Perhaps like a lot of other dreamers the world over, I've often imagined myself doing something like this gentleman did back in 1991 - get a beautifully restored old biplane, and just go anywhere I liked for as long as it felt right to me.
Of course, most of us can't do that for several obvious reasons, like our jobs, our families, our obligations to paying our debts, and all that. But it warms an old dreamer's heart to sometimes come across somebody who has actually lived that dream. Not just lived it, but wrote a hell of an interesting and readable book about it. Not his first book, either, and that's likely why he could afford to take the time and spend the money to live his dream, and take his great old plane to every state in the mainland U.S.A., except Alaska. He didn't go to Alaska with it, because, as he says in the book, "I don't go anywhere you have to chew your whiskey and cook your motor oil."
If you can still find this book, and you're yearning for a good read, you'll thoroughly enjoy it.
I've indeed read this very book (yes, English version haha) 10 years ago. The author has an easy way of writing, and he has written a couple more books, The Saucer, a science fiction story being one of them which I also boughtbayt haven't read as yet.
ReplyDeleteHe also (still?) has an informative website.
I can also recommend reading Rinker Buck: "Flight of Passage": ...in the summer of 1966, Rinker and Kernahan Buck, two schoolboys from New Jersey, bought a dilapidated Piper Cup for $300, rebuilt it in their barn, and took off on the journey of a lifetime - a daring flight across the Rockies to California. They became the youngest aviators on record to fly America coast to coast, navigating all the way without a radio because they couldn't afford one...
I'll have to try to find that one about the kids and their Piper Cub,and thank you for mentioning it.
ReplyDeleteAt one of our annual air shows here at Abbotsford years ago, while my two youngest sons were just little guys, we took them to see the planes,
and there was a lady pilot with a Piper Cub who did a sort of comedy act with it, and she made that thing 'dance' across the field about 50 feet above the runway in the most wobbly way I ever saw a plane flown. It was both amusing and scary to watch. Of those two boys, one loved the noise and the planes, but the other little guy was terrified, and as I realized too late, I shouldn't have brought him there - proving once again that parents can be really stupid sometimes.
I've always been attracted by planes, and during the early 1950s I even took a brief leave from my civilian job as an electrical power station operator apprentice to enlist as a pilot trainee in the RCAF, as Canada's Air Force was then known.
Trouble was, I opted to remain in eastern Canada for basic training instead of choosing the west where most of my group decided they wanted to go - and where I was, the weather was so rotten that fall and winter, we didn't get off the ground more than three or four times in a month. Normal schedule was for flying training half a day every weekday until the first nine months were completed.
I got discouraged about not being able to fly, which was the only reason I joined - I wasn't there for the 'spit & polish' - and so I asked to be released to return to my civilian job. They let me go, but only after making me do menial jobs around the HQ building for six weeks while they showed me who was boss. By then, I was about ready to go "over the hill" regardless. But looking back now, I sometimes wish I'd stuck with it and discovered if I could have made a red-hot pilot or not.
My daring adventures on motorcycles in more recent times suggests I might have been a real show-off, once I got comfortable with their scrap-iron and learned how to throw it around properly.
That's hard to do while sitting on the ground admiring almost zero visibility and cussing a lot.
On the other hand, I might have dug a hole ten metres deep, like one of those guys from my class did later on, after they'd got into jets.
He and two buddies were all up one afternoon practicing intercepts, and when they finished at altitude,
one smart-ass called out over the radio, "Last one down buys the beer!" and shoved the nose down hard. The guy who dug the hole didn't begin his pull-out soon enough, and the engine shafts of his CF-100 were in the bottom of a
smoking hole over 10 metres deep
when they got to it. All that was ever found of him were his boots and some tattered bits of flying gear. It's called "Pilot Error" in
those official reports.
Out of 110 of us at primary selection, only 15 made it through to the end of the advanced training to become front-line fighter pilots. Not a very encouraging average.... and really, why would I want to become a flying "hired gun" anyway?
But you don't ask yourself those questions when you're still young and horny and desperate.
That's right.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the interesting story - I felt like sitting by the fire and listening...
(;-))
...have a good week.
If you look in my profile, there is now a link to send me email.....
ReplyDeleteand the email address matches (almost) the title of this blog -
raysbloggingagain@hotmail.com
I'm thinking maybe I ought to apologize for putting you to sleep and having you fall out of your chair and bruise your whatever...
I do babble on, don't I?
I'll try to be less 'windy'....
No no no it's my obligation to thank you for reading that truely interesting story.
ReplyDeleteI have the capability to just sit and listen as if it were reality! Maybe because of all the reading of the stories in my books...
Thanks for the email link.
Have a good week, Ray.