You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.
-Ernest Hemingway
A lethargic old man is rumbling around the Sinclair Mansion this morning, dropping into a morning doze as he reads, as I read, the morning paper on my tablet. It is gray and dreary outside, with the promise of light rain most of the day. My head is a little muddled after we had guests, the family of one of Peg's dearest friends at the hospital, over to celebrate St. Pat's Day last night. Not our usual school night fun, and we're both getting too old for this. At least I am.
Our super high tech espresso machine has begun to misfire in strange and disturbing ways. It's not so high tech as to have a timer function, unfortunately, so for Peg to get her wake-up latte at 5:20 I have to roll out of bed no later than 5:10 to push and hold the power button and bring the boiler to life. This morning my eyes popped open at 4, and I figured I'd go ahead and shuffle into the kitchen for our predawn ritual, me and this Italian marvel. I pushed and held the power button. Nothing. I turned it off and tried again. The temperature number on the front illuminated, but I did not hear the boiler filling, because the boiler was not filling. I pushed the hot water button to see if it would squirt. Nope. I went back and fumbled for my phone on the nightstand, so I could look up how to troubleshoot the issue. I tried unplugging the whole thing, waiting a few seconds, then trying again, but the damn machine kept acting like it didn't know what I wanted, perhaps because I did not know how to curse at it in Italian. I laid my forehead on the kitchen counter in frustration. Twenty minutes had gone by. Finally, I gave it one more try, and the machine sprang to life as if the prior sequence had never occurred. Go figure.
The steam wand also seems to be developing a form of mechanical prostatitis, but we'll leave that one alone this morning.
I drove Peg to work so I'd have the truck to shop for dress shoes a little later. Someone has recklessly requested an in-person mediation in the panhandle next week, and all of my dress shoes are back at the farm. I won't go cheap, but I also won't go crazy on this purchase.
One of the two lawyers says he can't figure out why the other thinks we have to do this mediation sans Zoom. I'm guessing, having known all the players for years, that he has an item of MAGA apparel somewhere in his closet. Oh well--it gives me the chance to stop by the office, where the managing partner has taken to leaving a cardboard cutout in my chair as a reminder of the Ghost of Corning, and to make the rounds with friends I haven't seen in a while. They've all had their shots, or had the disease.
This need to go back to the Sunshine State, and the fact that I'll be back there the week following as well, this time for the Big Shot, has me thinking about our airplane issues. Yes, we have airplane issues, serious ones. When we bought the Mighty Cardinal a little over a year ago, neither of us saw the pandemic playing out as it did, highlighting the need to go places while minimizing our time on commercial airliners. It's a fun little airplane, but somewhat on the slow side, and at exactly fifty years old its round dial technology limits its utility in bad weather, and it lacks the modern safety features that are now pretty common in general aviation aircraft. I'm comfortable with all that, having grown up in the military flying beat up antiques; Peg is less so.
It makes sense to start the process of finding the right airplane by looking at our needs. Mostly, we are looking for speed and safety. It's about a thousand miles by air from the farm in Perry to go see Issac and Olivia in Andover. It's 850 miles to Dallas to see my folks and my sister. Wyldswood to our beloved Corning is, like Boston, about a thousand mile flight. All long hauls. It makes a difference if you're doing 135 knots true airspeed in the Cardinal versus 200 or so in a modern plane, and whether you have weather radar and the option of climbing to 25,000 feet if there are storms on the horizon.
My first discussion with Peg on this topic wasn't terribly practical. "You know dear, there are surplus military aircraft that show up on the market from time-to-time. Imagine flying to Boston at 420 knots and 40,000 feet. It'd be a gamechanger!
Then she saw a photo of the candidate airplane, which I recall as a MiG-21 trainer:
Her subsequent inquisition told me this wasn't going to be a viable option.
"How old is that thing"
"Probably the 1960s sometime."
"Does it have weather radar? Or anything modern for that matter?"
"Probably not."
"It's a jet--how much fuel would it burn?"
"Lots. Going fast means burning more fuel. And it's really, really fast."
"Would I have to sit behind you? Would I have to wear a flight helmet? What about my hair?"
Okay, the MiG is out.
Maybe another military candidate fits the bill, like the venerable, super-cool T-28 Trojan.
A favorite of the South Vietnamese Air Force during that conflict, the T-28 is sort of fast, growls mightily with that big ol' radial engine, and you can fly around with the canopy open, which is worth huge style points. My buddy Jive flies one at airshows (lucky bastard).
Peg points out, however, that she'd still be in the back seat rather than beside me, and with the canopy open her hair would get tussled. Then I let slip that my old friend Flash died in one when he was flying the airshow circuit, and that was the end of the Trojan as a possible replacement plane.
Whenever we fly into an airport of any size, as I'm taxiing to our parking space Peg will coo and point at a sleek bird parked there on the ramp.
"What's that one?"
"It's a Cirrus, Peg. As usual."
P has had a crush on the Cirrus for a while.
A new one will set you back around a million dollars, so we're solidly in the used market. Doctors and other bad pilots love them because they have a parachute, so if you get your behind in a crack you can pull the handle, and float down into a field somewhere. The idea has never appealed to me, but P likes having an out, even if using it renders the plane unable ever to fly again.
Otherwise, it's a fine choice, getting you there at around 180 knots (210 miles an hour), or up to 200 knots if you push it a little. Depending on what the previous owner decided to spend, it can have most of the gadgets of a modern plane, even if it's fifteen years old.
The plane that's piqued my interest most of all, however, is the Columbia/Cessna 400.
They don't come up for sale all that often (only four in the whole country right now), and get snapped up quickly when they're offered.
This thing is a beast--over 200 knots at cruise if you want to go fast, 185 if you're feeling thrifty and want to burn less fuel. A 25,000 foot service ceiling.
And the avionics are all that and a bag of chips.
Stormscope. The same traffic avoidance system you'd find in an airliner. GPS with terrain depicted. An autopilot function that will not only fly your missed approach for you, but allow your passenger to push a button on the panel and the plane will fly itself to the nearest airport and shoot the approach if the pilot is incapacitated. A nice feature if your driver is in his late 50s, with a high stress job, and a weakness for Jameson's and fried food.
Alas, we still need to sell the Mighty Cardinal before all this becomes a serious item of discussion. And, of course, there is the matter of budget, and how much plane we can actually afford. Still, on these gloomy upstate winter mornings, it's nice to picture P and me cruising along above the clouds, going somewhere fun and having fun getting there, without tussling her hair. Maybe one day.
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