Extraordinary flights
Flying can change your life
It would be wiser instead to engage in hangar flying at the Waypoint Café.
Between rounds of coffee, one pilot in our group asked, “Aside from your first solo, what was your most extraordinary or impactful flight?” Not an easy question, I thought. I have been blessed with some truly remarkable flights. There was, for example, when I conceived, organized, and led in 1995 the first flight—civil or military—ever allowed between Israel and Jordan. This historic Peace Flight consisted of 35 lightplanes carrying 135 Americans, Israelis, and Jordanians. It was personally approved by Jordan’s King Hussein and Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Another extraordinary flight was when my son, Brian, and I were cockpit crewmembers working together for the first time on a TWA flight. I was the captain of that Lockheed L–1011 flight to Berlin, and he was the flight engineer. It was a rite of passage. Some years after I retired, the tables were turned. Brian was the captain of an American Airlines Airbus A321 from Los Angeles to Hawaii, and I was his passenger on this, his first transpacific flight. The passage of the baton was complete. It was difficult to know which of these two flights was most memorable, most cherished.
Then there was my first transatlantic flight in a small airplane, a Piper Comanche, in 1959. You cannot imagine how thrilling it was to make landfall at Dingle Bay, Ireland, the same place on the map where Charles A. Lindbergh had made landfall 32 years earlier.
I again passed over Dingle Bay during the early 1970s. This was during some of my TWA flights around the world. Each of these Boeing 707 circumnavigations took 10 days eastbound or 11 days westbound and included exciting layovers as well as those infamous “checkerboard” approaches to Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport (HKG). Most remarkable was being paid for these adventures. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
Like many general aviation pilots, my bucket list contained the desire to fly military airplanes. I’ve been fortunate to have flown a number of World War II aircraft. These include a B–29 Superfortress (Fifi) and soloing a P–51 Mustang. I’ve even had the privilege of logging time in some of the warbirds in our current military arsenal such as the CV–22 Osprey and the B–52 Stratofortress. It has been equally joyful to share these experiences by writing in this magazine about what it is like to fly such incredible machines.
My most extraordinary experience in an airplane, however, was a “high flight” to above 70,000 feet in a Lockheed U–2 Dragon Lady. At that altitude and at full throttle, its jet engine sipped less fuel than it consumed while idling on the ground. The Sierra Nevada, the mountainous spine of California, was a mere corrugation on the Earth, and Lake Tahoe looked like a fishing hole. “High-flying” jetliners etched their contrails far below. We looked down and askance at the tops of thunderstorms.
I could not detect air noise through the helmet of my pressure suit, and I felt solitude like never before. I heard only my own breathing and the soft hum of avionics through my headset. Atmospheric pressure was less than an inch of mercury. Directly above the sky was black, and the curvature of the Earth was detectable. I was soaring at the upper limit of the atmosphere, at the edge of space.
Flying a U–2 was an epiphany, an experience like no other that somehow altered my perspectives. (Shown here is the U.S. Air Force patch given to me to wear on my space suit.)
Each of the others in our group that morning described their own extraordinary flights. We concluded unanimously, however, that becoming aviators and washing our wings in the wind unquestionably changed our lives forever.
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