clappgun-
i flew all over the southwest. my brother and i started a flight school and cessna FBO in farmington, nm. i was a flight instructor, air ambulance and charter pilot. ended up as an FAA designated examiner for single and multi engine land and instrument ratings and taught an aviation course at the local branch of NMSU. logged 3,000 hours in five years. i flew everything from single place open cockpit antique biplanes to twin propjet pressurized king airs. i retired from that career at age 26. my brother's still in it... a boeing 737 captain for americawest airlines.
here's flight storie number 00256:
WEIGHTLESS MUTTON -
my entrance into the world of flying came on the navajo reservation. at the age of twenty-one, i worked for my older brother johnny at sweetwater - ("toh'-li-kaan" in navajo), a remote trading post in arizona near four corners. he had recently earned his flight instructor certificate and was busier trying to teach other indian traders and public health service doctors to fly than he was running the trading post.
that left me with the boring job of "assistant trading post manager", which meant that i had to do real work unloading delivery trucks, stocking shelves, stacking hay, buying and stacking 500 lb. bags of wool, pumping gas and waiting on customers all day while he was off flying airplanes.
somehow it struck me that if i learned to fly i might be relieved of some of the physical work by offering to fly the twice weekly mail run into farmington or perhaps the occasional flight to pick up meat products in blanding. so, for me, becoming a pilot was not born of the love of flight or the desire to soar the beautiful blue skies over monument valley like an eagle, it was simple laziness. within a month from that day i had soloed and had already bought my own cessna 150 - a 1959 model that i picked up for $2700.
i was restocking the soda cooler with cold pop from the walk-in when johnny walked in and announced that we were out of mutton and he was going to fly up to blanding to pick up a couple. my escape opportunity had arrived! i blurted out, "i'll go!" and after a short discussion as to whether i was ready to make a solo cross country flight to somewhere i'd never flown to before i convinced him that i could handle the trip just fine and besides, i needed the experience.
he gave me a thorough briefing on the route and the particulars of flying into the blanding airport. i quickly plotted my course on the map, and within an hour i had driven up the hill to the dirt strip, pulled the cessna out of the barbed wire corral (made to keep the livestock off of the airplanes), done my preflight walk around and tire kicking routine and was rolling down the bumpy red dirt runway at sixty miles per hour.
the early model 150s had manual flaps controlled by a hand lever between the pilot and passenger seats. i pulled two notches (20%) and gently lifted off the moonscape of a launch pad we called our landing strip. as soon as i had 300 feet of altitude i gently lowered the flaps lever and continued my climb out to cruising altitude. i was overcome by a wonderful sense of freedom... not from floating above the beautiful landscape or slipping the surly bonds of earth... freedom from having to be back in the store working like an "assistant dog" stocking shelves and loading hay bales into pick-up trucks and horse drawn wagons for customers. it may have been 1971 in town but it was still reminiscent of 1871 out here in the remote regions of the reservation.
blanding is a couple thousand feet higher than sweetwater so i climbed from 4800 feet to 8500 before leveling off. it was a beautiful partly cloudy southwestern summer day and the air was smooth. one of the best things about this part of the country is that there are 100s of square miles of unpopulated, undeveloped land for every square mile of inhabited land. looking down as i flew, i saw an occasional dirt road, hogan, or pick up truck but mostly there was just unspoiled, uninhabited red desert. navigation was a piece of cake because i could see "blue mountain" at blanding seventy miles away as soon as i cleared the top of no-water mesa five minutes in to the flight. the heading i had plotted had me headed straight for it.
i crossed the san juan river just east of the beginning of the "goosenecks" and flew over the small community of bluff (which consisted of about a dozen structures). from there i followed the paved road straight on up to blanding. i had no problem locating the airport, entering the pattern and making my landing. this is an uncontrolled airport, so i just announced my position and intentions on the unicom frequency. there was no response and no other air traffic. being used to a dirt strip that was little wider than the cessna landing gear i had learned to use the edge of the runway for alignment reference (you can't see over the nose of the plane when making a soft field landing - which was the only way i'd ever learned to land) and i landed on the far right side of the runway. it was not until i took my check ride for my private pilot license that the examiner told me, "a good pilot always lands and takes off right on that white stripe in the MIDDLE of the runway." DUH. it had never occurred to me that that was what the stripe was for - i was so used to not driving on that "white striped line" in a car. i just figured i'd leave that other lane for aircraft that might be landing or taking off in the opposite direction... AS IF.
the man with the mutton was waiting for me in his truck when i walked over to the parking lot. i directed him to my plane and we loaded some balogna and other sliced meats in the small cargo area behind the seats. i put one butchered mutton carcass on top of the sliced meats and i put the other mutton in the passenger seat. i thanked the mutton man, signed the receipt and taxied out to take off. i figured to make better time on the return trip because i was at a higher altitude and i could "fly downhill" on the way home with less climb out and the opportunity for a slight descent all the way back.
when a pilot gets the plane to himself (without his instructor) for the first time he wants to try things - experiments... you know? like - i wonder what it would be like to put this baby in a dive, just enough to cause weightlessness? well i had the perfect opportunity here... just me and a dead, deaf, mute mutton carcass in the seat next to me. so i climbed up to 10,000 feet. i looked over at the mutton. thinking of something i'd seen on TV where they take up prospective astronauts in a big jet and put them in weightless flight, i said in my best john wayne impersonation, "pilgrim, if you're ever going to make the apollo program, you're going to have to get used to weightlessness." then i shoved the yoke forward. OOPS! too damn hard! the mutton, including the one in the back, and all the baloney, smacked the roof of the plane at a high rate of speed. i quickly over-corrected and greasy naked sheep and boxes of balogna came back down from the ceiling at an equally high rate of speed crashing hard into the seat and the cargo bin floor.
i spent the whole trip back climbing and descending, practicing the "weightless mutton dive" until i got to where i could make the dead, deaf, mute sheep float perfectly in the cockpit about a foot off his seat for almost a full 30 seconds.
unfortunately, not once in the course of my flying career, did i ever have occasion to put this finely honed skill to use.
-el mutton abuser |
