Like Father Like Son

I was struggling to match Carlo’s poignant Fathers Day article, filled with deep and subtle messages.  I’ve given up.  Tail end of a four-city business trip.  Too many meetings, hotels, overhead bins, airport check-ins, swine flu scans.  Too tired.

Too many things to say.

So I’ve taken advantage of the power outlet and LAN port in this A380 seat (more like a small hotel room) to blatantly purloin Lane Wallace’s article from the June 1999 issue of FLYING magazine.

I apologize to Lane, FLYING and the intellectual property laws and quickly add that I’m a long-time subscriber.  My excuse is that anyone can read this on their website, at http://www.flyingmag.com/flyinglessons/1422/like-father-like-son.html.

Read every magical word, fathers, sons, pilots, even moms and daughters out there.  Lane was nothing short of heaven-blest when she wrote this.

  

   

  

  

By Lane Wallace

June 1999

  

Several years ago I was standing inside a vintage B-24 “Liberator” bomber that was on display for a day at a North Carolina airport.  A middle-aged man walked slowly through the plane and then approached the pilot and asked if he might sit in the cockpit.  The pilot explained that the cockpit was off-limits for tours, but something in the man’s eyes made the pilot hesitate.  He asked the visitor if there was any special reason he wanted to sit there.  There was a long moment of silence.  Then the man answered quietly, “My father was a B-24 pilot.  My mom was pregnant with me when he left, and my dad was killed in a raid over Europe somewhere.  I never knew him.  But I thought maybe if I could sit where he would have sat when he flew … where he would have been when he died … “

  

The man stopped, unable to continue. But no more words were necessary.  The pilot silently gestured the man into the left seat of the cockpit.  I stood back and watched as the man gently ran his hands over the instruments, caressing the control yoke and the throttles, reaching out through the airplane and the years to touch the father he’d never known.

  

For several long minutes I just watched his hands, sensing the father in the son, as if the airplane had melted the years and men into a single moment and person.  Then I glanced up and saw the tears streaming silently down the man’s cheeks.  Fifty years later he was touching his father, perhaps for the very first time.

  

Our link to our parents is a complex relationship that perhaps we only really begin to understand when we’re faced with its loss.  Who we are is intertwined with the joy and pain of our interactions with them; their expectations of us and our needs — met and unmet — that we looked to them to fill.  Our parents are the foundation on which we build ourselves.  And no matter how mature and self-sufficient we become, and no matter how imperfect our parents are, they’re still that last line of defense that stands between us and the oblivion of the universe.

  

So to lose a parent is more than just another tragedy.  It is to have our universe explode, stop, and collapse in on us again.  Regardless of how old we are, we’re suddenly six years old again and Daddy or Mommy is going away, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.

  

In an ideal world, we only have to face this loss after we’re grown, having had the benefit of a solid, stable childhood and having had the time to develop the strength and support of an adult network of family and friends.  But life isn’t always ideal, in this all-too-imperfect world.

  

We may not even feel the loss on a daily level.  But the loss is there, somewhere inside.  And we yearn for completion.  A friend recently traveled back to the forests of France where his father was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.  What was he hoping to find there?  I’m not sure he even knew.  But somewhere, among the trees and the ghosts, he was likely hoping to find something that would help complete the ground underneath him; give him a sense of connection with a piece of his universe that had always been missing.

  

The man in the B-24 was undoubtedly searching for the same thing — perhaps had been searching for it, on some level, for years.  So what was it about the B-24 cockpit that allowed him to find his father there?  Was it simply the age of the airplane?  That it was a place his father had been? 

  

Airplanes touch the hearts of those who fly them and bring to life a part of their soul that’s difficult to put into words.  If you want to know the secrets of pilots’ hearts, fly with them.  Look in their eyes when they bank the plane around to catch the sun on its wings.  Sit in the cockpit where they flew, and you will be closer to touching their heart and soul than after a lifetime of watching television side by side.

  

A friend of mine recalls the only time he ever saw his dad cry.  It was after his father suffered a heart attack, bringing more than 30 years of flying to an end.  As Jim walked into the hospital room, his father looked up.  Tears began falling from his eyes as he said to his son in a choking voice, “I guess my flying days are over.”

  

Like many fathers and sons, these two didn’t talk much together about matters closest to their hearts.  But several years later, Jim bought an airplane and brought it to an airstrip near his dad’s farm.  The day was beautiful, and he offered to take his dad up for a ride.  As they got to the end of the runway, Jim turned to his father, gestured towards the controls and said, “Here dad, take it.  She’s all yours.”

  

A simple gesture, but one that said “I love you” as clearly as any words.  “I’m proud of you, I ache for your pain and I want you to be happy” … all in a single, simple gesture.  Jim and his father weren’t good with words.  But through a piece of machinery that had touched both of their hearts, they were still able to communicate.  It’s a valuable gift in a culture where fathers and sons too often seem painfully separated by canyons of silence.

  

Somewhere in the raising of our children, girls seem to learn more about communicating with words.  The reasons are undoubtedly complex.  Perhaps make-believe games provide practice in verbal skills that baseball and football competitions do not.  But a woman’s best friend is still likely to be the person with whom she shares her innermost secrets, while a man’s best friend is more likely to be the person with whom he shares his most important or favorite activities.

  

Yet without direct heart-to-heart talks, communication between fathers and sons relies more heavily on symbolic action, shared activities and unspoken understanding.  

     

Unfortunately, the unspoken messages don’t always make it through the translation.  Beneath the surface talk of sports or business are often sons who still desperately need to know their fathers are proud of them but don’t know how to ask, and fathers who love their sons very much but don’t know how to answer.  Frustrated, they circle each other from across a divide, searching painfully and too often unsuccessfully for some way to bridge the distance.

  

Many times over I’ve seen an airplane bridge that gap.  Part of the reason may be that airplanes allow fathers and sons to share adventures and life experiences that help create common ground and strong bonds of shared understanding and affection.  But other pieces of machinery could do that, as well.

  

What makes airplanes such powerful bridge-builders is that they do more than create adventures.  They can touch the hearts and souls of those who fly them, opening a door not only to a father’s mind, but to the emotional core of who he is and what he loves.

  

I doubt anyone ever explained this to my friend Jim or the son of the B-24 pilot.  But our hearts don’t always need words to understand.  Like airplanes, they speak a gentle, silent language of their own that’s deeper and more complex than any language made of words.  And with that silent understanding, these men reached out through an airplane and touched the heart of the man who gave them life.

  

  

  

Published in FLYING magazine, June, 1999.  

Posted from SQ 218, Melbourne to Singapore, ten years later. 

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

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A Message from a (Newly) Adult Son

Carlo flew his first solo on Fathers Day, 2006.  As far Tonet can remember, Carlo’s enduring dreams were of commanding the Starship Enterprise.  He wasn’t the type to fly an X-Wing down an abyss into the Death Star.  More a strategic Captain who backed up his diplomacy with proton torpedoes.

As Carlo and Tonet flew on downwind at Omni today, a taxiing US Air Force C-130 came on the radio:

“Clark Tower, request to hold at this position to align our navigational systems.”

Carlo and his Dad looked at each other and considered the following reply:

“Clark Tower, RP-C1513 would like to orbit here to calibrate our phasers.”

  

We all hurry to grow up.  Then we wish were were young again… .

  

  

  

  

It is a truism of adult life that life never ends up quite the way you planned it.

I had a very specific plan upon graduating.  It was derailed.  Badly.  My fault.

On the bright side, I had no plans on going into a relationship after graduating.  Look at me now.

It is some consolation to me that the unexpected tides of life after school are both positive and negative.  It is even more comforting that I held on to both my dreams of teaching English and flying airplanes.  My only regret is that I did not have the courage and foresight to start teaching sooner.  If I get run over by a bus tomorrow, that last sentence will be among my final thoughts.  But on the other hand, I’m deeply grateful for my hard-earned second chance, and for the support of the many people without whom it would not be possible.

I’m teaching today in one of the best high schools in the country, surrounded by good-natured colleagues, in charge of two hundred endlessly quirky and lovable teenagers, and I cannot imagine ever having wanted anything else.  The classroom is my natural habitat.  Often even more so than the cockpit.

Even my view of flying has changed.  The act of flying itself is not as important to me as it once was, and its endless wonders seem somehow less poetic to my older eyes.  The airplane is a wonderful machine, yes, a chariot to realms of adventure and beauty.  But it is a machine.  It is aluminum, copper wires, three little tires, knobbly things, and rigid wings.

Something happened over the past year that I’m still trying to understand.  Whatever it is, it’s made everything seem a little grayer.  The smiles are just this shade of wry, the laughter is now tinged with mild hysteria, and the flowers evoke nostalgia rather than daydreams.  I look at the wonderful job I’m in now, the one I worked for years to prepare for, and I think, guiltily, that amazing though it is, it is not quite what I spent my years dreaming of.

I miss those dreams.  I miss the times when everything seemed possible, when there was a plan that made sense, and success was directly tied to hard work and trust in your loved ones.

Don’t get me wrong.  I have an amazing family, a girl whom I would trade for no one else on earth, and a job that brings me joy, fulfillment, and pizza money.  I am happy.

But I have learned that the marker of adulthood is not when you begin to earn money, not when you finish school, not when you first fall in love, not when you first feel pain.  It is when you begin to have regrets.

The act of flying itself feels almost like a childish memory, the quixotic escape from reality of a young man who can’t even afford the avgas, let alone the plane. 

But I remember the smiles on the faces of the very special people I have taken flying, the wonder of my friends as they see the photos I take and look at their homeland with new eyes, and the indescribable look on Dad’s face when he realized that yes, I was going to be a pilot.  These things feel even more valuable now.  They are no longer just the highlights of life, they are reasons to live.  It is relationships that matter in this new world of funhouse mirrors and nostalgia and small salaries.  And flying is more important to me than ever because of this.

Some parts of flying have diminished in value to me, and some parts have increased tremendously.

And now I think of the man who made this unlikely dream possible in the first place, who’ll enjoy a special day today before being pulled back into the realm of obligations and deadlines. 

My Dad.  We flew for an hour yesterday, performing S-turns in strong winds using a road for reference, laughing at how fun it was to fly again.  I think of the S-turns of life, and how once again my unusual hobby, my aluminum paramour, and my indispensable copilot have helped me make sense of growing up.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

  

   

Posted from Manila, June 21, 2009

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Reliving D-Day at Brecourt Manor

Today is the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion at Normandy.

My son Julio and I toured Normandy last month.  His first visit to Normandy, my third.  We rented a car and drove 1,100 kilometers in 2 days.

We visited the airborne drop zones.  Walked Omaha and Utah beaches.  Toured the famous battlefields — Brecourt Manor (detailed in HBO’s Band of Brothers) and La Fiere Bridge (inspired the final scenes in Saving Private Ryan).

And then we visited battlegrounds that very few people know about — the Timmes orchard, Angoville au Plaine, and Hill 314 at Mortain.

Literally hundreds of stories.  Nowhere to start.

  

  

I had used Battlebus, probably the best tour outfit in Normandy, in 2004 and 2005.  This year Julio and I signed up for their Band of Brothers Tour. 

Tour guide Dale put it best:  “If you haven’t seen Band of Brothers, for God’s sake sort your life out and see the best war story of all time!”

  

  

E Co., 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, is well documented on the internet and in Stephen Ambrose’s book.  Few Easy veterans survive today.  Winters is dealing with Parkinson’s Disease, Shifty Powers has cancer, Guarnere, the Band’s sparkplug then and now, has survived one heart attack.  Forrest Guth is still touring.  All in their late 80’s.

  

  

Our Battlebus tour followed Easy’s route on June 6, 1944.  We saw where Winters landed, on the road from Ste. Mere Eglise to La Fiere Bridge.

 

Winters dodged the flak gun at the crossroads and walked up his C-47’s flight path to roll up his stick, skirting Ste. Mere Eglise to the north.

Guarnere landed where the white sign is, within sight of the infamous massacre in the churchyard.

 

Winters, Guarnere, Lipton and other scattered paratroopers joined Col. Cole’s group, 150 men, mostly 502nd, 507th, 508th PIR — a real hodgepodge.  The large group could have captured Ste. Mere Eglise, but Cole was headed for his objective — Causeway #3 off Utah beach.  Cole had landed on a rosebush, so he was mad as hell. 

They ambushed a horse-drawn German supply unit delivering breakfast at the T-junction of D423 and D115.

   

Winters left Cole’s group and took his small band up the D115 to the D14.  Winter’s objective was Causeway #2. 

Cole saw little further action on D-Day (but he did lead the first bayonet charge since WWI five days later, for which he won the Medal of Honor — posthumously – for gallantry above and beyond the call of duty).

  

  

Winters had a bit more excitement on D-Day.

At this spot,  below, Malarkey met up with the German POW from Oregon. 

 

Speirs did not shoot this POW group down as in the HBO mini-series, but he had other incidents.

At the hamlet of le Grand Chemin, Winters met up with his battalion’s HQ. 

 

  

He was ordered to silence a German gun battery just 75 yards away, which was firing on Utah beach.

The Germans had not posted any sentries, and, deafened by their own artillery pieces, did not sense that there was a gathering group of American paratroopers just 75 yards away.

Winters briefed his men here.  The guns were just over the next hedgerow to the left.

 

  

copyright Paul Woodadge

  

  

Liebgot and Pleshe set up machine guns at a hedgerow in front of the battery. 

Lipton and Compton flanked to the right, and Winters attacked straight ahead.

There were German machine guns in the hedgerow behind the guns — the battery was a 360-degree defense strongpoint. 

There was another machine gun at the Manor itself, over a hundred yards away.

The attack took three hours. 

  

  

 

  

  

Battlebus tour guide Allan showed us the artillery hedgerow.  No trenches, no bunkers, just a ditch along the hedgerow. 

 

  

German machine guns nested across the field to the left.  Lipton’s tree stood among those in the middle distance, but has since been cut down.

Malarkey tried to get a Luger here.  Guarnere and Lorraine fired on fleeing Germans.  Wynn was shot in the butt, and Toye escaped injury from a grenade that Compton dropped.  All of that really happened.

 

  

Not shown in the movie — Malarkey ran past the last gun, jammed his mortar tube into the hedgerow, and fired 3 shells at the Manor, just out of sight to the right.

One hit a corner of the Manor.  One hit the lower window at left.  And one went right through the upper window at center and took the machine gun out.

 

Winters ordered everyone to run back to Le Grand Chemin.  Mission accomplished — the 105mm artillery guns were silenced.  He would not risk his men to silence the machine gun nests, which was not the mission.

That afternoon, Winters guided several Sherman tanks around the back of the battle site.  The tanks took out all the machine guns.

There is a photo of Malarkey revisiting Brecourt Manor with Battlebus in July, 2008.

  

Battlebus is the only tour group allowed on the field.  The Manor’s owner buried all four 105mm guns in his farm.  He left out a pair of arms from one of the gun traces. 

    

He has received bids for up incredible amounts of money in exchange for the guns, but he won’t sell.   Because the whole world wants them, and he has them.  Normans are like that.

The young son of the Manor’s owner was shot, apparently by Speirs, shortly after the battle.  He was treated at a hospital ship, and later became Mayor of Ste. Marie du Mont.

  

  

This battle is still studied at West Point as a lesson in small-unit tactics.  A Distinguished Service Cross, three Silver Stars and nine Bronze Stars were awarded for this action alone.

A monument to E Co. stands at the D14 crossroads. 

  

The stone plinth at the right has a granite tabletop etched with Winters’ hand sketch of the battle. 

   

  

Posted on June 6, 2009 from San Francisco, CA.

  

 

Like I said, a gazillion stories.  I’ll leave you with this one, for now.  Conspicuous gallantry above and beyond… :

 

Lt. Col. Robert Cole’s Bayonet Charge

“When Cole and the remaining men of the battalion reached Bridge 4 there was less than a Company of men left … .”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacques_wood/2752258773/

http://www.paratrooper-museum.org/cole.html

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Photography in Flying in Crosswinds

Kit posted a question about a photo in “Here There Be Dragons.”   We also get a lot of verbal comments from friends about photography.  Ranging from offers to do coffee table books to disdainful questions about which version of Photoshop we use.

  

  

All photography in Crosswinds is digital, with minimal post-production.  We don’t even own Photoshop.

I was a film guy.  Post-production, other than cropping, feels sinful.

Remember film?

A friend who worked at Kodak’s old film division said their last days were like nuclear nuclear plague in Terminator – co-workers were terminated by the hundreds as the film industry went extinct in the digital age.

How do you compete when you make dinosaur pet food?  Your customers were wiped out.

Now the only film Kodak makes is X-ray film.  My Mom got loads of near-expiry film for free, for her instamatic camera.  She’s thrifty like that.

 

 

Another revelation will blow away the Gadget Guys with the big DSLR 12-1200mm bazookas: 

Nearly all photography in Flying in Crosswinds is done with a point-and-shoot camera 

There are some photos by passengers with digital SLRs.  But it’s just impossible to handle that artillery and fly an airplane at the same time.

 

 

 

  

The SLRs do have amazing depth of field versatility.  You can freeze an instrument like the vertical speed indicator  in razor sharp focus and blur everything beyond the alcohol compass. 

Blurring the outside view is an oxymoron in most aerial photography.  Nevertheless, with with an SLR you can knock yourself out.  Here, Kevin proves that at least a part of my steep turns are perfectly level!

  

  

  

My point-and-shoot camera’s real inferiority complex is with resolution.  Even with my 13 mega-pixel image processor, I couldn’t make out that UFO at the old Crow Valley gunnery and bombing range west of Clark.

  

Kevin solved the mystery for me with his Nikon DSLR. 

 

 

  

     

  

With our point-and-shoot, though, Carlo and I can snap pictures with one hand. 

 

      

  

 

  

  

We can also quickly shoot fleeting traffic (Carlo once captured a territorial eagle bent on chasing us away from his sky).

Would be tough to set up an SLR quickly for a shot like that.

  

   

Finally, our camera will actually fit in our Cessna 152 flight deck!  

Can’t do that with a bazooka!

  

  

I use a Nikon P6000.  Aside from the one-hand convenience, it has one, devastating advantage over many, many cameras.

It has GPS. 

Yup, Global Positioning System.  Its GPS receiver records the exact position from the earth-orbit GPS satellite constellation every time we shoot.

When we vainly admire our pictures on Picasa (freeware on the internet!), they are automatically overlaid on Google Earth with minute precision, literally.

It’s how we know what river we’re at.  I take a picture, overlay that sucker onto Google Earth, and voila!

  

  

And you thought we navigated by looking at the names of towns on school roofs!

 

 

  

I love that P6000.  I’m a Nikon guy, anyway.  I still have a Nikon FM dinosaur in a drawer.

There was a time when Canon’s lenses were ground and blown by Nikon.  I used to tweak the Canon guys with this little factoid. 

So I wondered when folks bought Nikon cameras and then used third-party lenses like Vivitar or Tamron.  Nikon’s superiority in the 1970s was in lenses — we bought Nikon’s lenses, and then had to buy the Nikon camera body because it was the only one you could use with those lenses.

   

  

But equipment is not the real arena in photography.  The best amateur photography I’ve seen was my Dad’s.  He had a Leica IIIf, circa 1939.  

No TTL, plain viewfinder, hand-held light meter.  In the days when the highest film speed was ASA 64, his photography was pure magic.  Proof that the most vital piece of equipment was two inches behind the viewfinder.

 

  

Kit, the photo was shot at 6,500 feet.  Above the haze layer, the sky is almost painfully blue. 

  

The purple tinge in the clouds is either a white balance artifact from our monitors or a phaser blast from the neutral zone.

  

  

Posted from Chicago, June 1, 2009

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Here There Be Dragons

Protesters stormed the ASEAN summit in Thailand.  Thais celebrated the big Songkran holiday, throwing pails of water and squirting Super Soakers at each other.  In the Philippines, on Easter Week, we also had  a wet, stormy story.

My last trip to Vigan.  “Last” is a scary word.

   

    

  

  

  

  

This story will hog the Slow Learners page of this blog for a long time.   

The haze was infernal that day. 

The wind itself lost its way, shifting fitfully from east to south to west.  

I held short at Omni while Clark Tower changed runways on a US Navy King Air doing touch and gos.

    

  

  

  

After takeoff, traffic in the landing pattern was easy to spot against the gray crud.

     

My planned route, in magenta below, was Omni to Tarlac to Pangasinan to San Fernando airport in La Union.  In a Cessna 152.  This is the aviation equivalent of driving to a beach 150 kilometers away in a golf cart.

 

  

Concepcion, Tarlac, the birthplace of Ninoy Aquino, is a VFR reporting point for Clark’s control zone.  The haze looked especially bad out there.

   

Over Concepcion, I began to turn left (yellow track) to San Fabian, Pangasinan.

  

Then Clark Tower told me to avoid their runways’ climb/descent approach corridor until I was 15 miles out. 

Balikatan military exercises were ongoing.  US Marines were flying Harrier fighter jets and C-130 Hercules tranports  nearby.  I didn’t want to hurt their fragile airframes with my mighty Cessna 152’s wake turbulence. 

So I turned back to the northeast, to avoid their approach path.

  

The planned route in magenta, the actual track in yellow.  The gray feather is the ILS approach path to Clark.

  

  

In the 1970s, when Clark was a US Air Force Base, an F-4 Phantom buzzed a Cessna trainer, blowing away the Cessna’s wings.  The student and instructor died.  They had to dig down 40 feet to get to the bodies in the wingless Cessna.

  

Eighteen miles out, I turned back to the northwest to intercept my planned track to La Union.  Into the worst of the haze.  Except it wasn’t just haze.

Rain. 

A minute.  Two minutes.  Harder rain!  The airplane started bouncing around.

Bouncing around?  Am I in a thundersto… ?

     

The haze had veiled a cumulonimbus behind it.

Cb, or thunderstorms, are bad news.  Dragons prowl around spewing out electrical bolts, roaring, as their huge scaly tails hammer your airplane. 

As I flew deeper into the rain, the ground was still visible, but the dark dragons loomed ahead.

  

[Han Solo:  "That's no moon.  That's a space station!"]

I was at my target altitude, 3,500 feet, for the leg to San Fabian, but the VSI was still reported a 1,000-foot per minute climb. 

  

Updraft!  I knew what was coming next.

My whole world had shrunk into the 3-inch the artificial horizon on my instrument panel.

The airplane was rocking.  What’s the definition of  moderate turbulence?  Butt lifting off seat?  Oof!  Head banging on ceiling?  Ow!

I checked my seat belt.

  

It lasted less than 5 minutes.  But even a minute in turbulence in a Cessna 152 is pure religion and eternal penitence.  We’re not talking thermals or convective burbles from a sun-baked rice field here. 

I was flying below a thunderstorm.

  

As expected, an increasing tailwind sheared me downward at the far side of the cell.  I remembered the flight with Julio five years ago, and pushed the throttle all the way in.

 

The microburst spat me out, and I had blue skies above, and the same damn haze ahead.

The 5-minute fun ride is highlighted in blue, below.  The Garmin 296 GPS records altitude and heading variations every 10-12 seconds.  The cell was just east of Tarlac.

    

Behind me, the storm was hidden behind the haze again.  The rear windshield plastic trim had popped loose, but the cargo net tie down straps were secure.

       

I’d had enough of the haze!  I climbed to clear blue skies at 6,500 feet, where I would be able to spot thunderstorms 50 million miles away.

Half an hour later, I was at top of descent.  The Garmin told me to head downward for San Fernando.

The sardine-can vents were still dripping.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

     

  

  

  

  

  

An hour after takeoff, I was on short final to runway 01 at La Union.

 

  

Later, watching fishermen on a calm beach at Puerto de San Juan, La Union, I exchanged text messages with Kevin and Iyoy:

Kevin:  Ever notice how lonely it gets inside a charlie bravo? 

Iyoy:  I had my share of dat at d old RPVI.  Departed San Carlos vmc for 30 min flyt to old RPVB at 1730 and encountered squall line of summer TSes.  3 beers in 2mins at the first sarisari store I cud find.

  

  

Posted from Bangkok, April 27, 2009  

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

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Paoay, Pinakbet, Pipian, Poki-Poki

Vigan isn’t the end of the earth.  The scenery doesn’t go south as the airplane flies north.  Ilocos Norte, home province of former President Ferdinand Marcos, is barely within our fuel radius.  Enough for a quick but unforgettable aerial survey.

It’s a wonder that WordPress didn’t censor this title.

  

  

  

  

Vigan is as pretty on the ground as it is from the air.  There are real 18th and 19th century houses here, and restored cobblestones.  Only horses, people and Pilots are allowed on Calle Crisologo.

 

 

 

 

  

  

  

 

 

 

 

    

   

  

  

Hotel Salcedo opened only two weeks before we found it.  A block away from the center of the old town, the hotel is a restored 18th century building.  The building across the street is a mirror image and completely unrestored, so that the pair look like Cinderella and her step-sister.  

   

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

The hotel is tastefully designed.  Capiz shutters, nooks with rattan chairs — under the stairs, on balconies, at the sala on the second floor.   Modern bathrooms, radio frequency key locks and alarms, wireless internet.

   

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

Carlo and I spent the night agonizing whether longganisa is a mortal sin on Maundy Thursday. 

  

We did our visita iglesia at Vigan Cathedral after a light longganisa dinner (this is where lightning strikes me down!!).

  

On Good Friday, the santos glared balefully at us. 

 

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

 

   

  

 

  

  

     

   

  

  

    

We fasted.  We deprived ourselves of real food and ate cornik chicharon, twin popsies and other dreary deprivations.

Oh, Ilocano cuisine!  Hearty pipian, chicken stew with a hidden ground rice surprise.  Igado, pork and liver stew, with bato and lapay [English translation deleted by WordPress censorship services]. 

Pinakbet.  Bagnet, like lechon kawali but on steroids.  Lato, green seaweed pearls on a vine, like tiny grapes. 

Poki-poki — eggplant balls.  Enough said.

  

Sapsapuriket, my personal favorite — like tinolang manok, but with chicken blood, sili, dahon ng sili, siling labuyo.  In other words, perfect for when you and your airplane are trapped in Ilocos by heavy, endless rains from a cold front.

But I’m getting ahead of my story… .

With all the voluptuous dishes Ilocos serves up, you wonder about trip blogs that enthuse about hitting McDonald’s for a “yummy breakfast”.  I mean, you get on a bus for 12 hours, and then when you arrive your idea of immersion is to gorge yourself at McDonalds, Max, or Jollibee??

Why even bother to leave Manila?

  

  

  

  

On the other hand, why leave Vigan and its culinary temptations?

But we had to.  Ilocos Norte was just 10 minutes north, by Cessna.

        

        

     

     

        

   

    

     

    

 

   

  

    

Pinget Island is a lollipop-shaped peninsula jutting out into the South China Sea from Ilocos Sur.  It must be motivating to hurry across that sandy isthmus as the tide comes pounding in.

   

There’s more up north.  Lapog, renamed to San Juan, is one of the few Ilocos towns I’ve seen on the ground. 

  

I once vacationed here for a few days, staying with a girlfriend’s folks, who hailed from here.  Long time ago.       

  

Finally, our meandering arc in northern Luzon crossed into Ilocos Norte.

The fabled beaches of Currimao are even more spectacular from the air.  Mouse over the pictures to check the location.

 

   

  

Feet dry at Currimao.  Climb to 1,750 feet to stay above the Laoag control zone, but outside the traffic zone of the aerodrome, clearly visible ahead.

  

At the northern apogee of our odyssey, we turned east to Paoay, with its famous cathedral, made from coral blocks, built from 1704 to 1894.   

  

  

  

  

  

    

 

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

  

Next to Paoay town was Batac, Ilocos Norte, the hometown of former Philippine President (or dictator and plunderer, depending on your politics) Ferdinand Marcos.   The Mariano Marcos University and the church, with the Marcos museum and mausoleum (or wax museum, also depending on your politics) are easily visible from the air.

  

  

  

  

    

  

 

  

     

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

No time to linger here, unless we wanted an unscheduled stop at Laoag airport (where they don’t sell avgas anyway). 

It was time to lean the mixture way back, pull the RPMs down, and begin the long, slow, fuel-anxious slog back to Ilocos Sur, all the way past Vigan, and down to La Union and our fuel depot at San Fernando airport.

 

  

Posted from Bangkok, April 25, 2009

Other cool Vigan blogs out there:

I am Lai 

Vigan Rocked My World

     

  

  

  

  

  

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Voyages to Vigan

I flew to Vigan four times during the Easter Holidays.  Enough for honorary citizenship in Diego Silang’s Yloko Libre.

We found a charming boutique hotel.  Ate the best dishes Ilocos has to offer.  Sat quietly in the 18th century Cathedral.  Prowled the flea market on Maundy Thursday, fasting on balut and twin popsies.  A real Holy Week hardship.

Explored a bookstore full of quaint old editions — Isak Dinesen essays, Star Wars in Spanish.  Dodged kalesas on Calle Crisologo, bought kilos of bagnet and bottles of basi, to be packed into the airplane for the Insulares in Manila.

  

  

  

 

   

   

You can take the low and slow road to Vigan, from Manila.  Ten or twelve hours, by car or bus.

  

Or you can take the high road.  Less than three hours in a Cessna.

You take off on the last leg from San Fernando, La Union, skim the surfing beaches of San Juan, hop the cliffs and ridges at Luna, and suddenly you are there — Ilocos Sur. 

At once, the scenery changes.  The folded, rumpled coastline of La Union gives way to the sand dunes and tobacco fields of Tagudin, Dili, Candon.

  

Emerald, azure and slate seas.  Blistering summer heat and glare.  Frothy surf.  Big bikes on the beach. 

     

These are some of the most beautiful coastlines in the Philippines.  Fishing bancas decorate the tidal flats, like multi-colored confectionary sugar beads sprinkled on a brownie.

 

 

  

  

  

  

 

   

    

   

 

 

 

  

  

  

  

     

  

  

Just 30 minutes after departing La Union, you approach Santa Maria and Narvacan.  Kaleidoscopes of languid river deltas and fantastic coral fans, clearly visible underwater.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

    

  

    

   

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

    

    

  

  

North of Narvacan, you get to the mountain that juts out like a thumb into the sea.  The highway sways precipitously towards the water.

     

Some days, the mountain at Narvacan bares herself in soft misty air.  Most days, she cloaks her head in cumulo tresses.

 

   

And off the last point of land, at the tip of the thumb nail, is a grotto with a statue of the Virgin Mary. 

  

 

 

 

  

  

 

   

   

  

   

Another 2 minutes of slow, lazy flight.  A town comes into view, uniquely geometric, laid out like a prism.  Santa, Ilocos Sur.  Founded 1576. 

1576!

 

     

The Spaniards, in naming towns, had run out of names of saints, so they stopped at “Santa” when they named this one. 

Two hundred years later the dude Diego, from Aringay, Pangasinan, led a revolt against excessive taxes and forced labor (I have that same problem every day).  The Spaniards couldn’t defeat him in battle, so they hired an assassin to take him out.

Diego’s wife, twice widowed Gabriela, took over.  She’s the one from Santa.

Later, Theodore Roosevelt visited Santa and declared it to be a place of “poetic beauty”. 

Bet you didn’t think I knew all that.

  

  

The real poetic beauty is yet to come.  You turn left after Santa, heading northwest along the coast.  And you get to photography paradise.

    

  

  

That’s the Abra river delta, not Photoshop.  The colors really look like that.

The Abra river slithers down from the Cordilleras, through the Banaoang Pass, under the Quirino bridge, through the municipalities of Santa and Caoayan, and out into the South China Sea.

Gabriela used to slip back and forth between Abra and Ilocos Sur through the Banaoang Pass.

 

  

  

You ogle the otherworldly scenery, then fly northwest a couple of minutes more, and your voyage is almost over.  Vigan — sleepy, rural, laid back Vigan – is just ahead.

  

  

As a final treat, when landing to the south, you skim past the Bantay Bell Tower.

  

  

  

This is where Carlo discovered that I was scared of heights.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

The view from the swaying, creaking wooden staircases and platforms inside must be grand, but I had my eyes closed the whole time. 

After 2007, the Bantay Bell Tower was closed to the public.

 

   

  

  

Finally, the voyage ends at Vigan airport. 

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

 

 

As you see on the video, you want to roll out with your nose wheel held up in the air, stall horn blaring, to announce your arrival.

  

The ramp can accomodate four Cessnas or one ex-provincial governor’s Let 410.  When the Guv’s sexy turboprop is here, you park your Cessna on the farthest corner, like the school dunce.

 

  

  

  

  

 

 

       

 

    

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

  

I love Vigan airport.  They should never modernize it.  Completely useless but welcoming gate, the mango tree loaded with fruit, the dirt lane leading to the airport ramp.

  

 

No control tower, just a Flight Service Station — a guy on a radio offering optional advice.  A few other friendly people tend the airport grounds and secure the airplanes.

    

  

Just how friendly they were, I would learn soon.

  

  

  

  

Posted from Bangkok, April 22, 2009

Next:  Awán ti ngumáto a dínto bumabá

  

  

 

  

  

  

   

   

    

   

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Mike Finds Oil!

There is an old joke about the three steps needed to ensure success in life:

1.  Work hard

2.  Sleep early

3.  Find oil

Do all three, and you will have a rich and fruitful life. 

Mike found oil at San Fernando, and ensured that he still has a life.  

  

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

  

 

  

  

 

  

 

San Fernando, La Union has a beautiful 7,000-foot runway, newly paved with virgin white concrete, runway and taxiway lighting, a new control tower, huge parking ramp.

  

And aviation gasoline.  

  

  

Only three airports in Luzon sell avgas – Clark, Manila and San Fernando.

For short-legged airplanes like the Cessna 152, San Fernando is the gateway to northern Luzon.  If we refuel at San Fernando, we can fly to Vigan and Laoag.  Of course, once we are at Vigan or Laoag, we need to refuel again back at San Fernando, to get all the way home to Clark.  Remember this.  We will see this fuel conundrum again.

 

 

Student pilots learn to leave the nest by flying solo cross-country.  The fledgling aviator flies far from home, alone in an airplane, left to his own wits.  He needs to find and land at two airports over 50 miles away from each other.  And then he needs to fly home.  If he can find home.

  

This procedure scares the living daylights out of his instructor.  And his Dad.

  

When Carlo flew to Lingayen and San Fernando for his first cross-country, he had never traveled alone outside Manila.  He didn’t even have a driver’s license.  Yet there he was, alone in an airplane cockpit, trying to find an airport five provinces away from Manila.  He didn’t even bring any money.

  

  

  

  

Mike was flying his first cross-country solo, Omni-Lingayen-San Fernando-Clark, on Maundy Thursday.  He arrived at San Fernando and discovered oil!

    

Engine oil, that is.  There was oil pouring out of his engine.

 

Fortunately, he had already landed.  Over 15o kilometers from his flying school’s home base, he did the smart thing.  Actually, two smart things:

1.  He called the flying school for a rescue airplane

2.  Then he headed for the beach.

 

His SMS message is still in my phone.

“First solo cross country.  Aircraft had massive oil leak.  Landed in rpus safely.  Am now stranded in surfing capital of the philippines!  On beach listening to cinema paradiso.  No sense in freaking out!”

If I ever need to send a distress message, I’ll remember Mike’s style.

  

  

Carlo and I flew from Omni that day, to San Fernando and Vigan.  When we arrived at San Fernando for fuel, we found Mike quite relaxed.

  

His flying school’s chief mechanic had already been flown in by another airplane, and was tightening the oil return hose that Mike probably loosened himself, just so he could visit San Fernando’s famed surfing beaches.

Mike’s good cheer was infectious.

  

If he wasn’t worried, then neither were we!  We said au revoir and flew off to Vigan, an hour north by Cessna 152.

  

  

Posted from Bangkok, April 19, 2009

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Ilocos

For two years now, Carlo and I have had a tradition of Flying North during long vacations — Christmas, Holy Week, Thailand’s Songkran.

This year we crisscrossed Luzon – Pampanga, Zambales, Pangasinan, Benguet, La Union, Ilocos, Nueva Ecija, Aurora.  Always looking for the best food, the friendliest people, the most spectacular views.

The verdict?

  

  

  

I first discovered Ilocos decades ago.  No, I didn’t march north with Juan de Salcedo in 1572.  I went in 1979 with my first girlfriend’s parents.  They hailed from Lapog, Ilocos Sur. 

All I remember from that sojourn is that Lapog and Vigan were sleepy towns, where even the flies were grounded, numbed into senseless torpor by the searing summer heat.

  

Five years ago, I flew to Vigan airport, which in a Cessna 152 is equivalent to falling off the edge of the world. 

I think that was in 1884.  Maybe 2004.  The details are blurry.

 

  

  

Then Carlo and I re-discovered Ilocos three years ago.  We flew to San Fernando in La Union, where we stopped overnight to fortify ourselves for a trip into deep space. 

At a beach resort in Bauang, Carlo flight-planned the trip north. 

We had to buy the J-12 Operational Navigation Chart.  The one that covers, northern Luzon, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Romulan Neutral Zone and the edge of the known universe.

  

Now, several hundred flight hours later, Carlo and I fly to Ilocos like you go to the beach — it’s not quite our backyard, but it no longer feels like the voyages of Juan de Salcedo.  We’ve been there every year for the past three years.

   

  

This Easter weekend, I flew to Ilocos four times in six days.  The breathtaking pastels of Ilocos scenery still captivates us. 

 

 

  

I can’t get enough of Ilocos by air, pulled north by stunning coastlines, the vivid tobacco fields and river sand dunes, old Spanish churches and bell towers.

 

 

I sometimes try to “dumb down” the color saturation on these pictures, because nobody would believe the colors.  I don’t even own a copy of Photoshop.
  

Some of the heartiest Filipino dishes beckon, too. 

Pinakbet, pinapaitan, diningding, bagnet, igado, pipian, and the embarrassingly explicit poqui-poqui.

  

  

  

 

  

We used to do day trips, but this year Carlo and I discovered a boutique hotel just off Calle Crisologo, a block from Cafe Leona.

Only three weeks old, it’s an original Spanish-era building that was gutted and then restored, capiz shell shutters, wide plank floors and all.

  

  

Carlo and I flew an aerial visita iglesia over Ilocos on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  We circled over cathedrals and churches at Paoay, Batac, Lapog, Santo Domingo, Vigan, Santa, Narvacan, Candon, Tagudin.

 

 

  

  

  

 

  

 

  

  

    

Actually, Good Friday isn’t the best time for a voyage to Ilocos — you can’t eat bagnet without getting a double dose of guilt — one for your doctor and one for your soul.

But if you visit Vigan on Maundy Thursday, you can light lots of candles at the cathedral in penitence. 

Then you can have bagnet, igado and Vigan longganisa at Cafe Leona, the cholesterol guilt assuaged by a dish of fresh arosip seaweed.

  

Getting hungry?  Well, you need to fly to San Fernando, La Union, first.  First the airplane eats, then you can eat.

  

  

Posted from Vigan, April 17, 2009

Next:  Work hard, sleep early, find oil

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

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The Reinvention of a Cessna Pilot

Cessna Pilot (n)  [sess-nah | pahy-luht].  1.  Straight and level  2. Flat-footed– use of rudder optional  3. Fifteen-degree banks, gingerly, 30-degrees maximum, 45-degrees death wish;  see also,student pilot, wimp, pre-Meynard neophyte.

     

        

       

  

  

  

  

  

The Cessna 152 is a sweet little thing under any circumstances, but a climb prop, upgraded engine, in-panel GPS, and other little goodies make flying it even more of a breezy joy. 

  

  

It’s the most benign flying machine around — I joke with friends that it’s possible to crash a 152, but you have to work really hard at it.

 

    

So I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when Meynard, our aerobatic instructor, tried to put it into a spin… and it wouldn’t. 

We tried twice, but 1513 simply will not spin!

 

So Meynard reached into his bag of tricks.

   

  

A snap roll, aeronautical wizardry that combines theatrics and violence, is ideal for air shows and dogfights.  It was a favorite maneuver of Japanese master ace Saburo Sakai, who used it to evade opponents and get into attack position behind them before they knew what had happened. 

A snap roll is basically a horizontal spin — power-on stall, then haul back on the stick, er, yoke, while stomping a rudder pedal of your choice.  The plane twists into a violent aerodynamic contortion that ends with straight and level flight, or a classic spin, depending on what you did next.

 

 

Attempting to spin our Cessna Soda Can will cause it not to spin, but to sort of mush downwards in a lazy spiral, stall horn blaring.  Snap-rolling it, however, brings a blood-curdling and frighteningly human shriek from the stall warning horn, and then the plane heeeeeeeels over and HEY, we’re in a spin!

   

Wait a minute.  We’re in a SPIN!  Aaaaiiieeeeee!

   

Meynard is relaxation itself.  Reduce power, neutralize ailerons, opposite rudder, and elevator yourself back to sanity.  It’s an easy routine for him — he can even come out of a spin on a specific heading. 

He actually tells me to slow down and relax, and not add power too soon after the recovery – I have enough airspeed from the dive!  Just relax, man. 

I’m in the middle of a spin and he’s telling me to relax.  This is great!

    

We do two or three of these before heading back.  1513 never skips a beat.  I love that airplane!

   

The next landing is the 151^st in my logbook.  Not my best — too much lateral movement on touchdown.  My last few landings were all perfect!  It had to be the one with the master instructor on board… .

   

Dad is waiting for us as we taxi back and shut down. 

  

Meynard opens the door and promptly tells him, “Well, he’s a maniac, just like you!” 

   

Dad goes utterly green with envy when he hears that we did snap rolls.  He’s wanted to do that since forever!  The next day, as he heads out for his own flight with Meynard, I ask him what his plans are.

   

“To have more fun than you!”

   

Later, he confides in me that Meynard says that I’m a natural and should teach.  That is the highest compliment I have ever received from a fellow pilot.  Wow!

  

  

The past couple of days added a new dimension to my understanding of flying.  In the hours after my certification, I had begun to lapse into a mentality where I saw flight as a continuing equation, where you traded pitch for airspeed, RPMs for altitude, and luck for experience.  It is, but it’s also far more than that.

  

The truly masterful pilot doesn’t just fly by the numbers, reliant on procedures and gauges. 

He is not a slave to his flight plan or the needles on his control panel. 

It’s the other way around.  

  

  

  

  

At some point, the airplane becomes more than just a noisy equation.  It becomes an extension of his mind and body.  The change affects every part of a pilot’s flying; it is a

reinvention. 

  

  

  

  

It’s given me a lot to think about, since a lot of flying’s lessons tend to be curiously applicable to life on the ground.  My other dream, you see, apart from flying like Maverick in Top Gun, is to become a great English teacher.

  

  

Posted from Vigan, Bataan Day, April 9, 2009

  

  

  

     

   

   

   

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I Acquire an Unusual Attitude

Carlo continues his story of flying with Meynard.  Over the course of two days, he is bombarded with new epiphanies on the theory and practice of flight.

   

  

  

  

The g-forces squeeze me into my seat as Meynard takes us through a loop, an aileron roll, a spin, and a hammerhead.  I follow him on the controls, trying to keep up with the intricate rudder movements.  P-factor and engine torque really come into play in aerobatics.  My perspective shifts from ground to sky to ground and back again as the plane gyrates through the air.

    

Then, before I know it (and before my head has stopped spinning), it’s my turn.  Meynard walks me through the instructions for an aileron roll.  Okay, straight and level, raise the nose 30 degrees, firmly push the stick all the way to the side, and whooOOOOOO!!!!!   Move over, Maverick!

Now this is flying!

    

One of the things I didn’t realize about aerobatics is the importance of ground references. 

Loops, for example, are best performed over a road.  Line up with the road, check for traffic, lower the nose for speed, and haul waaay back on the stick (a yoke would never do for this kind of work!). 

  

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

Ease up on the back pressure for a moment across the top, to round it off,…  

  

… and then haul back again until you’re level, using rudder vigorously all the way to stay lined up with the road. 

 

  

  

 

 

     

    

  

 

 

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

Those motorists are getting quite a show!

     

    

       

Afterwards Meynard asks if there are any other maneuvers I’d like to try.  I immediately ask if we can do an oscillation stall. 

An oscillation stall requires quickness, fine control, and confidence with low speed flight. 

To do it, you slow the plane to just above stalling speed, reduce power, and pitch up to hold altitude until the plane stalls.  Gradually, no sudden inputs, so that the plane doesn’t snap.

Then use the rudder, not the ailerons, to keep it level.  If you use the ailerons, or are slow on the rudder, the plane will fall off on a spin.  If you do it right, the plane will mush downwards, nose up, just past the edge of a stall, wings and rudder wiggling slightly.  The maneuver is also known as the falling leaf.  It’s used as an exercise in aircraft control and stall recovery.  I have a knack for doing it perfectly – in the 152.

   

In the Decathlon, it takes a bit more getting used to.  The nose sloshes indolently from side to side as I twitch the rudders.  Meynard’s instruction here is minimalist and elegant.  He does one himself to demonstrate that the Decathlon prefers BIG rudder inputs at low speed.  After that, I have the Decathlon purring like a kitten as it flutters downwards like a big yellow leaf.  Yes!

    

We fly part of the way back to NAIA upside down.

 

        

Meynard and I do a quick debrief with Dad watching.  I give myself a three out of five – I have a good grasp of flight, but I need to learn to fly by the seat of my pants, instead of chasing needles. 

  

  

  

  

  

     

      

     

Meynard wants to see how I fly the Cessna, so before I know it, we’re over the practice area again, this time in 1513.

     

      

Posted from Manila, April 7, 2009

Photos of Meynard’s Decathlon at 2009 Hot Air Balloon Fiesta are used with permission from a photographer who refuses to be identified.  Yet.  Watermarked and copyrighted.

  

Next:  The Reinvention of a Cessna Pilot

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

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And We Haven’t Even Started Maneuvering Yet!

Carlo continues his story of flying with Meynard for the first time. 

In two days he learns more about aerodynamics than most pilots do in years.  He is in a fabric-covered aerobatic airplane, yet his best lessons have nothing to do with maneuvering flight.

  

  

  

  

There was a large, yellow, thing in the hangar.  It was a spindly, almost insectile contraption.  Huge cockpit windows.  Spade-shaped things sticking out of the wings.

  

I ran my hand gingerly over the fuselage.  Fabric.

  

The thing sat with its nose snobbishly high in the air, its empennage perched on a tiny wheel at the rear.  A taildragger.

I peeked into the cockpit as we pushed it into the sunlight.  No gyro instruments.  No yokes.  Control sticks.  Not a Cessna.

   

  

This, according to Dad and Meynard, is a real man’s airplane.  A Super Decathlon, made of fabric, steel tube, and lightning bolts.

Great balls of fire!!

  

  

  

  

  

  

    

  

  

  

  

  

                

 

  

  

  

    

  

You do three things in an airplane, Meynard says.  You aviate, navigate, and communicate.  He would do the latter two on this flight.  That’s good because that Decathlon can be quite a handful.  He claims that all airplanes are basically the same, but I don’t know about that.

 

Basics.  He asked me to maintain straight and level flight as we entered the practice area.  Piece of cake, right?  No one can beat me on heading and attitude holds.  I’m like an autopilot that makes witty comments!

 

But not this time.  The Decathlon weaved all over the sky as I struggled to stay on track.  The heading would deviate, I’d correct, and then I’d find out that I’d gained a hundred feet.  Geez!  Adjust power to correct.  Now I’m back at the correct altitude.  Didn’t trim – I’m going too fast.  Throttle back.  Oops, heading!  Hey, I’ve lost fifty feet and dropping.  Power!  Pitch up.  Watch the heading.  Correct heading and speed.  Ahh.

“You are climbing, sir!”

Ack!

 

Meynard’s gentle prodding follows me as I find, to my embarrassment, that flying forgiving little Cessnas has disguised flaws in my technique.  I chase needles.  I forget to check the area before maneuvers. 

“Pitch and power,” Meynard reminds me.  A fundamental.  I know that.  But not the way he knows it, and it shows.

     

And we haven’t even started maneuvering yet!

   

Meynard’s students learn to take off, fly an entire pattern, and land with the whole panel covered, no references except the view outside, the seat of their pants, and the sound of the engine. 

I had learned to fly by the numbers, which has its own advantages.  It’s easy on the airplane, it’s easy on the passengers, and the airlines love predictability. 

  

However, that is not the kind of flying needed in aerobatics and emergencies.  

What is called for is flying that is quick, decisive, precise, and based on intimate knowledge of the airplane rather than on a bunch of charts and figures. 

The practitioner of this kind of flying is so attuned to the laws of aerodynamics that it is instinctive.  

The airplane has become an extension of his body and will.

  

  

     

  

This is how Meynard flies.  Aerobatics, he says, makes you a safer pilot because of the level of precise control and decisiveness it demands. 

  

I wonder for a moment why he keeps reassuring me how safe aerobatics is.

    

Then he does a loop.

  

  

Posted from Manila, April 5, 2009

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

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The Invisible Important Thing

In January 2008, over a year ago, Carlo finally flew with Meynard. 

How time flies!  I remember every moment — watching him taxi away in the Decathlon with Meynard, and again in the Cessna 152.  And then watching him taxi back, cool as a cucumber, both times.

Carlo wrote about it four months later, April 2008, in Bangkok. 

It is now April, 2009. 

This article, the first of four parts, written beautifully by one of my favorite writers, is a year old.  Waiting to be published on a special occasion.

Today is the 2nd anniversary of Flying in Crosswinds!

Read twice that paragraph about flying on autopilot, near the end.  It hits you the second time.

–  Tonet

  

  

  

   

I have to admit that the thought of flying with Meynard intimidated me. 

A self-made man of astonishing talent and admirable character, Meynard was someone I didn’t know what to make of at first. 

I’d heard from Dad how demanding he was as an instructor, calling for precision and certainty of oneself at an extreme level that made all my previous flight instruction seem lax by comparison. 

His intensity, and the way he had channeled it into every rating I could think of (helicopter, glider, instrument, commercial, ATPL, aerobatics, etc.) was something I had never seen before — or since.

 

Dad had been urging me to fly with him and let him correct any bad habits and fill in any gaps I might have in my mindset and understanding of aerodynamics. 

It wasn’t until early January last year that I finally went.

  

Like most of my flying experiences, it proved to be much more than what I had expected.

 

This blog entry is overdue, I know.

It has been a busy year so far, what with little things like a breakup, graduation, farewells to old friends and making new ones and finding someone who might turn out to be more than a friend and figuring out what to do with my life.

I’m amazed I was able to shoehorn any flying in at all.

     

  

Very time-consuming, this business of growing up.  It seems that all the grown-ups I know (I don’t quite count myself as one yet; call it denial) are in a perpetual rush, always in a hurry to do something and be somewhere else, running after security and the strange things grown-ups seem to be obsessed with. 

  

Not many take time to smell the roses, and fewer still take risks to do what they really want to do.  Dad has issues with the former.  I helped talk him into doing the latter.

He outlived his Dad.  Passed the mark just a week ago.  I’m not sure he expected to.  Today, he’s healthier and happier than ever.  Fulfilled. 

It’s partly the flying, I suspect.  It’s one of the things he was meant to do.  He wishes he’d started sooner.  I’m glad he started at all.

  

  

 

Ever read Jonathan Livingston Seagull?  It’s an old story about an outcast with tremendous talent who was born to instruct.  He pursues it, finds fulfillment, and makes a contribution that rocks the world he lives in. 

  

  

  

  

  

  

    

  

My other favorite book is by the pilot-author Antoine de-Saint Exupery.  The Little Prince’s title character and his friend, the wise and friendly fox, remind us that what is truly important is invisible to the eye.  I’m glad Dad decided to go for the Invisible Important Thing. 

Right now, I’m reading about Antoine de-Saint Exupery. 

They finally found out who shot him down, a young German Messerschmitt pilot who was shocked to discover that he had killed his idol. 

I wonder if Exupery had any regrets, plunging down, down into the Mediterranean. 

I doubt it.  He followed his Prince’s advice, after all.

   

It’s important to go for the Invisible Important Thing.  You never know when that Messerschmitt will pounce on you, guns and cannon blazing. 

I’m thinking of Ernest Gann now, and how the Messerschmitt, or the heart attack, or the missing elevator balance hinge bolt, or the last stroke, always gets you in the end.  How will you fly before it does?  On autopilot?

 

Meynard doesn’t fly on autopilot.  He goes straight to the most basic, important things.  In life as well as flying.  I’ll leave it to more capable wordsmiths to share his life story, but he does fly the way he lives.

 

His friendly attitude won me over and put me at ease before the flight.  Nearly.  As we walked out to the hangar, I got my first paradigm shift of the day.

  

  

Written April 12, 2008

Posted from Manila, March 31, 2009

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Our Beech B-25 Baron Bomber

Carlo’s first instrument flight.  At night.  In IMC.  In a multi-engine cockpit.  Left seat.  It doesn’t get more pressure-laden than that.

     

    

   

     

I’d had my turn.  Two runs.  It was time to give the other Captain a shot at it.

On the takeoff video, Meynard never stops teaching, even as Carlo accelerates to rotate speed.  Meynard leads the scan with his finger — altimeter setting, heading bug, airspeed, RPM, manifold pressure, airspeed.

    

Carlo rotates.

He is flying his first twin-engine retractable high performance airplane, night instrument departure.  Not many 22-year old English majors just out of university get to do that.

    

    

Carlo flies SID 27 to OLIVA intersection.  Meynard briefs Carlo on the procedures Manila Approach might use to bring us home.  Most likely radar vectors to the VOR/DME approach to runway 06 at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, the country’s biggest, busiest airport.

Sure enough, Approach begins vectoring Carlo through various heading changes and descents, first for traffic separation, and then the approach.

    

    

www.ozarkairfieldartworks.com

I sit in the back, thinking about Ted Lawson and his B-25 crew, in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

Their dusk flight from Tokyo to the Chinese coast, listening for the promised beacon at a Chinese airfield.

The weather was deteriorating.  Fuel was down to the last few gallons.  They skimmed the waves, looking for somewhere to land.

    

    

www.eyewitnesstohistory.com

The Doolittle Raid fascinated me as a child.  I first read Lawson’s 1943 book, my Dad’s copy, in the 1960s.

Lawson survived the raid but lost a leg due to injuries from his crash landing.

  

  

  

  

I built a scale model of the B-25B, and flew the mission many, many times in my imagination. 

www.DoolittleRaid.com

      

It was an endeavor of courage and integrity.  All-volunteer.

    

The twin-engined US Army B-25 bombers, designed for land operations, launched on April 18, 1942,  from the US Navy aircraft carrier Hornet just 650 miles from Japan, well inside the lion’s den. 

They were led by Lt. Col. James Doolittle, a proponent and champion of air power.

They flew a one-way mission.  There was no way to recover land-based bombers on a carrier deck.  The Hornet ran for safer waters as soon as the last B-25 took off.

     

    

It was the first bombing raid on Japan, barely 5 months after the Pacific war started.  Bataan had just surrendered nine days earlier.  Corregidor was still holding out.  Japan was not bombed again until 1944.

  

www.wingsoverelburn

Lawson and his crew hit targets in Tokyo.  They had flown from the lion’s den into the lion’s mouth.

After bombing military targets in five Japanese cities, the B25s flew on towards airfields in China.  Arrangements had been made for homing beacons and fuel in five Chinese airfields barely outside of Japanese-occupied areas.

     

    

    

But there were no beacons.  They had never been installed.

  

www.warbirdcollectibles.com

 

Lawson ran out of fuel over the Chinese coast.  He crash-landed his bomber, the Ruptured Duck, on a beach at Zhangzhou, in heavy rain.

  

Only one B-25 landed intact, in Russia.  All the others crashed.  None were shot down.

Of 80 men, 3 were killed in the crashes, 5 were interned in Russia (and eventually escaped via Iran), and 8 were captured by the Japanese.  They were tortured and subjected to a mock trial.  Three of them were executed.  One died in captivity.

The other 63 men, including Doolittle and Lawson, survived crashes or bailouts, and were taken by the Chinese to safety, over several weeks.  Over 250,000 Chinese were killed by the Japanese in retaliation.

Only 9 of the Doolittle veterans are living today (there were still 12 last year).  Already in their 80s, they still hold reunions in April, every year.

  

  

When Doolittle took off from the Hornet, he had only 467 feet of flight deck.  That’s an incredibly short takeoff run for a 31,000 lb takeoff. 

That’s a feat for a 1,650 lb Cessna 152.  Never mind a Baron.

     

    

   

     

Our airplane bounces in anti-aircraft fire, and clouds of smoke from the AA guns zip past our cockpit windshield.  You can see the explosions early in our documentary of the flight.

 

  

Captain Carlo is remarkably cool despite the enemy fire, holding heading and altitude.  The copilot leads the checklist as we drop down through rain, looking for the promised homing beacon… .

  

  

Manila Approach clears us for the VOR approach, and Carlo finesses his first ever instrument approach to a landing, rain streaming across the windshield.

  

I laugh out loud as Carlo touches down.

  

  

  

     

Neither of us could have flown the Baron solo to a perfect outcome.  Still, Carlo and I did fly the Baron for 3 hours, with Meynard coaching us through checklists and IFR techniques. 

I got to fly night instrument approaches using procedures I had last flown many months before in a Cessna 172 single, and which I had flown multi-engine only in Meynard’s Frasca 132 simulator.

Carlo gained an appreciation of the challenges and joy of flying at night solely by reference to instruments, under positive control by ATC, in a high-performance retractable twin.

Most of all, we had incredible fun!

  

  

Could we have flown and landed solo if Meynard took a nap?

Ha!  Can the Pope pray?? 

  

  

I remember getting home very late that night, after we debriefed the flight at Airworks.  Carlo and I were both floating on air, despite our exhaustion.

Home past midnight, we slept very soundly that night.

It was 24 hours to Christmas.  But we’d already had a piece of it tonight.

  

 

Posted from Bangkok, March 26, 2009

Excellent web resources used in this post:

The Doolittle Raid Remembered

Naval Historical Center 

Wikipedia

  

   

The movie, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, starring Van Johnson, Spencer Tracy and Robert Mitchum, is on DVD. 

No blue screens or computer graphics here.  All the flying scenes, including the hair-raising short field takeoffs, were shot on location.  1944.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Twin-Engined Fire Hose

My laptop was stolen in Amsterdam two weeks ago, with all my pictures since 2007.  It turns out I had backed up a few photo albums onto my home computer, which is now yielding these hidden treasures.

One of those albums is from December 23, last year.  T’was the night before Christmas… .

    

     

    

     

Meynard gifted us with a flight in his Beech Baron B58, one of the fastest, sexiest piston airplanes in general aviation.

Our first multi-engine operation.  I had Manila-to-Subic-to-Clark, night IFR.  Carlo would take us back to base, Clark-to-Manila.

  

  

The briefing took, uh, 2 days.  Emergency procedures, SIDs, approaches, even a crew change briefing.

No, it wasn’t like drinking from the proverbial fire hose.

More like, waterboarding. 

  

   

    

  

Carlo and I kidded around nervously in the hangar, looking for a prop on the nose of the airplane.  

The Baron was slightly larger than the Millennium Falcon.

    

It looked like a WWII medium bomber –  a B25 Mitchell, A-26 Invader, or the British Mosquito.  The numbers fanned  the fantasy – twin Continental IO-520s, 285 horses per side.  Over 230 miles per hour, 20,000-foot ceiling.  Enough payload for 6 crew plus a bomb load.

We boarded in a misty rain.

  

  

That was outside the hanger.  Inside my brain, Walter Mitty was having a field day.  We were at an airfield in England, for a night bombing raid to Europe.

  

  

The best part came at engine start.  In the Cessna 152, we always called out, “Clear prop!” 

But we had two propellers now.  Pump and prime, hand on starter switches, and a pause… .

… because I’d fantasized doing this next part since childhood.

Squinting theatrically out the left window, I put all the authority and timbre of Van Johnson, Gregory Peck and John Wayne into my voice,

  

“Clear LEFT!!“ 

“Clear!”

“Starting NUMBER ONE!!“

  

Hehe.     Never had more than one engine before!

  

I repeated the procedure for the right engine, my face already hurting from excessive grinning.  Thankfully we weren’t flying Gregory Peck’s B-17 or John Wayne’s DC-6 — four engines each.

  

  

It took a fistful of throttles to get us rolling.  The night was dark as ink.  Perfect for a night bombing raid.

 

 

  

  

I was shot down in flames at Subic. 

Parallel entry into the hold over the VOR.  I botched the intercept, and the airplane drifted west of the inbound leg. 

We S-turned to the VOR, fighting a crosswind from the east that had to be a 300-knot tornado.

As the TO/FROM flag flipped, I was reduced to homing to the VOR, the pilot’s equivalent of hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del on the instrument procedure. 

I was way behind the airplane.

Subic Approach joined in on the fun.  The dialogue is still embarrassingly clear in my memory.

“RP-C826, are you turning right or left to the VOR?” 

Smartass.

Approach was watching those S-turns on radar.  I was so far outside the hold that it didn’t matter which direction I turned.

 826 will be turning left, sir. 

“Roger that, sir, will you commence the approach now or would you like to try another hold?” 

You could almost hear them snickering over visions of the infamous Meynard skewering another bumbling student.

  

 

I’d show them.   On the holding side, I put in three times the wind correction angle, just like the books said.  I tracked perfectly on the holding leg.  After the prescribed 60 seconds, I cranked us over into a perfectly standard rate turn.

But we went wide again, into unprotected airspace outside the hold.

  

“Sir, malakas talaga ang hangin.”  Xavier gave me a face-saving out.

Xavier, a pioneer at Airworks, was leaving for the airlines.  This was Xavier’s last joyride in genav before migrating to the aluminum tubes of Cebu Pacific.

  

  

I flew the approach.  At Decision Height Meynard called “Visual”.

Subic’s localizer is offset 5 degrees off runway 07, to bend the final approach away from 3,068-foot Mt. Silanguin. 

You go visual at the VOR on Grande Island, and bank right to line up with the runway 2.3 miles ahead.

 

It’s not quite Kai Tak, the wild old airport in Hong Kong, but you could pretend it was.

  

  

     

     

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

   

As a sop to my pride, I did fly a good short final… .

 

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

  

  

  

We flew SID 18 to Clark.  I was determined to vindicate myself with a perfect approach at Clark, 31 miles away. 

There, my hold was fine, as was the turn to final and base.  I began to weave up and down the glideslope.

“You are LOW on the glideslope, SIR!“  Vintage Meynard.

 

 

We were one full dot low at 5 miles (the glideslope needle, above, is on the left margin of the HSI).  Meynard punished me by calling, “Visual”.  Game over.

  

Like flying a bomb run on Berlin and hitting France. 

  

    

Yeah, laugh at the video. 

    

Watch Meynard throttle up to recapture the glideslope. 

“Ho-ho-ho,” he says without mirth, as he points out our low-and-slow instrument indications with his finger.

Attitude, HSI, vertical speed, HSI, airspeed, attitude, airspeed, attitude.

  

  

We back-taxied quickly as a departing airliner positioned on the runway.  Holding at H2 off runway 02R, Carlo and I swapped seats without shutting the engines down.  The way the WW II pilots did it when they had to pick up the secret agent from the pasture in France secured precariously by the French Maquis.

 

That totally deflated guy in the back seat is moi.

 

 

Then it was Carlo’s turn.

  

  

Posted from Singapore , March 22, 2009.

Other night IFR stories here.

Next:  Multi-Engine Carlo

 

  

 

  

  

  

  

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Par Avion: Should Student Shun Shouting?

We get comments here.  And email, SMS, even phone calls.  Some of them raise issues that deserve a one-sided know-it-all response from a highly opinionated pilot like, er, Carlo 

We’ll call these posts, Par Avion.  Air Mail. 

 

Hi Tonet,

I saw your pictures at Hua Hin on WingsOverAsia website.  I hope someday I’ll be able to join you guys on cross border flying expedition.  Not that until i have my PPL.

I have started flying the Cirrus SR 20.  I have 1.3hrs in written in my logbook and I hope I can fly more often despite my instructor raising his voice every time I make mistakes.  It’s me who chose him.  All I need now is word of encouragement in case of emotional breakdown as a result of constant pressure.

My roommate is thinking about changing instructor (same instructor as me) once he clears his first solo.  He just can’t tolerate being scolded furiously during circuit training.  I hope I will last longer than him, at least until my PPL.

Some of my friends abroad advised against flying with this instructor but I just hope I can stay resilient despite the harsh remarks during flying.  Hahaha.  I know it will be good for me someday.

Would like to hear your opinion…and encouragement perhaps…

  

  

  

  

Captain, if I were you (and I’m not you), I would change instructors now. 

Shouting has no place in a teaching environment. 

It has been proven in education, consulting and leadership that shouting doesn’t make anything clearer.

Shouting is great for getting the student’s attention (“I have the airplane!”), or in increasing stress levels.  Some aspects of military training — preparing you for stress — benefit from a shouting instructor (”WHEN I WANT YOUR OPINION, I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU, LIEUTENANT”).

Shouting also works well when you want to show you’re angry.

  

  

But shouting drowns out comprehension and retention.  You don’t understand, you don’t remember.  And you’re paying by the hour to be shouted at. 

It’s also dangerous.  You’re flying an airplane, and you’re being shouted at.

  

  

Meynard, my instrument and aerobatic instructor, does raise his voice, but it’s not personal.  He does it to get your attention.  In class or in the simulator.

He also raises his voice to dramatize a point, to lead you to a climax in the lesson.  You sit there watching the passionate performance.  At the end, you want to applaud.

I’ve never heard Meynard raise his voice in the air.  Ever.

Flight training is distracting enough.  You are drinking from a fire hose.

You’re climbimg in the circuit after a bad landing, and should be fully engrossed in an activity that needs a very high percentage of your brain power – flying an airplane!   You barely have bandwidth to absorb advice, never mind a shouting rant.

     

  

If your instructor shouts for the wrong reasons, change.  You are paying for training.  Get training.

  

  

Having said that, it’s natural for you to feel overwhelmed at the start.  And many flight instructors are dedicated, passionate and sincere.  Consider enduring this behavior if he has these redeeming qualities.  And when you earn his praise, you know it’s really earned 

  

  

   

  

Posted from Amsterdam, March 18, 2009

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Lost Forever

We haven’t written for three weeks. 

An insane travel schedule — eight countries in two continents, kept me on the road for 26 days.  Somewhere in there was one night in my apartment in Bangkok.

Carlo has been immersed in job interviews and teaching demos.  Somewhere in there were the last days with a very special person, now overseas for over a year.

There’s a reason why there are no pictures in this post.

   

   

  

  

This week I was robbed on a train at Schipol airport, Amsterdam.  I lost my clothes, camera, iPod and the usual suspects — credit cards, cash, ATM cards, keys.

And my personal laptop.  With over 250 Gigabytes of digital pictures.  Nearly 100,000 images, mostly of flying in the Philippines, going back to 2007. 

My portable hard drive, with all my backups, was in the bag too — I backed up my files during the flight to Amsterdam

All gone.

  

  

I once flew my Mom to Baler.  We never made it.  A dark, solid ceiling squeezed us down towards the massive Sierra Madre peaks rearing up from below.

We turned back.  Above the foothills, near Laur, Nueva Ecija, my Mom and I spotted a bogie, two o’clock high.  He glanced back at us several times, eyeing the range, planning his attack.

Sure enough, he pulled into a vertical left bank and swept down in high-G diving turn, long wings buffeting with the aerodynamic load.  He was now pointed straight at us.

 

It was an eagle.  Headed directly at our cockpit.

  

As I flinched from the coming impact, he pulled pitch and flashed over us.  I craned my neck to watch him.  He zoomed into a perfect chandelle, wings spreading outward, content that he had driven us out of his operating area.

There was no time to take a picture.

  

Months later, Carlo and I tried a different strategy to Baler – VFR on top.  We never made it.  Towering cumulus boxed us in at 9,500 feet, the cloud tops racing upwards much faster than the airplane could climb.

We fled, diving through a gap in the towering clouds.  Down low, I flew gingerly up the Pantabangan river valley, to peek under the weather.  Nothing but dark and forbidding rain, solid IMC.  We turned back, finally, for home base.

Above the foothills, near Laur, Nueva Ecija, Carlo took a random, careless picture of the cloud-shrouded mountains behind us. 

I looked at that digital photo weeks later.  There, perched at our seven o’clock high, was the eagle from a year ago.

  

  

You will never see that picture now.

  

    

Nor pictures of Carlo flying IFR in a twin-engined Baron, like a bomber pilot from World War II, an insane grin decorating his face.

Nor any of the 1,200 digital photos I took of the Balloon Fiesta.  Nor the pictures of Pinatubo’s crater on the clearest day ever.

Nor the pictures of Hermana Mayor.  Yes, I finally got to land at enchanting Hermana Mayor.  Not that I can prove it anymore.

Birthdays, Christmas, first solo anniversaries, PFSG fly-in.

   

Two years of flying memories, all gone.

  

  

  

  

There was also a small book given by Carlo — Missing You.  And a Christmas card, dated January 17, 2005.  That letter had gone with me around the world for four years.  There is an intense personal story behind that dislocated Christmas.  A story of a Dad losing his son for a while, a story of forgiveness and trust and forever friendship.

  

A dear friend told me not to mourn the lost memories, that the people are still here.  That may be true.  But as Carlo moves further into his own adult life, the loss of the letter, a time machine into a receding past, is twice as heartbreaking.

  

  

  

  

Posted from Manila, March 13, 2009.

If any of our readers would like to share pictures of the Balloon Fiesta, or any of the flights we may have shared over the past 2 years, I will gladly acknowledge your ownership in Flying in Crosswinds.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Flying North

Every Christmas, Carlo and I miss some family reunions to fly beyond our Central Luzon backyard.  I figure that if I get a heart attack and lose my Class II medical, then I can go to all the family reunions.  

  

Last December’s plan: 

1.  Baguio to scavenge childhood memories

2.  Beaches.  La Union!

3.  Stunning coastline to Vigan, Ilocos Sur

4.  Home for New year

   

We’ve done this for two years now.  Four days together, talking about books, computer games, school.  And now, about jobs and serious girlfriends.

This year we had a surprise ending.

   

  

  

     

Our start date, December 27, was blessed with perfect weather.  The image on the left is not retouched. 

  

Maybe we were imagining it, but climbing past 4,500 feet we could almost smell the ripening rice crop, and the sharp tang of carabao dung.

  

The dirt runway of Paniqui airfield nestles between the sleepy towns of Paniqui, above, and Ramos, below.

We are told that a lone watchman still tends this airstrip, waiting for an aerial emergency.

  

   

The trick to enjoying the scenic Cordilleras is to not think about the engine quitting.

 

 

  

  

   

  

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

This settlement on a mountain top has intrigued us for years.

If the engine does quit, that plateau is the place to glide to.  Hopefully they have Jollibee there.  Besides, the river below would be far too cold.

  

    

   

I was flying left seat.  You can see my landing is far more creative, dignified and artistic than Carlo’s [sniff] barbaric arrival ten days earlier.  Humph! 

At 2′ 30″ in the video, just after I pass over Kennon Road on short final, the tower said,

“1513 be advised there is a ray gun, near runway touchdown markers.”

Ray gun? 

It puzzled Carlo too, but I was too busy landing to worry about Klingons or Imperial Stormtroopers.

At the 2′ 38″ mark, you can see the stray dog running off the runway to the right.

  

  

The President was at Baguio, so the ramp looked like Khe Sanh or Tora Bora.

   

  

  

  

  

  

   

  

  

  

Our friends from the 505th Search and Rescue Squadron were there too. 

These handsome gods get special mention here because  if our engine does quit, they are the ones who will pick us up from the mountain top village.

   

  

  

     

Baguio was cold — 9 degrees Celsius, the air was clear as a bell.  Plus, the 68-year old Star Cafe was open!  My Dad fed me breakfast here every year since the late ’50s.  I even have a 1959 picture standing in front of it, in diapers.

  

I’ve always tried to pay it forward with Carlo.  But they were always closed for one reason or another.  This time, we pigged out on the same mami and congee I remember from my childhood.

  

  

Lunch was at Cafe By The Ruins.  We loved their food in 2004, cooled off in 2005, despaired in 2006-07.  Market Manila reported similarly on this clinical history.

          

Last year, they must have gotten the old chef back.  The pinikpikan, chicken beaten gently with sticks before slaughtering, was tasty again (unless you’re from the SPCA), the lumpia crisp and fresh, and the longganisang hubad had nothing to be ashamed of.

  

Carlo’s eyes are cropped out so that our criticism will remain anonymous. 

We also vandalized their menu.  They had “Poets,” but we had a better “P” word!

    

The day’s highlight was dinner at Mario’s, a family favorite.

Gambas, lentejas con chorizo, salpicao.  We always ask wistfully about their corned beef and cabbage, even if they took it off the menu a million years ago.

They did have Alphie, on-the-job trainee for the Christmas Season.

 

     

Leadership guru John Maxwell talks about eagle jobs and duck jobs.  You never put a duck in an eagle job — customer service, entertainer, call center agent.  Eagles thrive on attention and high energy. 

How many accountants make it as President?  Ducks — accountants, engineers, geologists – do all the work underwater, while eagles fly high.

This is why we hate going to banks, or government offices.  We have to deal with ducks employed in jobs that require eagles.

Alphie hovered nearby all night, quick to offer menus and chat with diners.  She sneaked some dessert out for us to sample so we would order it.

OJT servers don’t earn any pay, apparently.  They compete for training slots to complete school requirements, and pay for their own board and lodging (Alphie isn’t from Baguio).

We promised to put her picture on the blog      Fly high, Alphie.

  

  

Posted from Amsterdam, February 17, 2009

Next:  Ilocos!

  

  

  

  

  

  

    

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Reflections on a Year of Crosswinds

  

  

  

I’ve been had.

–  Tonet

  

  

  

  

Well, I have to say that my plan worked perfectly.

Even before he became a pilot, I always knew that Dad would make an amazing writer.  An amazing storyteller.  It was an easy conclusion to come to, as I have been his most rapt audience since before I could talk.

That’s why I convinced him to start this blog, almost two years ago.  I even went along when he told me that he wanted it to be a joint project!  (I try my best.)  Now look at it.  Thousands upon thousands of hits, records broken just this month.  Awards.  Hundreds of regular readers.  I’m proud of him.

  

  

Storytelling and a love of flight have always run strong in our family. 

Grandpa used to regale my Dad with stories of American fighters roaring overhead at the height of World War II, and of how my Grandfather was shanghaied into repairing Japanese planes at Nielsen Field (whose runways now serve as Makati city’s main arteries).  It was there that he gained an appreciation for Japanese food, another thing that seems to have been passed on to the succeeding generations…

  

I was named after one of Dad’s favorite storytellers, his Uncle Carlos.  A large and friendly man who was in the habit of raiding relatives’ refrigerators, he filled Dad’s head with stories of flight and adventure.  Parents, watch out what your nutty relatives tell your kids!  Your kid just might be inspired to do crazy things – like becoming a pilot.

Love for stories is in both my blood and my name.  I suppose the English literature course and the teaching job were inevitable.  Not that I’m complaining.

     

So it’s a great honor to see Dad’s storytelling prospering here.  I think I’ll get him to write a book next!

  

  

As for me, the past year has brought its share of stories.  Adventures.  Flight.  And yes, romance.  Dad’s categories were well chosen, it seems…

I’ve reached that point in my flying where I can comfortably take close friends up for a sightseeing tour unlike any they’ve ever seen.  Old promises dating from my student pilot days are being kept.

  

Take this guy.  Professor Ambeth Ocampo is the head of the National Historical Institute, has worked with presidents, and hopes to write the great Philippine History book.  For all that, he seems to have the most fun shocking, entertaining, and  teaching his students all about the myriad craziness that most historians leave out of the books.  Check out his book, Rizal Without the Overcoat, for fun facts and insights into the life of our quirky and passionate national hero!

I wrote a paper for his class once, and mentioned my pilot’s license offhand.  He wrote a short note asking about it, and I half-seriously invited him to go flying!

I got an A on that one, I think.  Coincidence.

Nearly a year after I graduated, I took him flying over Mexico, a town whose history he had written about in his column in the Inquirer.

   

Kate Teng is one of the smiliest, most lovable friends I have, and also one of the most adventurous! 

It was no surprise when she took me up on my offer. 

  

Funny how psychology students do crazy things sometimes.  She loved seeing Mount Arayat from the air, and applauded as I performed chandelles and steep turns among the clouds south of Magalang.  Her smile says it all.

     

Nina is the first non-aviator member of my family to go up in the air with me.  She was always rather different from the rest of our cousins.  Deep thinker, book lover, effusively joyful.  This was only her second flight ever.  On her first, in an airliner, she was bursting with excitement as the plane left the ground and marveled at how everyone else on board could possibly be bored.

Imagine her reaction to an oscillation stall.

  

I don’t think I’ve ever had a passenger who had this much sheer, squealing delight flying with me!

  

  

In December, it was my turn to be introduced to a new and thrilling experience, as I was treated to not one, but TWO flights in something called a Beech Baron. 

This sleek and elaborate contraption had twin engines, constant speed propellers, retractable gear, radar, and fuzzy seat covers.  All new experiences.  Oh, and one of the flights was at night.  More on that soon!

Dad and I went on our holiday air trip, passing through Baguio, San Fernando, Vigan, and Baler!  Each destination was a new adventure, and the trip deserves its own article.  I will say, though, that the climb out from Baler gave me a new appreciation for wind’s effects on one’s fllight path…

This year has been a tumultuous one for me.  I would even go so far as to describe it in Dickens’ words:  the best of times, the worst of times.  I suffered a massive delay in achieving a dream I’ve been cultivating for over six years, dealing irrecoverable damage in the process.  But I also achieved a dream I hadn’t thought I would find until I was much older.  An entry on my list of things to do before I die.

 

  

The entry was “love and be loved by the most beautiful woman on earth.”

If you want an apt and detailed description of her, send a poet over here, because I don’t have words that will do her justice.  But I’m gushing again.

I’ve had more heavy crosswinds, structural damage, and VFR flight through IFR conditions this year than in any of my 22 years on this planet.  But I’ve also had more than my share of uplifting things.

I wonder what 2009 will bring.

  

  

Posted from Manila, February 6, 2009

Next:  Flying North

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Meynard the Medicine Man

Last November, I texted Meynard, needing therapy.  I was in Bangkok, after a rough month at work, too much travel.

Meynard is my aerobatics instructor.

He replied by text… .

  

“We can use the Decathlon as a psychiatric couch.  Combinations this time.  Cuban 8s and Immelmans.  Sequence of 6 maneuvers.”

  

Salvation!  My home leave was only three weeks away. 

I went nuts when the Bangkok airports closed, trapping me in Bangkok.

  

  

  

  

On December 19, I was in Meynard’s classroom in Manila, briefing for my first aerobatic flight in months.

We sat around for two malicious hours, bashing straight and level pilots who try to fly without spilling the coffee of the people incarcerated sardine-like in Airbus and Boeing aluminum tubes.

We were way out of line.  And thoroughly enjoying it.

  

  

I told him of the placard I saw in the Cirrus the night before.  Aerobatic maneuvers and spins prohibited.

It’s like sex, he said with a pensive but wry smile that bordered on pity.  Imagine doing the missionary position all your life… .

  

Meynard had flown in that Cirrus backseat recently, and the demo pilot, immersed in his all-singing, all dancing glass doo-dads, busted a departure clearance trying to fly a non-existent SID.  

Meynard reverted to instrument instructor mode when the pilot did that.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?  THERE ARE NO SIDs HERE!  WHEN ATC TELLS YOU TO MAINTAIN RUNWAY HEADING TO THREE THOUSAND, YOU [insert French phrases here] MAINTAIN RUNWAY HEADING!

Later, they got lost.  Somewhere between Echo and November, which are NAIA taxiways.  Lost on the ground.

Instead of burying his head in the cockpit glass, the poor fellow should have looked out the window glass.

  

     

Meynard told me a story about his friend Carl Pascarell, test pilot. 

Carl was test flying a Velocity at St. Augustine airport.  The radio in the airport office crackled.  It was Pascarell, looking for Jim Moser, the FBO owner.

Sorry, Jim isn’t here, said the girl behind the counter.

That’s ok, says Carl.  Wasn’t important.

   

Turns out Pascarell wanted to ask Moser for suggestions.  Because the Velocity was in a flat deep stall at 9,000 feet, neither yawing nor rolling, dropping 1,500 feet per minute, airspeed zero.

   

Nothing Pascarell did brought the nose down.  So he climbed out of the airplane.  In the air.  While it was stalled. 

He lay on the forward canard wing, trying to weigh the nose down.  For 30 seconds.

Finally he got back in, and  rode the airplane down to the crash.  Then he went back to his day job, which was being an airline pilot.

  

  

Another Meynard friend is Budd Davisson, a great aviation writer whose hundreds of flying stories and articles are mostly true. 

They met when Budd drew Meynard as his dogfight adversary at Sky Warriors (”Fighter Pilot for a Day”), in Atlanta. 

       

Meynard didn’t tell them he was an aerobatic pilot. 

The resulting dogfight, in T-34 Mentors, was epic.  Bud wrote a whole article about it in Sport Aviation.

Meynard flashed past, we stood our airplanes on a wing tip, pulled the noses up hard.  Meynard was no slouch, canopy to canopy, spiraling upwards. 

I lost all concept of whether we were going up or down. 

  

It felt like only an ounce of additional pressure would stall the wing, but get rid of that ounce and it was instantly flying again. 

I suddenly saw it!  I released just enough back to let my nose sweep up Meynard’s wing. 

As we drifted past behind him, I started to roll back in, Grumpy said one word in my headset, “rudder.” 

My foot went in, the nose swung and there was Meynard floating in the amber gunsight.  A twitch of a finger, a belch of smoke, and I was ready to have an outline of Meynard Halili stenciled on my cockpit.

    

  

  

  

Between stories, Meynard niggled at my past errors.  Not enough rudder in oscillating stalls.  Aileron input in pure pitch maneuvers.  Pilot-induced oscillation.  Exiting aileron rolls 3 degrees to early.

Three degrees.  Geez. 

  

     

  

  

Two hours later, we actually took off.

  

  

In the Decathlon, he yelled at me unceasingly.  Not holding altitude within 50 feet in competition turns leaving NAIA.

Not enough right rudder to offset p-factor as I pulled hard to vertical uplines, as we passed Plaridel. 

At the Charlie Four training area, I was barreling my loops — inadvertent aileron input as I pulled back on the stick.

Meynard pushed me hard.  No more kid gloves.  Haranguing, scolding, provoking.  C’MON TONET, FASTER ON THE RUDDER!

  

I enjoyed every second of it.

“You masochist, enough!  You’re having too much fun.” 

  

He made me land at Omni’s short, narrow runway.  I actually did 3 pretty good stop and go’s, my first taildragger landings in months.

     

You thought those two hours in the classroom were just for airline-bashing and hangar-flying stories.

It was therapy, specially tailored for me, who had been traveling far too much in airliners. 

Meynard got me so relaxed that I did 3 good landings on a 600-meter runway in a taildragger!  After two hours of aerobatic maneuvers.

Psychiatrist.  Meynard the Medicine Man. 

  

  

Homebound, we photographed ourselves.

In the picture, my sunglasses are lifting up.  Headset cable floating up.  In the window above our heads, you can see Earth.  

     

The airplane is upside down.

See the insane grin?  I was whole again.

  

  

  

  

Posted from Bangkok, January 29, 2009.

Pass cursor over images for photo credits.

Budd Davisson article excerpted from “Sky Warriors — Walter Mitty, You’d Better Check Six”, Sport Aviation magazine, March 1996.

  

Next:  The Aerobatic Box

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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