A man's got to know his limitations.
-Harry Callahan
Dirty Harry
Lying here in bed at my mom's house, unpacking yesterday.
After bumbling out the door ten minutes late yesterday morning, I got a hug from Peg in front of the terminal at Elimira-Corning, and walked into a rare moment at the metal detector there--a line. Seems a very old woman and her two daughters who were a good bit older than me were having trouble mastering their roles in the TSA security theater. One was inexplicably carrying a tub of strawberries. The mother couldn't figure out how to load a bag on the conveyor, the sequence in which to take off her shoes, etc. Then their luggage was a virtual Easter egg hunt for the corpulent TSA lady at the x-ray machine, leading to bag searches and more delay. One couldn't find her shoes, which were stuck in the conveyor after she failed to put them in a tub.
Sometimes the modern age passes us by, or we were never actively on board in the first place. An adumbration there.
The flight was on-time, and with a two-hour layover in Detroit I settled into a big swivel chair in the Sky Club with a delightful latte, perched in front of a plate glass window that allowed me to watch all the chumps scrambling on the concourse below to their gates. I would've felt like airline royalty, but for the empirical fact that the Sky Club isn't quite as upscale as it used to be. They let me in there after all. A pudgy thirty-something in sweats loudly participated in a conference call while drinking a mimosa at ten in the morning. A posse of young men sat in a circle around a table filled with empty glasses, obviously a little drunk, maybe heading for a bachelor party someplace warm. Three generations of foreigners of some flavor clustered maskless around one's iPhone, which was playing a video recording of what sounded like bad karaoke for the benefit of everyone in the Sky Club.
Philistines all. The Sky Club is a lot less fun when you can't drink.
And this morning, I could not. My two hours were spent immersed in reading about the intimidating glass panel on the new airplane, a tangle of screens and functions navigated by buttons that seemed only marginal descriptive, and certainly not intuitive. The human factors engineer who designed this mess was clearly autistic, or maybe just younger than the old round-dial fighter pilot trying to make sense of it all.
I told a friend, an anesthesiologist, that it was like if he'd fallen into a coma immediately after his residency, woke up twenty years later, and was whisked into an operating room full of machines he'd never seen before, just ahead of the first patient. Except the operating room is flying along at 200 miles an hour.
We arrived at DFW on time. I walked out the door to the rental center shuttle bus, and found myself crammed inside in a standing-room only mob. What social distancing? One young man with a beard just beginning to go a little gray was wearing a ballcap proclaiming, "Lions Not Sheep."
Oh yeah. We're in Texas.
The rental center featured a line at the Hertz counter with 40 folks being serviced by two employees, while a third looked at her watch and walked off on break. When I finally ran that gauntlet and walked into the parking structure, there was only one car left, a little Nissan Versa, still dripping from the car wash. I dashed to the car and threw my bags in the back, stealing a march on three rather corpulent young Hispanic women who moaned in breathless disappointment when they saw I'd arrived first. All that gym time finally paid off.
The drive to Arlington was uneventful. When I arrived at Van Bortel Aviation, my salesman Blake was waiting out front, eager to walk me out to the new sled.
"Skip's already out there. I think you guys are going flying."
A little trepidation swept over me, here in the eleventh hour of my day, famished and ready for a nap. This was supposed to be ground school day.
A sixty-five-ish guy in a windbreaker and white Cirrus ballcap was adding oil to the engine when I walked out to the plane. Oh, here's a picture.
Something else, isn't it?
When Skip turned around, it was like I was looking at my beloved late Uncle Lehman. Skip's a lawyer himself, who hung up his cleats a long time ago to play on his ranch and teach other overtasked professionals how to fly very sophisticated airplanes.
"Weather's supposed to be really bad tomorrow, so I thought we'd fly out to Mineral Wells today."
This was not a request. I fetched my headset and kneeboard out of the car.
Skip flew the first leg to Mineral Wells in the left, aircraft commander seat, while I tried to keep up with all that was going on around me. The Columbia 400 is a beast compared to the Mighty Cardinal, climbing out at 1500 feet per minute, and roaring along at 4500 feet and 165 knots indicated without breaking a sweat. A confusing tangle of information was on the flat screens in front of us, Skip constantly hitting buttons and turning knobs to reveal on the screen other airplanes, rain shower cells, and the boundaries of controlled airspace around us.
After a landing or two, Skip rolled us onto the ramp at Mineral Wells and shut down. We switched seats, I started the plane, and away we went.
"You fighter guys know to keep the nose wheel on the center line, right?" I was a few feet off to one side as we taxiied. Skip is a stickler for detail, as I would come to find out. "If you don't do it exactly the same way every time, all you're doing is experimenting. Every flight will be different." He's right, of course.
We took the active and I pushed up the throttle to full power. It's no Eagle, but damn. Just damn.
I set up for a series of left hand patterns, and proceeded to make nine landings. I was constantly behind the plane, fishing for switches and busting altitudes and generally working my ass off. Landing was trickier than the Cardinal--I haven't flown a true low wing since 1987, and ground effect had me floating around in the flare, a disconcerting feeling with Texas's strong winds.
We popped up above the field and did steep turns, slow flight, and power on and off stalls, all standard stuff on a transition ride. Skip got on me for being 40 feet off my altitude. He got on me for setting the manifold pressure at 12.3 when he said it should be 12. He got on me if I lost five knots when I was trying to hold an airspeed just above stall.
Then I tried to start manipulating the G1000 panel, fishing around between us for buttons and knobs and inevitably grabbing the wrong one. I was sweating a lot.
"No no no!" was a phrase oft-repeated over the next hour or so.
Finally we headed back just below the clouds to Arlington, where I made another three landings while trying to sequence in a busy traffic pattern. I greased on the last landing like a boss.
"Saving the best for last," I commented on rollout.
"Seems that way," he replied. "And don't touch that flap switch until you're off the runway."
I knew that. One develops bad habits without the occasional chastisement from a flight instructor. I ought to know. I used to be one.
After a quick debrief I dropped off Skip at his hotel, nixed plans to meet my old squadron commander for a cocktail because it was already 7:30 and I had a 44 mile drive to Mom's house, and started snaking my way along the freeways to McKinney, unpacking all this on the phone with P.
Today's supposed to be ground school on account of the weather. Very good. I need to get used to turning switches at zero AGL and zero knots. A lot to learn.
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