Background

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The fake date on each subject is to force the 13 subjects to be in the order shown.


You can read some of my other travel blogs by clicking on:
       DresellySail.blogspot.com 
       DresellyUshuaia.blogspot.com       
       DresellyLabrador.blogspot.com      
       Dreselly.blogspot.com       


                      Dick Dreselly   Brunswick, Maine

Beginnings 1931 - 1944

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return".  Leonardo da Vinci

The first time I can remember looking up in wonder was the evening of November 23, 1931, when I was almost 7.  That was a lot closer to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln than to that of Barack Obama, only a generation after the Wright Brothers first flew, and 3 years after Charles Lindbergh turned the eyes of the world skyward with his solo flight from New York to Paris.   Perhaps my favorite comic strip then was Buck Rogers, in which space ships traversed the heavens.   That memorable night my parents  stopped our car and woke me.  We got out to watch an apparent space ship just above us.   A huge dark cloud obscuring the moon and stars, it was outlined by white and red and green lights, and accompanied by the thrumming of 8 motors as it  slowly passed perhaps 400 feet overhead.   It could fly that low because there were no TV tower obstructions.  As newspapers reported the next morning, the apparition was the Navy's  USS Akron (ZRS-4), then the largest of the world's several dirigibles.   It could retrieve, launch and store 5 small planes, and had a range of over ten thousand miles.

Actually the eyes of small boys and adults alike were turned skyward whenever an airplane was seen above.   Accounts of daring aviators distracted adults from the Great Depression, and we boys built model airplanes from balsa wood and tissue paper.

In 1941 I bought the first REAL airplane I ever saw for sale, a tiny tattered Aeronca C2 displayed on a lawn.  I could afford the $300 price because I had graduated from delivering newspapers for a penny each to a $75-a-week night-shift job while I attended full-time high school, building Liberty Ships for the coming War.   I was 16, but met the minimum age of 18 by lying about it.    I sold the craft two years later, and never flew in a small plane as pilot or passenger until 1950.

In all the accounts below, distances are in statute miles and speeds in statute miles per hour.   That was current in 1950, but now nautical miles are used.  Vintage instruments and modern aircraft instruments have the same calibration difference.

CessnaS 140 and First 170A: 3/1950- 6/1951

In the spring of 1950 I learned to fly, courtesy of the GI Bill, a government schooling subsidy for those who had been in uniform in the recent War.  For each lesson my young instructor, Roger Atwood, would fly his nearly new 2-seat  Cessna 140 , registered as NC2189V, up from Northhampton to a tractor path in a corn field near where I lived and worked for a non-profit youth travel organization in Northfield, Massachusetts.   My lessons were ecstasy alternating with despair.  I loved flying, but it seemed Roger was constantly reminding me that I was OK in one dimension while courting disaster in the other two.   However, after almost 8 hours of instruction I was launched on my first solo flight.   Takeoff and cruise are simple, I thought, but I could wreck the plane on landing.   That first flight was supposed to last just a few minutes, but it was suddenly acutely clear that nobody could help me, and I could delay the landing only until the two gas tanks were empty.   So I landed.   It was the best landing I would make for quite a while, as first solo landings are reputed to be.

Now I was allowed to risk the airplane and my own neck in solo flight, but the law required I have 33 more hours, with and without the instructor, until I could take up passengers and risk their necks.  I was taught new skills, like landing in cross winds and high winds, and flights to other states.  I was also taught how to recover from tailspins, which after years of controversy is no longer taught to new pilots.   I was taught "pilotage", the deceptively difficult skill of navigating by comparing a map with the view outside the windows, necessary because many planes lacked radios and GPS hadn't been invented.   Twenty years later, in 1970,  I first flew a plane with a radio, and thirty years after that, in 2000, I first used a GPS.

That Cessna, like most of the planes I've flown since, was a "taildragger", meaning the third wheel to support the plane on the ground is at its tail.   The great majority of modern planes have the third wheel under the nose of the plane, making it much easier and safer to land at most airports, but very difficult to land on very rough or soggy fields.   So most Alaskan "bush" planes are taildraggers.

A mere 2 1/2 flying hours after I made that first solo, in the 2-seat Cessna 140,  Monroe Smith,  my father-in-law at the time, let me solo his nearly new Cessna 170A ,  registered as NC9115A, which had 4 seats and a lot more horsepower.   Monroe was an intrepid risk taker, as allowing a very inexperienced pilot to fly his nearly new airplane costing the price of 5 new Fords would indicate.  He crashed that plane that year on a very tight Northfield pasture on which I landed successfully 31 years later  in another  Cessna 170A.... The clickable link above shows the small differences between the 170, the 170A and the 170B.

After Roger tested and issued my "private pilot ticket" I had 44 1/2 hours of dual and solo time in my logbook.   When I quit flying 53 years later I had accumulated another 1453 hours, but only one more rating: seaplanes.   That meant I was supposed to fly only in VFR (Visual Flight Rules) conditions, and not in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) conditions.   Some of us amateur pilots maintain that it's safer for us not to be IFR rated, because that would tempt us to fly legally in weather that our lack of recent IFR experience might make dangerous.   But like most VFR-rated pilots of long standing, sometimes I've edged into conditions where I could have used an IFR rating, if I had had the necessary "blind flying" instruments.

I flew no more until I went to Luxembourg a month later.

Aeronca Champ: Luxembourg 1950

For two 1950 summer months I was employed by Youth Argosy, a US non-profit travel agency, in Luxembourg, a country 2/3 the area of Rhode Island.   I became the only American who had a  Luxembourg pilot's license, and may have remained so.

















I found only one small private plane at the Luxembourg city airport, an Aeronca Champ  registered as ONT,  imported from the USA by the haberdashers guild.  Perhaps because our president, Harry Truman, had been in that profession, perhaps because Americans had liberated their country about 5 years earlier, or perhaps because I had all of 44 1/2 hours in small planes (none after I was awarded my "private pilot ticket"), they allowed me to rent it.   In 3 short flights I landed at every airport in the country: all two of them.

One pleasant evening I rode my bicycle out to the airport to get familiar with this unfamiliar plane nobody had shown me how to fly.   After the usual check-up and warm-up I pushed the throttle all the way in, and accelerated down the rough grass runway for takeoff.   As the runway end approached, the plane had not reached flying speed, so I taxied back and tried again where the grass was not as tall.    A few seconds after I left the ground a flashing red light appeared in the control tower, the international signal to land immediately.  So I made the necessary four right turns, rounded so my path was more like an oval than a rectangle, and came in low on final approach over high tension lines.   As I crossed the wires I felt as if some force briefly restrained the plane, but I kept up flying speed and landed.  I taxied to where I'd started, and got out to find the cause of the takeoff difficulty and the tower's red light and the odd sensation over the power lines.   I found a tangle of wires caught in the braces between the main wheels, with 2 wire strands extending backward.   One strand ended about 50 feet back, but the other continued, continued.....  I could hardly believe what I found way back, like seeing a ghost, so I told nobody about it until  Flying magazine  published an article I wrote about it.  What I saw was the end of the long wire, nailed to a post.   In that entire brief flight I had been tethered like a captive animal.   The controller had seen the wires, and flashed the red light.   He told me that as I crossed the high tension lines there was a shower of sparks, apparently from the dragging short wire, which explained the tugging sensation.   As I biked back to my hotel people were out muttering on their lawns, for I had extinguished all the lights in half the city.

The metered time for all the above was a nominal 0.21 hours or 13 minutes, for engine warming, two takeoff runs, one flight, and taxiing.   That confirmed the brevity of the flight.

Much later I made some calculations, and figured that yes, the wire tension could have been just under the breaking point, and the plane could have withstood the pull as if a heavy passenger had occupied the back seat.   I wonder what might have happened had the red light not flashed.

I made another flight of 11 minutes there, and a one hour flight to the second airport,  a short strip nestled between  relatively high buildings in Esch, on the German border, where war damage was still evident.  Pilotage (navigating by matching the hand-held map to what I saw below) on this flight was the most difficult I have done before or since, because there were no significant roads, no railroads and no water until I reached the Moselle River at Esch, and mostly a vast irregular patchwork of small multicolored cultivated fields.   Not at all like New England.

First Commonwealth Skyranger: 4/1954- 7/1955

My flight log shows a few entries in the Cessna 140 after I returned from Europe, but none for the 34 months after June 1951.  During that time I became divorced and was a civil engineer for two seasons in Greenland.  There we worked 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, with overtime after 40 hours weekly.   IRS laws made those high earnings tax free if the worker was in a foreign country 510 full days out of any 18 month period.   That left about 37 days one could spend in the USA or on international waters, so we all would go home briefly and then "abroad" until Metcalf & Eddy called us back to Greenland.

So in April 1954, with a total of 61 dual and solo flying hours in my logbook, none in the previous 34 months, for $800 I bought a  Commonwealth Skyranger 185 , registered as NC92975, in Lewiston, Maine, for a flight to Mexico.   I went daily to the airport hoping for good weather.   I was rusty and this was an unfamiliar plane, but the not-abroad days were accumulating toward 37.   April 13 I settled for less than perfect conditions, and got 4 hours of  instruction (dual) and solo flight.

There were many times, some mentioned below, where it looks like I was pushing the envelope too far.   However, I got as comfortable flying the plane as I did a bicycle, there were far fewer other planes in the air to avoid then, and the Skyranger design was exceptionally safe.   Commonwealth Aviation was one of the several companies that started producing planes at the close of the War, to accommodate an anticipated huge market.   But production greatly exceeded demand, most small airplane builders went bankrupt, and one could buy a superbly engineered Skyranger for less than it had cost Commonwealth to build it.   Almost uniquely it had leading edge slots near the ends of both wings which, as the plane slowed to its stalling speed of 38 mph, would force air to flow smoothly over the wing ends, providing some support, so the plane would "mush" down instead of dropping like a stone as did other planes when stalling.   The Skyranger cruised at 95 mph, but  could be flown safely at 45 mph.   Flying into the wind on landing yielded a ground speed like that of a vigorously pedalled bike.

April 14 I headed for Florida, to visit my daughter and my friendly ex-inlaws.  At dusk I landed at Basking Ridge, NJ, where an X at each runway end indicated the field was closed.  I slept in an empty hangar.

The next morning I couldn't start the engine.  Since there was nobody else at the abandoned airport, I phoned an active airport for help.  An affable man arrived, and quickly discovered that I'd forgotten to turn on the magnetos after turning on the  main switch.  He told me that he couldn't get an airline job in spite of his flying experience in the European War and in the USA, because of the color of his skin.   Years later the FAA published a book about that Tuskegee Airman, which ended with his death on an African humanitarian flight.

As I approached Washington a black cloud wall ahead forced me to land at the next field.   It was Beltsville, a government facility not open to outsiders, but I was allowed to stay 2 hours until the storm passed.   The only air charts (maps) I could get in Lewiston ended about there, but I continued flying mapless past DC until I could spot an airport.   I spotted one in Virginia, landed, and bought charts for my entire route to Texas.   I landed that night in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The next morning the ceiling (bottom of solid clouds) was less than a thousand feet, so I didn't fly.  Then a small Tri-Pacer came in from the south, and out got the pilot, on crutches.   Quite illogically, I figured that if he could fly, so could I.   So I took off, flying at about 700 foot altitude.  However, I found that with no lakes or ocean like in Maine, and without the perspective of ample altitude, I was soon lost.   I struggled with the controls and map folds trying to match railroads and towns to what swiftly passed below, but I remained lost, so landed on a newly plowed field.  The farmer acted as if my landing were routine, and told me where I was.  I got back in,  pushed the throttle all the way in, the engine roared, and the plane didn't move.  That was because the furrows ran the short way of the field, and the 2 main wheels were in a furrow.   I rocked the elevators back and forth, and the plane struggled out of that furrow, then another, until finally I left the ground and flew between the barn and the house.   The weather improved, and I continued southward by "the other IFR": I Follow Railroad.

That evening I landed at Savannah, Georgia.   My initial IRS ration of 37 days was dwindling, but I couldn't immediately continue, since I'd never flown at night.   In a very lucky coincidence, when I paid for gasoline in the airport office I met a crop-duster,  D. L. Curry, who had just delivered a plane there and wanted a ride back home.  Home was 300 miles south, right beside the people I was to visit in Delray Beach, Florida.  So we flew south in darkness in my plane, a few miles inland from the bright lights along the coast.   He neither used nor needed a map.    Over the dark land west of Delray Beach there was an occasional pinpoint of light.   Over one he circled low, throttled back, and shouted "Hey Monroe" out the opened window until more lights appeared below.   In the picture below, the next day, are Monroe and Isabel Smith and their son Jonathan, with Monroe trying to start the engine by "propping" it.   Presumably I was in the plane in case the engine started.    Monroe and Isabel were my friends, the parents of my ex-wife, and the founders of American Youth Hostels. 

The next afternoon I left for Texas, circling the Gulf of Mexico.    From Brownsville, where USA and Mexican customs and immigration facilities were conveniently combined,  I flew towards La Pesca (The Fish), Mexico, 200 miles south.   My chart showed it as a village without an airport at the mouth of a big river, but an article in True magazine in a single sentence mentioned that there was a rudimentary airstrip there.  I flew the 2 hours a few feet above the beach, occasionally looking up at cows on the adjacent fields.  I saw not a single person or structure in those 2 hours. The photos in this segment are about 56 years old.  The beach photo was taken when I ascended a little higher to simultaneously manipulate airplane and camera controls.

Laws and government  permeated the airspace back home, but here was anarchy: no government rules, no government help.  After miles of sand I came on a big river meeting the sea, but the only "airport" seemed to be a short strip of sand festooned holes  made by the scurrying land crabs.
There was a tattered windsock and not a single structure.  I chased off the crabs in an initial low pass, then landed, carefully avoiding the big crab holes.  From a thatched hut across the river came an Indian, paddling a canoe made from a log hollowed out with an ax, to transport me to the village.   His family provided a hammock and breakfast, for which I paid the peso equivalent of a dollar.  They indicated that was quite generous.

After 2 weeks at the next stop, Tampico, I flew south along the Gulf to Tuxpan.  An airline pilot who had just come from Mexico City told me there were big breaks in the overcast, so I could fly up in the clear to continue on top to where Mexico's central plateau penetrated the clouds.   I tried that, but the hole was too small and I was immediately in thick cloud with zero visibility.  I  quickly descended to clear air.   After some thought I decided to climb up anyway.   I knew if I headed towards the rising ground in the soup, "the earth might rise up to smite thee", so  I turned left to fly parallel to the  jungle wall.   Below the clouds I set the plane to a uniform ascent of about 400 feet per minute, which with an expected cloud thickness of a thousand feet, meant I should emerge on top in less than 3 minutes.   It was like being in a telephone booth surrounded by brilliant white cotton,  which I could see swirling between me and the propeller.   After a year-long minute I had a constant dilemma: do I give up and descend swiftly, or am I about to break into sunlight on top, or do I try for the top but go into a spin?  I kept my fingers lightly on the control stick so as not to disturb what the plane was doing so well.  Occasionally I glanced at the simple turn-and-bank instrument, which was supposed to tell me if the wings were level.   The longer I flew the greater the dilemma, until there was a flash of sunlight as I went through a deep hole in the corrugated cloud surface.  Soon I was skimming the top.  It was one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever seen.   I felt I was in heaven in body, where 5 minutes before I might have arrived there in spirit.   I never tried that again.  Solid white cloud below extended to the horizon all around, except for the high cones of volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl far ahead.  Navigation was as simple as it gets.  I had no radio, the map didn't show any mark of civilization, and all was  brown below, so I just aimed right of the volcanoes, where I knew the city was.

Mexico City is surrounded by higher ground, so one must ascend to at least 10,000 feet to fly there.   I flew beyond the cloud cover, over undulating scrubby vegetation until I could see the Aztec pyramids,

countless swirling dust devils, and some kind of chemical concentration spiral, and the city, with the biggest highest airport I've ever used, at 7300 feet elevation.   The air in that central valley was as crystal clear as when Cortez invaded it, but decades later it was rated the most polluted and murky on earth.  A green light from the tower said it was OK to land on a strip parallel to that used by the international airliners, so I did.

On several landings since Maine the engine had quit when the engine was idled for taxiing, and routine maintenance was needed after the long trip, so I asked for a repair facility.  I was directed to taxi across a main road while car traffic was held up.  At the facility I met someone who was to be source of much unpleasantness over the next year.   I'll just call him Milton S., because he may still be alive.   He was a Dutch citizen with a crude wooden leg, and said he had the only flying business in Mexico with a female pilot.   I flew Milton in the Skyranger to Coatzalcoalcos, in the oil regions near the Yucatan peninsula, where we talked of founding a joint air  passenger-and-cargo business.   As a tentative step to that end I bought a local Ryan Navion, registered as XB-GOW, pictured here after it was retrieved to Texas.  My Chevrolet Bel Air and I roughly date the picture.

I made three flights to Acapulco.  The place where divers plunge down a cliff to water that is deep enough only when they hit it as a wave comes in is just left of the center of the picture.   The divers are as famous as movie stars, and marry them.  The picture is restored from a 56-year-old 35 mm slide.

To get to Acapulco I had to cross the higher basin rim south of Mexico City, so I learned to find rising air currents, like eagles and glider pilots do.  Some of the areas near my route were labelled on a Mexican map as "tierra desconocida", meaning unknown or unexplored territory. On the first trip I met a girl, a schoolteacher from Mexico City.  That prompted a second trip to Acapulco, on the return from which I was gradually forced upward as the thickening cumulus clouds rose, until I was mushing along at 13,600', where one is supposed to use supplementary oxygen.  Before I found a descent hole I was threading a path around towering clouds of ethereal beauty, like iridescent white cathedrals.   Because of the beauty and hypoxia I never felt closer to this poem that used to be familiar to all pilots:

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

See:  the author: Pilot Officer J. G. Magee, Jr. 

I took up smoking 5-cent-a-pack black Mexican cigarettes.   I was 30, rather late to begin an addiction that I quit with great difficulty 12 years later.  That may have been why I failed in climbing Orizaba, Mexico's highest volcano at 18,500'.  I took a taxi (about 5 USA cents a mile) from Mexico City to the village near its base, Tlachichuca, the driver stopping occasionally to nervously inquire if there were "bandits still about".  My climbing guide had a prominently enlarged chest from breathing the air of his home at 11,000' altitude.  We spent the night in a mountain cave at 13,500', the pack horse tethered outside.  I had to force each breath until I acclimatized somewhat, and slept.    The next morning I laboriously ascended to steep snow at 16,500', where I couldn't take another very slow step upward.  I told the guide, "No puedo andar mas" (I can't go further), and we descended.

In the city I logged a few hours in a Link trainer, a pre-computer flight simulator, to develop skill in "blind flying", which is flying with reference only to instruments in the airplane.


On my way back to Maine I flew my longest hop ever, from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 635 statute miles at about 10,000' with a tailwind.   My 2  days from Mexico to Maine in a little VFR plane might have been a record.  I landed in a pasture near my father's business in Winthrop, and later tried to take off again.  However,  I forgot that on takeoffs from muddy fields the pilot is supposed to hold the stick way back to keep the tail low until leaving the ground, the opposite of the position for normal takeoffs.  As I accelerated to about 25 mph, suddenly the wheels caught in the mud, the tail went up, things cascaded over my shoulders, and the plane came to rest with the bent propeller in the mud.

I   returned to my job in  Greenland, while the farmer cut the field length in half with a new fence, and cows chewed holes in the plane fabric.   One day, I was told, the mud had dried, the holes were patched, the wind was just right, and Bill Perry, the Augusta airport FBO, attached a new prop, squeezed aloft over the fence, and flew to a real airport which has since disappeared, South Portland beside the Rigby railroad yard.
   

The next year, 1955, I again went from Greenland to Maine, then by Skyranger to Mexico.  I buzzed Niagara Falls, which was legal then but not now.   

One evening I landed for gasoline in southern Texas as another stack of 37 days was dwindling.   I could reach the border at Laredo by 10 PM, but had never soloed in the dark.  I figured I'd teach myself the new skill by continuing, like learning to swim by jumping off the dock, so I flew into the night.   When I got a few miles from the glow of Laredo I searched in vain for where lighted airport runways were supposed to be.   There was not even a street light to mitigate the darkness below.  So I flew to the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico, its waters visible down but not ahead in the faint moonlight, turned downstream until I found a unique bend shown on the chart, then turned left for what I now calculated was the airport 2 miles ahead.  There was a faint moon, but I couldn't see the airport until at the predicted moment I suddenly saw a runway below, indicating my dead reckoning had been perfect.   As I looped around to land I  turned on the landing light.  It didn't help, but blinded me, so I turned it off, circled away from the unseen hangars ahead, and returned to land in the dark, very cautiously since I could barely see down, but hardly at all ahead.   The hangars were visible only as I passed them.   I came to a halt at the very end of the runway.  The buildings were locked so there was no phone.    I went to the adjacent deserted road for a car that might give me a lift.    Perhaps 15 minutes later oner appeared and slowed.  The driver apparently thought better of my outstretched thumb, and started to drive onward.    I shouted "PLEASE SEND A TAXI !".    They stopped, and I was invited into the back seat.    In the front seats were two older ladies.   Between them was propped a large shotgun, pointed just over my head.   They said they had been hunting rattlesnakes, which lie on the hot pavement after dark.   It was a good thing I hadn't attempted to walk the 5 miles to town.

In Mexico City I found the Navion had been attached and hangared by a business to which Milton owed money.   That was illogical and illegal, because he never became my partner, but I struggled with lawyers and courts and corruption to retrieve my Navion.   My life was threatened, so my lawyer suggested I change my hotel residence, which I did by walking several blocks in a maze until I was sure nobody was following me.  Finally I gave up and flew N92975 black to Maine.

The rainy season had begun, so I flew northward across a couple hundred miles of high central plateau under a low overcast, then down through corrugated jungle valleys to Ciudad Victoria for gasoline.   

From there on the ground was much lower but the clouds were still at the same high elevation, so pilotage (navigation by comparing the map to the few features on the ground) to Texas became much easier.

I sold the Skyranger in Maine and  went to Holland to buy a small sloop, which I eventually sailed back to the USA alone, detailed in  DresellySail.blogspot.com

Flying then was a lot cheaper then than now, even allowing for inflation.    I figured it cost me about dollar an hour.    Five gallons/hour at 16 cents/gallon.    20 cents/hour for oil changes.   10 cents/hour for miscellaneous.    Zero for overhauls because I never had any done.    Zero for insurance: I had none.   Zero for depreciation, since I sold my $800 (tax free) plane for $900 minus a 10% commission. 

While I was sailing,  my lawyer had Cantinflas's (click on that) chief pilot snatch the Navion when nobody was looking, and fly it to the airport at Grand Prarie, Texas.   Apparently he could do that because his boss, "the Mexican Bob Hope",  had influence and was above the local corruption.   By then I had learned that  Milton had dropped bombs in a recent war in Guatemala, was wanted for murder there, and was a pederast.

I didn't return to Mexico for several years.  However, these and subsequent visits to Mexico left me with a deep respect and affection for its people and culture.  That it has some bad dangerous people is obvious.   That some of its underpaid police and officials seek bribes in order to support their families is well known.    However I, and later Marge, have had so  many experiences of kindness, trust and dignity from Mexican residents, especially the poor, that we consider it the norm.

Mooney Mite and Navion: 1957

I had given O.S.Smith ("Smitty"), the Grand Prarie FBO (Fixed Base Operator: the airport business), the power to handle matters of airport ownership while I was abroad.  That was another mistake.   I should have learned from my experience with Milton.  Smitty swapped the Navion for a Mooney Mite , registered as N112C, and some money.

I visited Al Mooney, an iconic designer behind the Mite and other planes, at his small factory in Kerrville, Texas, to ask if the Mite could be retrofitted to carry sufficient gasoline to be flown to Europe via Labrador, Greenland, and Iceland.  After some thought he said yes, but eventually I abandoned the idea.

At 550 pounds empty the Mite was about the lightest manufactured aircraft since the Aeronca C2.   It had a single seat, so I would have to teach myself to fly it.   Shortly after I took off for the return to Maine I realized I was sitting on the unfastened seat belt.  As I raised my hips enough to free the belt, my head bumped the sliding canopy above.  That made it fly off and away.  The revised air currents slowed my speed by 10 mph, and made the dirt on the floor fly up in my face.   There was nothing to hold me in the plane if I were bumped upward in turbulence, so I quickly fastened the belt.   I reached Louisville, Kentucky by dark, and found Smitty had delivered a defective plane to me: the lights didn't work.   In the landing at Louisville I should have held the nose higher, but the front (tricycle) wheel struck first, and collapsed.   I held the nose up as I steered off the runway, ending nose-low and tail-high, as in Winthrop.  Like in Winthrop there was no injury except to my pride.   I sold the damaged bird to the Louisville FBO, and returned to Maine by commercial plane.

Auster and Cessna 120: 1956- 1958

While on the sailboat previously mentioned I visited P.J. Macdonough and his wife in England, where he was working.  PJ, a fellow engineer from Greenland, was great as a man, an engineer, and a father, and here in 2010 I miss him.   He had been shot down in the War and survived German imprisonment.  We rented a little British-made Auster, and flew it across the Channel to France, Belgium and back.  I vividly remember the huge horizontal figures south of London made millenia ago by stripping off soil to expose the white chalk that extends to the chalky White Cliffs of Dover.

I bought an Ercoupe in Kilgore, Texas, and flew it to Smitty's operation in Grand Prarie.  He swapped it for a Cessna 120 (like a Cessna 140 without flaps), which I flew to Maine in late 1957.   I flew it some in Maine, and sold it the next year.  I didn't own or pilot a plane again for 7 years.

Second Commonwealth Skyranger: 7/1965- 6/1966

In Maine in July 1965 I started going with Margery Pierce, and bought another Skyranger, registered as N33385.  I flew it for 80 hours, mostly in Maine, until I sold it a year later and went to work as an engineer in Vietnam.  My relationship with Margery lasted much longer.  We married in 1968, after Vietnam, and are still enjoying life together.

Marge and I landed the Skyranger at many little Maine and New Hampshire airports, and several places that weren't airports.  We especially enjoyed landing on Seawall Beach, which was then little known and accessible only by taildraggers or a 2-mile trail.

Beach landings are easy, requiring more knowledge than skill.  The pilot should land:
*  When the tide is half way out and receding (consult tide tables ahead), to give a wider "runway" and more time for extraction if the wheels get stuck, which is unlikely.
*  On the strip of hard dark sand between the soft wave-washed sand and the loose dry sand above the high tide mark.
*  When there's nobody on the beach, and it's not nesting season for the endangered piping plovers.

Aeronca Sedan: January-April 1970

I didn't pilot another plane for nearly 4 years, until Marge and I bought an  Aeronca Sedan,  registered as N1438H, in Massachusetts.   We bought that to see the March 7, 1970 eclipse over Nantucket, and fly to California.

Although I flew the plane to our home airport in Augusta, Maine safely, it needed minor repairs by Ed Williams, the experienced but deliberate mechanic at the local FBO.  Five weeks layer, on the morning of the eclipse, the plane was still in pieces.  Marge and I and my 14-year-old stepson Phil hurried to help Ed put things back together, and we took off with about 30 minutes to spare.  After an emergency bathroom stop in Massachusetts there were zero minutes to spare.   As we arrived over Nantucket we could see the vast shadow sweeping over the ocean towards us at 1500 miles an hour.   It was awesome and unforgettable.  The visible world was black except for a few automatic lights below, and a brilliant sunrise-sunset marked the horizon full circle around us.  Then we saw sunlight far away apparently sweeping toward us as the umbra (shadow) sped swiftly away.

We saw only one other plane aloft in the eclipse, but as we started for Maine the Martha's Vineyard airport below was crowded with planes, their occupants having watched the show through telescopes.

We learned 2 things about eclipses, untimely because for most of us there are few of them in a lifetime:
* Don't bother with a still or video camera.  The results show practically nothing.   As with a first kiss, the idea is to pay attention and savor the moment forever.
* You can look safely at the image during the entire complete eclipse, because the sun is hidden.  The moment a sliver of sun starts to show, use the special eclipse glasses or just look away.

There is a strong psychological phenomena that occurs when flying over water beyond gliding distance to land, called "automatic rough".   In older planes without sophisticated engine instrumentation, one is constantly listening for a small change in the sound of the motor, which might indicate trouble.   That occurred as we flew over several miles of ocean to and from Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.   It turned out that we didn't just "hear things".   We had an independent expert examine our engine, and he wrote a paper excoriating the dealer who had sold us the plane.  There were 3 bad cylinders.  We received that paper just as someone was about to buy our plane, so we told him, lowered the price, and sold the plane.  That looked like the end of our plan to fly our own plane to California.

Beechcraft Musketeer

We had planned a 23 day (3 weeks plus weekend) round trip to California, but now had to consider forgetting it, or going by airline (which would mean not much of interest enroute).  The unexpected solution came two days before our planned departure.  The Weisbergers, a local couple, had decided to stop flying and sell their  Beechcraft Musketeer,  registered as N3512R.  The Augusta FBO suggested we rent it for our trip.   The Weisbergers figured they could use the rental income, that we might be induced to buy it, or other prospects would be impressed that this was a plane capable of easy transcontinental flight.   So the evening before our departure on April 18, 1970 I was given 70 minutes of dual instruction in this plane that was quite different from anything I had flown.   The third landing wheel was on the "wrong" end: the front.   It had a radio.  I had never used one, and was worried about the fast transmissions required between tower and pilot.   The fuel was delivered to the engine by pump, not gravity.   It was a low winger, not a high winger.   The flaps were controlled by a hydraulic pump, not by lever action.   The panel and controls were different. 

 I took a small mountain of charts and how-to manuals.   We hurriedly packed, realizing that our gear would weigh as much and take as much space as a fourth passenger.   Nevertheless we have a picture of Marge, Phil and I standing by the plane beside the few things we planned to take, including those things we had to leave behind anyway.  That first Saturday we reached Dunkirk, New York, where we were grounded by 3 days of rain.  We intended to make lemonade out of lemons, so found interesting things to do in that wet drab city with warning signs on its polluted Lake Ontario beaches.   At that rate we'd never reach California.

We used the entire runway and then some at an Ohio airport.

But the weather improved, and so did our adventure.   In Arkansas one of us suddenly required a pit stop.   I made a quick map search and calculation, and we landed on the grass strip at Gaston's, a fishing Mecca.  As the wheels touched we abruptly discovered that the 6" grass concealed a 2" deep mixture of water and recent grass clippings, which created giant twin green sprays until we slowed down.  I wasn't sure we could safely take off in those conditions and get over the high cliff we had just descended over.   So Marge and Phil stayed behind while I made a test takeoff.  That worked fine, so we 3 flew onward.

At Oklahoma City we chose the smaller airport, as always, but found too late that it was the busiest, because of its Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.  After we entered the airport pattern in the usual counter-clockwise direction, the controller in the tower told us something that is oft repeated in our family: "One Two Romeo, you are in the pattern backwards - turn right".   The great majority of airports have an invisible rectangle that pilots are supposed to follow with left turns, counterclockwise, until they land approximately into the wind.   Obviously this airport had a right-turn clockwise pattern.  So we left it as instructed, the controller forgot us, we reminded him, and at last we were on final for landing, under his control.  He warned us perhaps 3 times about another plane also somewhere on final, and so warned the other plane.   Quite close to landing we found the tower had made and was making a mistake that was almost disastrous.  Ours was a low wing plane so we couldn't see directly below, and the plane had high wings so its pilot couldn't see directly above.   Apparently the controller suddenly looked out the window instead of at his radar screen, saw the other plane was directly below us, converging vertically at the same forward speed, and ordered its pilot to turn left immediately.   Then we saw the other plane, and landed without it.

Eastern Texas has few bodies of water or railroads or other landmarks.  That, combined with the unannounced shutdown of a radio station we needed for a navigation fix, and a strong unpredicted cross wind, made our position uncertain.   When I climbed 2000' higher so we could receive another station, Phil was as pleased as I when he got us a fix showing exactly where we were.   There was bad weather ahead, with possible tornadoes, but we were able to divert directly to a little emergency strip at McLain, Texas.   It was then very dark, except for brilliant lights in a big arrangement of pipes that we learned was a natural gas  processing facility.   We walked toward and around it, wary of heat-seeking rattlesnakes.   Beyond and below it were a few houses we hadn't seen from our tiedown.  Here was another example of the generosity we have found when travelling away from cities, by plane or boat or car.  The owner drove us 6 miles to the "best motel in town" in his Cadillac, waited while we registered, took us to a restaurant, and took us back to the motel after supper.   In the morning he and friends arrived for breakfast and drove us to the airport.

This paragraph is about one long fascinating day.   We left Albuquerque, crossed the quite invisible continental divide, flew 3 times around Shiprock  (sacred to the Navajo and a landmark to the pioneers) for pictures and video, and flew over the  Four Corners point , where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet.  I

We landed at Page, Arizona and walked about 3 miles to  Glen Canyon Dam, on the Colorado River.

We enjoyed a tour of the big chamber with huge photogenic generators adjacent to the dam.

As we continued flying beside the great river downstream, its canyon deepened and widened.   For the first time in flight I experienced vertigo, as we crossed from one side of the widening canyon to the other.  We had intended that when we reached the village of Grand Canyon we would fly over the Canyon, but I couldn't do it, because of the sudden fear of height, the perception of all 3 dimensions.




















We had planned to hike to the bottom of the Canyon and stay at Phantom Ranch, a simple hostel that is usually fully booked months ahead.  However, our Dunkirk NY delay meant we were too late for our reservations, and could only hope for 3 last-minute cancellations.  We waited while those ahead in line got their spots, until we finally got ours.   It was awesome (again that word, and that feeling), in spite of heat, and carrying only one hat, and my patting an innocuous-looking cactus.  For details of our hike, click on:
 Grand Canyon hike  <--DON'T MISS THAT
 CLICK: LOTS OF PHOTOS ETC.

That night it snowed up on the rim.  In the morning we photographed the snowdrift that came in around the door.   The cabin was austere, but we thought it a better deal than expensive El Tovar, which had a mere curtain to separate the "rooms" (ours and Phil's), and plumbing that Teddy Roosevelt must have used.   We drove a rented car along the canyon rim, and ran out of gas though we were told the tank was nearly full.  We were privileged to meet and talk briefly with Emery Kolb , an almost legendary figure.  In 1903, 16 years before Grand Canyon was a National Park, he and his late brother started the photographic studio on the canyon rim that he was still running.  Ken Burns' recent TV series on our National Parks featured the brothers and their daring trip down the Colorado in 1911, recording the first motion pictures of the canyon.  Mr. Kolb autographed his book for us.

The following day we took flight in marginal weather, dodging snow showers to Prescott, Arizona.







 We passed over Hoover (Boulder) dam, and landed after dark at Bermuda Dunes, California.  The airport was deserted, but apparently used by the wealthy.  We phoned an upscale motel that advertised free transportation, apparently for those arriving in private jets.   A limousine arrived, driven by the owner, Lucille Ball's brother.   Although he stood by while we checked in, he and the super service vanished when I asked for something cheaper than the initial price.  We dressed for dinner, but the restaurant was closed and the transportation had vanished, so we ate crackers and candy from vending machines.  Our luxurious rooms had fully stocked bars and patios directly on the Bob Hope golf course.

The next morning we flew below sea level over Salton Sea, an unusual opportunity.

went up through  famously windy San Gorgonio Pass , and landed at Hemet.   That was close enough to our friends Dick and Phyllis Plummer in Perris, the congested airspace of Los Angeles, and the Pacific Ocean.


We visited and toured there for 3 days, then headed east along the Mexican border.   That cleared strip was clearly visible, as were the deep copper mines in Bisbee, Arizona.

We spent 2 nights in Nogales, from where we drove to a ghost town in the mountains, and to Mexico on their May 5 (Cinco de Mayo) holiday.  Near Tucson we were allowed in the mostly-outdoor Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near closing, to see the iconic tall Saguaro cacti receding on a downward slope towards the horizon.   We toured spectacular Carlsbad Caverns, another National Park.

On the 21st day of our 23 we were still in Oklahoma, but we got aloft just after a dark turbulent cold front passed eastward, and with a strong tail wind made it to Ithaca, New York.

We landed at the Augusta airport on the 23rd day, Sunday.  We had logged 55.1 hours, for which we paid $18 an hour, with our gasoline costs reimbursed.  Two of those hours were night flights.

Second Cessna 170A: N9776A

After our round trip to California in the spring of 1970 I flew in the Musketeer, a Cessna 172, and a Piper PA28.   Two years after the California flight I was invited to join the Pleasant Pond Flying Club in Augusta as part owner of a Cessna 170A, registered as N9776A.   I flew only that for 21 years; nearly half my flying hours were in it, 706 out of 1499.   Marge and I had many wonderful flights in it that I won't detail here, but a few need mentioning here.

Our first memorable flight in "76 Alpha" was to Prince Edward Island to see another total eclipse of the sun, July 10, 1972.   Near the eclipse path we were eating lunch at an airport restaurant with very cheap lobsters and very slow service.   I realized we couldn't finish eating in time, so we bagged the lobsters, ran to the plane, made a quick takeoff, and arrived at the eclipse path with seconds to spare.  After the spectacle we banked towards Moncton, New Brunswick, where we ate our lobsters on the grass beside the plane with dark IFR clouds approaching.   The next day we met an African American, a professional musician and amateur astronomer returning from the eclipse in his more elegant plane than ours.   We and Roger took off for Bangor but communicated as he slowly passed us.   I remember acknowledging his transmissions with, "Roger, Roger".   We said goodbye at Bangor customs.

On June 21, 1981 there was a dedication ceremony in Northfield MA for the First American Youth Hostel and the founders of American Youth Hostels, Monroe and Isabel Smith,  my daughter Carol's grandparents.  She urged that I attend with her, though there were good reasons not to.  I finally complied, hurriedly leaving Augusta in 76A with less than full tanks, a small electrical problem, and marginal weather.   At Northfield I  landed in what seemed the only usable pasture.  As I descended on final over the trees I saw they were deceptively high because they were on a tall bluff, so I ended my landing with a ground loop just short of the Connecticut River.  That's a quick reversal of direction, which if done too abruptly can damage a wing as it contacts the ground.   Then I knew this was the field where Monroe pancaked his 170 in 1950.

In 1975 we flew 76A to New Orleans.  We remember:   Hiking to Le Conte Lodge on the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina.  A superb meal at the elegant Commanders Palace, oysters to dessert for just $9 each.  Waiting for the fog to clear at a little airport near Savannah, where the FBO convinced me that every pilot should be trained to recover if his airplane is flipped upside down at low altitude, and the friendly priest who was building his own plane.  Flying north along the Carolina offshore islands, and being shocked at the ugly sprawl on them.   Landing where powered flight began, the monument at Kitty Hawk, NC.  Our longest hop in 76A, from Allentown PA to Augusta ME.

We landed at several islands off the coast of Maine: Islesboro, Deer Isle, Swan's (pictured), Matinicus (very short, grass), Marshall's (very rocky patch), Isle au Haut, Canada's Grand Manan (rocky, twice.

February 15, 1981 Marge and I flew to a landing on the frozen but nearly snow-free lake on Isle au Haut, one of the furthest offshore of Maine islands.



  We sailed to it on our 1968 honeymoon, have canoed to it 3 times, camped, and hiked all of its mapped trails.  Marge slipped on ice on this hike and  pulled a muscle, so we were late returning to 76A.  The engine started reluctantly.  By the time we took off it was as black as it gets.   As the plane rose I carefully avoided the tall dark pines on each side of the narrow pond. We crossed a lot of cold black ocean before the relative comfort of land, and landed at our base in Augusta.

On October 6, 1984 I was overdue to fly from Augusta to Bowdoinham for a required biennial check ride.  I knew the plane so well that I confidently and quickly zipped through the pre-flight check list.  Removable gust locks, external or internal, immobilize all movable surfaces on planes parked outdoors.  As I paused to enter the plane I glanced around and observed that I had removed all the locks.   I took off, turned left for Bowdoinham, and felt that my gentle movements of the controls seemed unexpectedly stiff.  There was a problem I didn't understand, so I operated the controls instinctively, made 3 more left turns and descended on final for landing.  As always, I used the throttle to control my descent.  About 5' above the ground I automatically idled the engine: a big mistake.  The plane dived, so I pulled back on the yoke with all my might. without result.   The wheels hit the pavement hard, which caused a big bounce followed by smaller ones as the plane slowed to a normal taxi.    I got out and found there was a gust lock on the opposite elevator that I had not seen as I too quickly looked around before entering.  Barry Schiff, a most respected pilot's pilot, wrote about flight control failure in the 11/1977 AOPA Pilot magazine, "The most serious such problem is the loss of elevator control.. The prospects of a successful landing are poor".   Indeed, had the dive started from 1000' instead of 5' the results would have been quite different.  The controls now freed,  I  flew to Bowdoinham.  Ralph Purinton, the FBO

One noon in Augusta I took up 3 friends from our offices to demonstrate a spin, starting at 3000' altitude   Only later did I find that spins in the Cessna 170A required empty back seats.  After 2 rotations I did what was usually necessary to come out of the spin, but that only made it worse.   As the spinning earth in front of us approached,  I had to think fast.   The weight in the back seat was keeping the "angle of attack" in the stalling position, so I pushed the throttle in and the nose further down, until the wings "caught" and I came out of the descent.   I never did another spin, with or without 3 passengers.

Three times in 1987-8 I used 76A to maintain our trail assignment on Bigelow Mountain.  I would drive from our Brunswick home to Bowdoinham, the  base for 76A at the time, fly to the airport near  Sugarloaf mountain, hitch to the Appalachian Trail crossing south of Stratton, climb up 2 miles with bucksaw and clippers to our trail at Cranberry Pond, clear obstacles up over Cranberry Peak, with its beautiful view of Flagstaff Lake and other mountains, and down to Stratton, hitch or hire a ride back to the airport, climb in all sweaty and dirty, and return to the unlit Bowdoinham field just in time.   This saved a couple hours over driving, was interesting, but was too complicated to repeat a fourth time.

January 16, 1989, the day before my 64th birthday, I took 76A to Northeast Airmotive at the Portland airport to have an encoding altimeter, a safety device, installed.   The mechanics diverted to work on a plane from the Canadian Arctic, and so finished 76A hours later than promised.   It was near dusk on that winter day when I left just ahead of approaching IFR weather, for the short flight back to Bowdoinham, where 76A was then based.   Near Brunswick, a few minutes from landing, approaching cars on the highway below had their lights on, and it looked black ahead.   I had to make a quick decision, because in 5 minutes I could be on the ground at Bowdoinham, or dead.  So I turned back to Portland, but it looked just as bad in that direction.  I came upon a long undulating field in Freeport, and skimmed its tall weeds at a slow 75 mph and full flaps, looking for a level spot.  There was none, so just 6 seconds before I would have contacted the tree wall ahead, I touched down.  The 4' tall weeds gently slowed my landing like on an  aircraft carrier.   Later I measured my landing run, shown by deflected weeds and dirt marks, as 290' long, ending 300' short of the trees at the end of the field.   As I taxied back on a frozen tractor path towards the houses and road at the other end of the field,  I saw a line of about 8 lighted vehicles approaching through the weeds: ordinary cars, an ambulance, police cars.  We all came to a stop head on.  The drivers stayed seated in their vehicles with their headlights on me, blocking my path, so I got out.   Although I was walking and talking, I was asked a very strange question: "Are you all right ?".   It seems that a nearby homeowner with a CB radio had dialed 911 and reported an airplane crash.   One of the cars contained TV reporters, so there was much media coverage of the event.   The next day I started my takeoff run on a homeowners lawn, continued on a short stretch of weeds we flattened with our car, and returned 76A to Bowdoinham.   Although I had just demonstrated my skill as a pilot, an FAA employee required that I demonstrate my ability to land at Portland, far simpler than the short undulating dark pasture in Freeport.

Marge and I enjoyed landing on Seawall Beach, frozen Rainbow Lake beside the Appalachian Trail sector that we maintained near Katahdin,  and many pastures and airports in northern New England.   Our favorite was Franconia, NH, where we went several times.  The routine was to go a day after the passage of a cold front, so the air was clear but not turbulent.   We would aim for very prominent Mt. Washington, enjoying the spectacular view as we passed the summit and the trails around it that we knew so well, then descend at 500' per minute towards Franconia.   We would land on its grass strip, park across the road from Franconia Inn, and enjoy an elegant breakfast.   Afterwards we would take off to the north, reverse direction, fly through the narrow top of Franconia Notch looking upward for a quick view of the Old Man of the Mountains, then fly west over 3000' high Kancamagus Notch, and return to Maine.   Once when we flew through the latter Notch 500' above it, two fighter jets passed underneath us in the opposite direction at maybe 500 mph.   From when we first saw them to when we last saw them took only a few seconds, but it certainly left a vivid memory.

In the 1980s we made a flew flights in Florida in rented planes.
 *  Palatka to sleepy Cedar Key (northwest of Ocala)  twice.
 *  Homestead to Keys, round trip without landing.
 *  Pompano: Pitts Special with Randy Gagne, champion stunt pilot who later was killed doing that.
Learned the snap roll, which is abrupt recovery from an unexpected inverted position, advised 10 years earlier by the FBO near Savannah.  In Pompano we toured the Goodyear Blimp in its hangar.

In 1989 we flew to the Cessna 170 convention at New Haven, CT.   There we met Nancy Tiers, who arrived in her 170 and had soloed in 1928, and Ed Cassagneres, who knew Lindbergh.

Once Bob Davis, another Club member, and I flew that route too soon after a cold front passed.   As we approached Mt. Washington the air became steadily more turbulent, until I wondered if the giant hand would shake the wings off,  and temporarily wished I had never learned to fly.  Air passing over an obstacle like a mountain ridge acts just like a stream passing over a rock: smooth on the upwind side and very turbulent on the downstream side.    As we passed over the ridge the turbulence suddenly stopped and we were ascending at 2000' a minute even with engine idled and the nose depressed.   Our return by a different route was downwind and much smoother.

Margery's mother used to spend all day on buses to go from Augusta to visit friends in her former home town of Princeton, on the Canadian border.   She had been reluctant to even fly commercial planes to Florida, but when she found she could reach Princeton in just over an hour in 76A, she was convinced.   On more than one of those several flights I looked back and found her asleep.  She died at 93, shortly after 76A was sold.

As the years passed the other club members flew 76A less, while Bob Davis and I flew it more and more.   I did more and more of its maintenance (minor maintenance, shovelling snow, changing oil, cleaning, getting inspections, etc.), and did all the paperwork.   Membership decreased to 5, the minimum allowed for members to get "non-owners insurance", cheaper than owner's insurance.   Finally a majority of 3 realized they were getting too old to fly, so Bob and I were outvoted, and I sold the plane for the club in April 1993.

When Marge and I made our first drive to Alaska by Toyota in 1996 we visited 76A in Minnesota.  It was a great nostalgic visit to an old friend as its new owner let me fly the plane with him, and on the return find its home base when he couldn't.

Cessna 172 Seaplanes

Marge and I were sad to see 76 Alpha go.  It had been an important part of our lives.  Then we realized this was an opportunity for a different kind of thrill: float planes.  Three months after 76A went with its new owner to Minnesota I started training in Cessna 172 float planes at Twitchell's, an old family-run airport in Turner, near Lewiston.   A float plane is a versatile compromise, meaning it's an inefficient plane and an inefficient boat.  In both functions new skills are necessary, some counter-intuitive.  For example, on water a float plane "wants" to weathervane so it points into the wind.  If a pilot is taxiing on the water and wants to go downwind, he must first turn the "wrong" way and operate the ailerons in the "wrong" direction.  After about 7 hours of instruction I was ready for flight test certification.  My instructor warned me the FAA examiner was tough, with no sense of humor, so I was nervous.   The last part of the test was to demonstrate docking, which is safe but quite tricky.  One has to judge the wind, aim diagonally for the dock, shut off the motor at just the right time, climb out on the left float, walk a cable from the left to the right float, and, as the plane neatly sidles up to the dock, jump to the dock to gently control and stop the plane.  It is too easy to either crash into the dock, or have the powerless plane come to a halt several feet short of the dock.   Everything was going right until I forgot to leave my distance-vision glasses in the cockpit before I walked the cable, so I slipped on it and fell.  Standing mortified in the cold muddy 4' deep water, I called out that maybe I could pass the test another time, but the famously dour examiner was laughing, and said, "If I get wet you flunk, but you got wet and you pass".

Twitchell's is one of the few FBOs in the world that will rent you a float plane after they teach you to fly one.  That's mostly because it's  easy to flip one upside down when landing or taking off, so insurance costs, and consequently rental costs, are high.  At most other such FBOs the only options are to just brag about your rating or to buy a float plane.

Flying floats takes the pilot back to when the air was not congested, radios were not needed, and freedom prevailed.   Float flying is beautiful; when one lands on a remote lake without camps and the engine roar ceases, the beauty and peace are never forgotten.   Float planes are most common in Canada, and states with many lakes, principally Maine, Minnesota and Alaska.

All of my float instruction and solo practice before the examination had been on the "nursery", up and down the Androscoggin River, between the bridge and Twitchell's.  My second flight after the test was distinctly different.  I went with Bob Davis over the ocean to the lake on Isle au Haut.   We hiked a few miles before returning to Twitchell's.

Marge and I flew several times to 5-mile-long Rainbow Lake, where for several years we maintained 4 miles of the adjacent Appalachian Trail (AT), and where the only buildings were a grandfathered retreat for Webber Oil executives.   Its caretakers became our long term friends.  I flew there twice to maintain our section of AT, once with Bob Davis and once with a hiker named Amy.  I flew twice to remove or bury a dump beside another stretch of AT, made several decades ago when hiker ethics didn't include "Carry In, Carry Out".  Once my co-pilot and fellow dump picker was Bob Davis and once it was Alan Lukas.

After our last float flight, in June 1998, Marge and I didn't fly a small plane again for nearly 2 years.

Among other things, we kept busy for that time with these:
* My heart valve operation in 1998.
* Finishing my last 440 miles of Appalachian Trail, with Marge providing taxi service.
* Coping with the FAA.  It requires that amateur pilots have a medical examination every 2 years.  For me they made that every year because of my prostate cancer surgery in 1996 and heart valve operation in 1998.   The FAA doctors, who then earned lots less than those in private practice, said my spine might snap in flight because of the first, or I might drop dead in flight because of the second, which our doctors said was ridiculous.   I had to have expensive tests that only FAA said were necessary, and finally was told I couldn't fly, period.   Other pilots advised that the only way to get my license back was to go to Mecca, meaning FAA headquarters in Oklahoma City.   So we did, on a side trip from visiting family near Denver.   We found the FAA extremely disorganized, with a backlog of several months.   Although that building replaced the one that had been destroyed by Timothy McVeigh 3 years earlier, we entered and wandered around corridors without seeing a single person, until we found the FAA office.   We waited while a clerk went to find our file.   An hour later she said she couldn't find it, to come back tomorrow.  We returned.  They had found both files, and said we could talk to the doctor in charge immediately.  This was a doctor who had to approve medical applications of tens of thousands of pilots, but talked to us as if he could ignore them and the clutter in his office.   He said I couldn't fly, then "happened" to find his unmailed hand-written letter that said yes I might, if I had more tests.   This was costing a lot of taxpayer, insurance company, and our dollars,.  But I got to fly again.