn’t take any pics of the Mustang because I was too close to it. But this photo, taken by Blake Mathis of Denny’s plane a week ago in Muscle Shoals, gives you a glimpse of its beauty. I was much closer to it than this.

Short Call-out

I got a short callout activation Monday night for a Deep South trip: Buenos Aries at 1100 Tuesday morning. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Our daily BA trip goes out at 9:45 pm and arrives at 7am. The return flight is also an all-nighter. We never see the vast continent of South America. Its towering peaks and endless jungle lands are cloaked in darkness for us. So what was up with this day-time flight?
 
The trip the night before got cancelled for a maintenance problem. They put the passengers into hotels around Dulles and began to get another jet ready the next morning. The original crew had no time to get a legal rest, so they nabbed me and my two first officers (F/Os). We were keen to see the Andes Mountains and the mighty Amazon River, for the first time.

The “bunkie” is the F/O who is along as a relief pilot on long trips like this one. He doesn’t make a takeoff or landing but performs a lot of other duties like the external inspections. One of those duties is to lay out a rest schedule for the three of us. He does this by subtracting 30 minutes from the planned flying time and dividing by 3. On this trip, that works out to about 3 hours 15 minutes each. Then, 15 minutes after takeoff he goes back for his rest period. The company keeps a first class seat with a curtain around it blocked off for this purpose. I then get the middle period, and the other F/O gets the last period. I immediately thought I might rearrange the schedule so that I would take the first period, then I would be in the cockpit for the good sight-seeing. But I thought the better of it. I knew the other guys were looking forward to that, so I just told them to wake me up if they saw the Amazon and the Andes.

I slept fitfully, peeking out the window every 15 minutes. All was cloudy. When they called me up I saw that our hopes were dashed. The Amazon Valley was totally cloud obscured. But then, just after I got settled-in, a big hole opened under us and there it was: The Amazon. Big. John Wayne big. Brown, muddy and churning, thick mats of green vegetation crowding its banks. Then it was gone.

We enjoyed another great BA layover—it’s one of my favorites—and the following night we resumed the dismal night schedule. On the way back up north, as is the standard practice, the captain gets the last rest period and the F/O flies.

Those first 6 ½ dark hours creep by with increasing agony until at last it’s my turn. I get in there and try to sleep, but feel like I’m not doing any good at it, then suddenly I feel the deck rotate downward, hear the slipstream increasing to a roar by the window, and hear the double “ding” on the cabin chime—a signal from the pilots to the flight attendants that we are descending through 18,000 feet, into what’s called the “sterile cockpit” regime. A flight attendant shakes me. I go up there and find the two lads, in a heated hurry to get home, are pushing the 767 hard. There’s Dulles Airport already in the windshield and getting bigger fast.

The radios are bleating instructions from the controllers and by the time I’ve got my shoulder harness on we are talking to Dulles Approach Control. I barely complete the Descent Checklist when the F/O calls “GEAR DOWN, LANDING CHECKLIST.” I do the checklist and look up between items, seeing that the lad at the controls is rolling in on final like an F-18 to the carrier deck (he used to do that). Things are happening fast for a guy who just a few minutes ago was fast asleep, and suddenly, BLAM. We’re down and rolling out. He slows it and I take over. The gate is right there as we leave the runway, and in one minute we are parked and the engines are spooling down.

The two F/Os grab my hand, say great flight, grab their bags, and are gone in dizzying speed. And me? I slowly head down to the lounge for an additional snooze before going home.

Funny how I will some day miss all, this.

Incurable Madness

What can be said of a man who returns home from his daily toil and throws up the colossal ruse that, in order to relax, he must toil again? Does the surgeon come home and dissect rabbits after dinner? Does the accountant relax before the fire and eagerly immerse himself in the paperback edition of Generally Accepted Accounting Practices? Does a farmer leave the field after a tough day’s work yearning to dig in the vegetable garden? And why would I come home war weary from airline rat races and then head to the nearest airport?

I’ll tell you why—to hear those words crackling through my headset that promise the ultimate form of relaxation is at hand: Yak Flight, check in.

Yak 2
Yak 3
Yak 4

Freedom is Flying, so goes the proverb, but formation flying seems to (excuse me) fly in the face of that proverb. As a wingman, you are not free to maneuver as you please, to go where you will, all those things recreational pilots extol. The wingman is as captive as the slave, the incarcerated criminal, the assembly line worker. For him to stray is calamity. Why, then, do us few eccentrics who seem to enjoy this madness consider it relaxation?

Adrenalin, dude. That’s what it’s about.

At last weekend’s annual Moontown Airport Fly-fest we assembled six Yaks and Nanchangs form around the area and flew from sun up to sun down both days, concocting fly-bys, different formation shapes, opposing passes, smoke passes, and various position changes, taking passengers, delighting onlookers, and having a grand time. Occasionally some of us would break away from the formation routine and do some hard core aerobatics. A million pictures must have been shot, and Jimmy Holt has made about 100 of them available on his Flikr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moontown

As the weekend flashed by, dozens of people emerged from the crowds and asked to ride our backseats, but most had to be politely turned down because promises of those seats had been out for weeks. But one little boy, about 10, kept nagging us for a ride. Wouldn’t go away. Clung to us like a hungry mutt from the time we climbed down till the next mount-up. 

The little boy’s persistence finally got him his ride late Sunday afternoon. I hope it doesn’t inflict him with this incurable madness that infects some of us, but I suspect he went away plotting a future that would take him soaring into the heights of insanity. I hope he makes it.

If Yak madness inflicts you too, look on the right side menu of the Decision Height home page and click, “Yak Heaven,” Moontown Airport,” and “Just the Way He Dreamed It.” Good luck.

Here are a few of Jimmy's pics