I feel like I cut my teeth in 24MC.  We flew together for 5 years.  But at first I was like a newly minted student pilot, since after all, it had been almost 20 years since I had gotten my license.  N24MC sported an advanced avionics suite:  a Garmin GPS Pilot III consisting only of an arrow that indicated the direction to your intended destination, similar to an ADF, if any of you remember those.  But to me, the Garmin was a Godsend, I was amazed at it’s accuracy.

I knew that I needed to practice so I decided to replicate my student pilot training.  Of course I started with a lot of time in the pattern getting more comfortable with landings.  And I laboriously planned cross country flights, some of which were ridiculously short in terms of time and distance.  One of my biggest concerns was fuel:  I had no faith in the fuel gauge and it took a while to get comfortable with the fuel burn per hour.  And, believe it or not, initially I didn’t trust the GPS:  I actually plotted courses out on a sectional and monitored, or tried to monitor, my progress using the sectional during the flight. N24MC was not rigged perfectly, or the trim was not adjusted quite right, so as soon as I would let go of the stick, the plane entered a descending right hand spiral turn; trying to turn the sectional over to follow the course required a fair amount of altitude.

One of my first cross country flights took me to Sacramento–KSAC.  The flight itself was uneventful; refueling was not.  I wasn’t accustomed to using the standard aviation gas nozzle and its large hose; the fuel pump at KRBL was similar to the old style automotive pumps.  For some reason when I got the hose to the plane at KSAC, there was no gas coming out of the nozzle, or I should say, it just trickled out. Of course I kept squeezing the handle trying to make it work, but that did no good.  It was only when I turn around that I could see that a kink in the hose was the likely culprit.  Not wanting to set the nozzle on the ground, I carried it back and started to fix the kink.  The gas gushed out the nozzle:  the valve was stuck wide open.  By the time I got the nozzle shut off, I was standing in a ten foot wide puddle of 100LL, my clothes were soaked, my eyes stung and I could taste the gas.   The best part:  nobody was around to see it.  The worst part:  I still hadn’t gotten any gas in the plane.

And then there was a trip to Hayward; I was enjoying the sights in the San Francisco bay area so much that I managed to bust the TCA.  I had to phone the tower when I landed and fortunately the controller didn’t make a stink about it.  Nobody would have known who I was if I hadn’t called in to land.

But one thing that I still had yet to overcome was my aversion to turbulence: I still avoided flying when the wind was anything less than “perfect”, which defies definition, and would quickly return to the airport at the first sign of bumps.  But gradually, I came to grips with this fear.  The first turning point came when I was due for my next BFR; the instructor put me through all the paces:  stalls, steep bank turns, slow flight, spin entries (we had no parachutes so spins would have been “illegal”) and numerous landings at a relatively short runway.  By the end of the BFR, I was soaked from sweat, but on my solo return flight to KRBL, I felt fabulous, and for the first time was oblivious to bumps:  I was flying the plane.  Another turning point came when I was laid up with Shingles:  my main pastime was watching videos which featured aerobatic flying and all the while I said to myself, “I can do that”.  As soon as the Shingles abated I headed straight to the airport and pushed and pulled the Pitts through a series of maneuvers (none of which would have scored any points in an actual competition) and, again, after the flight, I was elated.  And finally there was the stern resolution that I made reminding myself that I was flying for the fun of it, and wouldn’t let anything else get in the way of that enjoyment.  Gradually, the fear abated and the enjoyment and the utility of the plane increased many times over.

Now the Pitts is anything but a cross country traveler, but that is how I used it.  I set a goal to visit all of the airports that looked like they had a decent restaurant where I could go for lunch.  So that took me all over northern and central California and into Nevada; later, after my family and I moved to the central coast, I covered many parts of southern California as well.  Occasionally I would roll or loop the plane and I was fascinated with inverted flight (trying to navigate off the GPS while inverted is a real hoot) but if it diverted from getting from point A to point B, I avoided it.

I never flew 24 MC anywhere the limit of it’s capabilities; it was a fun plane to fly; I enjoyed it.  But occasionally, and more frequently after five years, I wanted something that would fly a little faster and go a little further.  So, after five years and almost 400 hours on the tach, once again I was turning the pages of Trade-A-Plane, but not too certain what I was trying to find.

Circa 2006.  So now I owned an airplane but knew that I wasn’t ready to fly it.  So I would go to the hangar and sit in it and make airplane noises.  (I stole that line from Sean Worthington….sorry, Sean)

Once again I contacted Ken Erickson to see if he could arrange a thorough checkout.  Ken was too busy, so he contacted Wayne Handley; Wayne was too busy so he contacted John King from the San Francisco bay area and John agreed to help.  Now mind you, I barely was even acquainted with Ken and had never met the other two guys and yet they were willing to go out of their way to help.  I was amazed.  Wayne even went so far as to phone me to follow up to make sure that everything was taken care of.  Let me repeat that:  He phoned me to follow up.  Who the hell phones people to follow up anymore?  I guess I spent too many years in retail and was really  jaded.

The day came and John King arrived at the Red Bluff airport to begin the checkout:  he was driving a twin Cessna.  The meager amount of money that John was going to charge me wouldn’t make a dent in the cost of the fuel he would be burning to go back and forth to Red Bluff.

The first day got off to a very slow start; in fact, it never got started:  John was not comfortable with the way the canopy lock was working and wanted me to find a mechanic who could adjust it.  That was it.  John got back in the C310 and left.  End of Day 1.

After finding a local mechanic to make the requested adjustments, Day 2 arrived and I waited for the C310 to arrive; it didn’t.  Instead, a small black and white biplane approached the field:  it sounded like a P-51 making a high speed pass.  I had never heard a plane this loud.  I learned later that the plane was called the Phoenix, an experimental amateur built homebuilt that John used in aerobatic competitions at the unlimited level.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

The checkout began in earnest, complete with parachutes.  In my mind I knew that I had 14 hours in a Pitts from back in Texas; I even soloed in it.  But my mind had forgotten all of the subtle technique; the hands and feet didn’t know what to do.  The runway at Red Bluff, KRBL, is an ample 100 feet wide and my take offs used most of the width of the runway; surprisingly my landings, if you could call them that, were not quite so out of control.  I was over-controlling the plane and didn’t realize it.  Day 1 and Day 2 were not very pretty.

Sometime along about Day 3 I said to myself before John arrived: “I don’t know what I am doing wrong on these take-offs, but on the next one I am not going to touch the rudder pedals until I see the nose start to move.”  When John arrived and we started out, I tried out my idea; it worked and from that point forward the check out went smoothly.  John would not sign me off on a BFR in a Pitts unless I demonstrated some spin recoveries.  So we did some spins.  And then we did some loops and rolls, etc.  And I was on my way.

Because of John’s schedule or the uncertainties of the weather, the entire checkout process actually took a few months.  While I was cooling my heels between actual flying days, I spent a lot of time on the internet reading about flying.  I discovered an article written by the man, Dan Rihn, who had designed the Phoenix, the plane that John owned.  I was amazed that Dan Rihn, starting when he was in college or a few years thereafter, was designing planes; and, he designed not one, but several world class planes:  the Phoenix, the Sunbird, the Goshawk, Awesome Lady and the One Design.  Over the years, if I’ve read the article once, then I’ve read it fifty times.  Little did I know and I never could have predicted that my life would cross paths with Dan Rihn ten years later.  You can find the article here; its a great read.