Achtung, Wir Fliegen! I Fly With The Red Baron!

   

  

It was quickly discovered by our own Intelligence Officers that the best of the German fighting squadrons were now patrolling our skies.  On the aerodrome at Coincy, a large field just north of Chateau Thierry, was located the distinguished Richthofen Squadron, then commanded by Captain Reinhardt.  Its machines were distinguishable by their scarlet noses, and by the extraordinary skillfulness of their pilots.  It was now included in Jagdstaffel No.1, which comprised four Flights of seven machines each.*  

                         

                   

      

   

   

   

          

It was time to fly with Hauptmann Helmuth.  The Red Baron himself!

How do you board an ultralight?  Very carefully, lest your foot punch through fabric or your butt bend an aluminum tube.  When Herr Hauptmann and I strapped in, the gross weight of the entire contraption must surely have doubled.

   

The giggling says it all.

    

      

After thorough engine start and pre-takeoff checks, plus a quick scan for pesky Tommies in S.E. 5s or Sopwith Camels waiting to ’bounce’ us during takeoff, we were off!

  

Achtung, wir fliegen! 

  

Helmuth held us below 500 feet for a while.  Ponds and trees zipped by.  In my mind, I heard the music from Flyboys.  Remember the scene when Rawlings (James Franco) took Lucienne (Jennifer Decker) flying?

  

As we climbed higher, I saw a city on the horizon.  That couldn’t be Tarlac, could it??  Herr Hauptmann pointed to the GPS and confirmed that we had already exited the Clark airport traffic zone, were now abeam Tarlac City, and were well on the way to Nueva Ecija.

It was time for me to fly the airplane.

Herr Hauptmann’s brief:  “Coordinate your turns.  We are heavy.  If you turn too steeply or cross-control, we could go into a spin.  I’ve seen that before, and believe me, I don’t want to see it again!”

I glanced at the fabric wing flexing in the wind, thought about stalling and spinning at this altitude, and vowed to turn very, very gently indeed.

  

The aileron control forces were a bit stiff, my excuse for immediately unleashing uncoordinated turns on Herr Hauptmann’s butt, about which he loudly complained.

Pitch was responsive enough!  A slight tug on the stick pointed us quickly toward the troposphere.  Rudder pedals, as in every airplane I have flown and will ever fly, are pests for pilots!

  

        

The famous German Fokker held the skies in 1916 and 1917 for it combined more of these essential details than did any one fighting craft of the Allies.  Then came the Spad which the French designed to out-speed and out-maneuver the Fokker, but still the Fokker had a higher ceiling and a swifter dive.

The British produced the S.E. 5 in 1918 which out-dove and out-maneuvered the Fokker, but could not overtake it on a flat race nor out-climb it.  The Sopwith Camel likewise came from England and proved superior to the best German fighting machines except in the matter of diving and high-ceiling.*

  

   

My best impression was of speed.  This airplane is fast!  Even dawdling as we were, it took just half an hour to fly from Woodland to Nampicuan. 

The Red Baron carefully kept me behind German lines.  We patrolled over Nampicuan, now 30 nautical miles north of Herr Helmuth’s luftbasis.  This was friendly territory for Der Fleigend Zirkus — the Red Baron’s Flying Circus. 

 

Rolf, a German who has made this country his home, has built a grass airstrip here and introduced sailplane flying — soaring with the wind – to the Philippines!  Surely I must write about that some day.

  

All too  quickly, it was time to go home.  I managed to keep the ball centered during my turn.  Or so I thought.  I tapped the ball, now immobile in the center of its tube, and haughtily pointed out to Herr Hauptmann that it must be broken

He curtly replied to me that his butt, still sliding around as I stabbed at the rudder pedals, was telling him otherwise.  If I had Photoshop I would paint a Kaiser moustache on Herr Hauptmann’s photo, above.

We flew low over the trenches under the Concepcion bridge on the Sacobia river, alert for ‘archie’.  We quickly spotted Der Fliegend Zirkus luftbasis.

  

  

 

Achtung!  Der Rote Baron!!

  

  

  

Flying down short final, Helmuth had that airplane right where he wanted it.

 

  

I thoroughly enjoyed flying with Helmuth.  More than a true aviation enthusiast, a superb professional and a studious pilot, he has become a genuine friend. 

  

        

Now I’m hooked on this, and will want to take ultralight lessons soon.  Curse you, Red Baron! 

     

    

Posted from Amsterdam, January 29, 2010.   

*Excerpts from Fighting the Flying Circus, copyright by Edward V. Rickenbacker, 1919, and Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1919.

Photos by Flying in Crosswinds, Prince, Rolf Dunder and Tim Maceren.                      

                

                  

                                

                     

           

   

             

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The Little Red Fokker

    

    

    

A New Year, a gaggle of new flying stories!  Already I have enough aerial tales to write about for an entire year.  It’s 2010, and we are off with a Bang! 

    

    

    

    

    

    

I finally met the The Little Red Fokker.  It took a year, but the stars finally aligned.                                    

It all began at the Hot Air Balloon Fiesta  last year, where I was Air Boss.

At an air show, the Air Boss partners with Air Traffic Controllers to manage all aircraft movement.  A terrifying job.  I was hellishly hot and heavily harassed. 

    

    

    

In the midst of all that,  Helmuth, who I’d never met before, goose-stepped up to me and curtly demanded in a clipped Teutonic accent that I ride his little red f*cker 

Right now.  Schnell!

A kraut pimp, I thought (turns out he is Austrian).  Then I realized he was referring to his Fokker. 

A Fokker is an airplane.  In case you were wondering.     

    

  

Eleven months later, I finally got to ride Herr Oberst Helmuth’s little red, er, airplane. 

It was based at Woodland Airpark, home to ultralight aircraft of the Angeles City Flying Club.  Carlo and I have flown many times over Woodland.  I’d been there but once, many years ago.  Why am I not a member of this intrepid band of aviators?

Talk about intrepid!  When we arrived at Woodland, there was a Quicksilver ultralight in the landing pattern.  There is nothing under their legs but Pampanga rice fields, hundreds of feet below.  

    

Woodland feels like an old Royal Flying Corps, Armée de l’Air, or Luftstreitkrafte airbase.  (The Brit, Australian and American club members all had ribald comments about The Great War, Austro-German pilots and Fokkers.)  Grass runway, clubhouse, fabric airplanes and vintage aircraft tucked away in hangars.  Craftsmen, professionals, enthusiasts.

 

  

  

  

  

     

  

 

  

   

   

   

   

 

  

  

     

Mike S’s PT-13 Stearman, a real treasure, is being restored here. 

   

   

    

Bob is doing an outstanding job on this, his fifth Stearman restoration.  I used to admire this airplane from afar, at various ramps and taxiways in Philippine airports.  It was the most beautiful airplane in the country, and will look even better soon.

    

  

Then I found it.  Der Kleine Rote Fokker! 

Jabiru 4-stroke 85 BHP engine, gorgeous French wooden prop

    

    

    

    

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

Wait, are those bullet holes?! It's a WAR out there!

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

   

    

    

    

    

  

I loved it at once – the flaming red fabric (yes, Virginia, this is a fabric-over-metal-frame airplane), the Balkenkreuz and all the other markings.

“Fok” stands for Fokker.  In case you were confused.  

The “E” is for Eindecker (n. Ger. “monoplane”, single wing), the first purpose-built German fighter airplane, designed by the Dutch aircraft designer, Anthony Fokker.      

   

The livery is a tribute to Helmuth’s great grandfather, who flew Hansa-Brandenburg D-Is, Albatross D-IIIs and Fokker D-VIs and D-VIIs for the Austro-Hungarian Air Service, in the Great War.

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

The stickers say it all.  This is an owner-built kit aircraft designed, ironically, by a French aeronautical firm.  An 85-BHP 4-stroke Jabiru aircraft engine, designed and built in Australia, drives that wooden French prop at 3300 RPM, on a diet of 100LL avgas or 95 octane Petron Blaze. 

Helmuth, who is actually an exceedingly good-natured self-deprecating craftsman and professional art restorer, is understandably proud of his masterpiece.  There is a very heart-warming story behind Herr Oberst, and we will write a lot more about him here!

The flap handle and trim crank are overhead, classic vintage craftsmanship. 

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

But then there were the CHT and EGT gauges, gyrocompass, electric turn coordinator, GPS, VHF, fuel pressure … enough instrumentation to send the ultralight to Mars.  The sneaky Flugzeugführer probably had full-color synthetic weather radar hidden somewhere.    

    

    

It was time to fly.  Kommandant Helmuth pulled Der Rote Flugzeug out into the sun.

    

    

    

I had never flown an ultralight before.  I was about to lose my virginity.  Snoopy, here I come!!       

 

    

Posted from Bangkok, January 19, 2010.

Next:  Achtung!!  Der Rote Baron!!     

    

    

    

    

    

    

        

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Tracking Santa

Carlo, Gino and Julio got gifts from Santa until they were in their early teens.  They believed, with all their hearts, that he would come every year.

They wrote letters.  I would proof-read them, and check that their wishes were this side of sane    I always asked them to put in other wishes, in case the workshop at the North Pole couldn’t craft their top choice.

Then I would mail their letters for them.

 

 

In later years, Santa got an email address.  Before the kids got their own computer, they would use my PC to fire off their wish lists to santa@northpole.com. 

The magic of the internet sent the letters got to the right person.

There were several tantalizing near-misses, when they nearly caught up with Santa.  They knew they had to be asleep, else Santa would give the house a pass.  But they were often too hyped up from the noche buena, or too eager to see what the sleigh would bring.  They would stay awake.

Santa got very sleepy, flying holding patterns above the house, until they dropped off to sleep.

  

Once, the kids woke up to find ice shavings on top of the gift-wrapped presents!  Snow from the North Pole!!  Wow, that was neat.  They figured the jolly Old Coot had unloaded the sleigh just before they woke up.  The snow had not melted yet.

Santa sometimes stamped his gifts with a real North Pole postmark.

One year, there was a big hubbub in Grandma’s garage, when three large presents were found on top of the parked cars.  There was a red hat, too.  Obviously, Santa was in such a rush that year.  Probably never stopped the sleigh, just did a touch and go over the house.

  

They got what they asked for, mostly.  X-Wing fighters, Star Trek communicators, Pod Racers, Lego sets, model airplanes.

 

 
  

One year, the kids scrounged around my apartment for an arrival snack for Santa.  They insisted.  All I had was Spanish sardines in olive oil, and tomato juice.  Fine.  We set that the snack on the table.  The kids woke up to find the Spanish sardines consumed, and the glass half empty. 

  

I love Spanish sardines, myself.  Goes back to illicit midnight snacks with my own Dad.  But olive oil and tomato juice??  I was so sure that Santa got a bit sick that Christmas Eve.  Ask me how I know this.

During the early Microsoft Windows years, a Santa tracking program appeared on the internet.  ETAs all plotted for thousands of cities all over the world. 

There is a map view, and a satellite view, and a time-to-go countdown for a Manila arrival.  The kids watched, fascinated, as the sleigh inched closer, and the counter for millions of homes visited ticked away.

We ran the software all through the night before Christmas, year after year.  Since the early 1990s.  We crashed hard disks, lost laptops, drowned home computers in floods.  But we always had a backup for Tracking Santa.  The software even got a Windows Vista upgrade this year.

 

 

 

      

Then came the day when they were too old to get any more gifts from Santa.  They were ABSOLUTELY heartbroken when they learned that.  I had to explain, and it wasn’t easy.  And I was stunned at their reactions.  Gino, especially, was very, very disappointed when he learned.

Their own children will enjoy many years of Santa’s Christmas gifts, for sure!  Just like my own Dad’s kids did, for many, many years.

I look forward to the magic of Santa’s visits on Christmas Eve, always.

 

  

   

Posted from Manila, December 24, 2009.  

  

  

  

 

  

  

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The Visible Proof of Man’s Faith

We continue to rave about Joshua Cooper Ramo’s No Visible Horizon.  Ramo was TIME magazine’s senior editor, foreign editor and assistant managing editor.  He converted from casual aerobatics to a serious attempt on a top 10 finish in US National Aerobatic Championship. 

      

        

No Visible Horizon is meditative worship of the seduction of extreme flying.  It is the aerial equivalent of Le Milieu Divin, that divine union of man and God on the plane of perfection, written by Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin.  

The mythical Jonathan Livingston Seagull exceeded the limits of his body in order to transform himself into the very spirit of perfect flight — “died and went to pilot heaven”, in ground-bound pedestrian terms.  Chardin himself was excommunicated by the institutional Catholic church for his heretical proposal that man could be “one with God” through the pursuit of perfection. 

Like them, Ramo’s aerobatic pilgrims laid themselves on the altar of “the world’s most dangerous sport,” to achieve that elusive nirvana of a perfect flight.

                             

Neil Williams was a British test pilot.  Deep expertise on aerodynamics, a conservative approach to tackling the unknown, and the desire to probe around limits – these drive test pilots on pilgrimages to new worlds.  They are not daredevils.  They are explorers.

 

Ramo writes of a famous Neil Williams story — entirely true — of a flight in 1970.  The Zlin 526 is a sleek airplane so revolutionary that it ”had jolted the flying world at the 1964 World Aerobatic Championships”.
                                                            

 

Williams took it for a test flight.  The whole Eton-Oxford routine.  Back in a minute, chaps.  He’s pulling into a tight loop when he hears a bang and sees his left wing folding up toward the cockpit in the same way you might close your upraised palm into a fist.

His little Czech masterpiece has a cancer.  The spar is the long metal stick that holds the wing to the airplane, and if you punched it enough times, the spar began to fold.  Williams’s Zlin had been flying for years.  The cancer was buried deep inside the wing.

 

     

Williams starts to think really fast.  Actually thinking would be too slow.  So he fires off on instinct alone, pure faith.  He rolls the plane inverted and snaps the wing out like a one-way hinge.  Imagine snapping out a carpet or sheet.  The wing cracks back into position just as he is finally upside down. 

Williams takes a deep breath.  Weird, to be sure, but probably salvageable.  He tries to roll upright and … the wing starts to fold again.  So he rolls inverted again and begins thinking.  No parachute.  Routine flight, and all that.  The engine hiccups.  Running out of gas. 

As the engine begins to sputter, Williams starts an approach to landing at the airfield.  Upside down.  Turns into his final approach leg, upside down, and, so low that he actually draws one wingtip through the grass, he fast rolls the airplane back upright at the last possible moment and lands as the wing folds up.  And walks away.  He has pulled off a miracle at the very last second. 

You could imagine pilots flocking to that little line in the grass, the leaves still wingbrushed, like Hajjis to Mecca or pilgrims to some sighting of the Virgin Mary.  That little line in the grass was it, they would say to each other, the visible border between miracle and martyrdom.  The physical proof of man’s faith.

  

There is an elegantly written ”Zlin Wing Failure Report” on the web, here.  Authored by Neil Williams.  Dry irony.  The whole Eton-Oxford routine.

Six years later Williams flew a WWII bomber head on into a mountain in Spain in bad weather, killing everyone on board, including his wife.

  

 

                

                  

                 

Posted from Hua Hin, Thailand, December 5, 2009

Next:  Kirby Chambliss

All images are from the excellent blog, Test & Research Pilots, Flight Test Engineers, by Neil Corbett of Scotland.

                      

   

                   

                     

           

   

             

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No Visible Horizon

It’s doldrum season on my flying, when my pilot license and our airplane’s airworthiness certificate is being renewed.  No flying for a while.

It’s time to write about one of my favorite aviation books.  One I’ve given to my best pilot friends at Christmas.

  

  

No Visible Horizon, by Joshua Cooper Ramo, is a thrilling, breathtaking read.  His writing credentials are drool-worthy:  youngest senior editor in TIME magazine’s history, then foreign editor and assistant managing editor.

Then he learned to fly aerobatics, competed in the US Nationals, and lived to write about it.  He placed 11th, missing the top 10 by 1/100ths of a point.

 

I could quote excerpts from the book all day.  The problem is, the entire book is quotable, packed with rich, vivid excursions to the very edge of aerodynamic and physiological limits.  A friend described the book as “fatalistic”.  It’s on the same plane as Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, lots of angst, tension and alpha energy.

Ramo’s coach for the Nationals was a former Soviet Champion, Kazakhstani aerobatic pilot Sergei Boriak.

 

Boriak has a test for me.  We are going flying for the first time and he wants to know will I get sick and will I be afraid?  Fail or Pass.

“What do you want to do?”  I ask him over the intercom.  “You fly,” he shouts back.  Your plane.”  I feel a bit of relief.  I glance at my watch as we take off.  10:45.  If I am lucky, this will be over by 11:00.  It’s a terrible attitude.

I level off at 3,000 feet.  I want to get a sense of how she flies and one of the best ways to do this is to slow down to the point where the wing doesn’t have enough air moving over it to keep flying.  It is like feeling up a girl during a slow dance, an easy way to see where you can put your hands and how this mystery is likely to react.  And as the speed bleeds off we settle down into a stall.  I calmly pop the nose down to pick up airspeed and stop the stall.  We are flying again.  The whole experience is very benign, almost no g’s pulled.

“Goot.  Let me have plane for moment.”  From the back seat, Boriak sounds happy, childish almost.  “You must have plane trimmed just right to fly.”

Suddenly the sky is torn away.  Sergei slams the stick forward and we are screaming earthward on a pure vertical line.  The power is full forward.  We are losing more than 5,000 feet per minute.  Now 7,000.  The meter runs out of room.  I can make out branches on the trees below.  I can see leaves.  At 300 feet, Boriak slams the stick back with a tug that puts six times the force of gravity on our bodies and throws us into our seats with a thud.  I relax for a moment.  Mistake.  Wham, Boriak is back on the stick hard, cranking us straight back up into the sky at about seven g’s.

Boriak sets the nose on a vertical upline.  I float in the cockpit as he slams the stick to the right and we begin twisting up through the sky.  As the plane teeters on the edge of a stall, Boriak taps us over into a dive and we are screaming earthward again.  Twenty-one thousand feet per minute.  Straight down.

  

  

I don’t feel sick.  And I find that as the ground races up at us, as Boriak whips the Sukhoi around with forces that would pull an ordinary airplane apart, that I feel no fear.  I look for the fear in myself like you might look for keys or a misplaced wallet.  But it is nowhere to be found.  Wham!  He cranks us back into the sky.  In this furious rummage of my soul, I have found a hint of real pleasure.  Bam!  We are level again, 300 feet, 250 miles an hour.  “Okay, ” Sergei says.  “Plane trimmed.  All yours.  How you feel?”  It is 11:00.  I am ready to learn to fly.

 

         

Posted from Bankgok, November 29, 2009

Next:  Kirby Chambliss, Joshua Cooper Ramo and Neil Williams

Images from Huffington Post, amazon.com and Sergei Boriak’s website at http://www.sergeiboriak.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Damned Flood

   

  

  

  

Remember your childhood backyard?  You knew where every tree was – the guava in the corner, the macopa near the poso, three kaimito dominating the center.  The dwarf lived under the culvert, and the sweetest aratilis grew over the neighbor’s wall.

  

  

  

  

Carlo and I learned to fly over Central Luzon.  In the lazy summer heat, we smelled the parched rice fields even from 1,500 feet.  When we banked steeply over the twisting Pampanga river, the fishermen in the bancas waved.

Our backyard.  With no pilotage chart or GPS, we can find Ben Hur’s chicken farm, or the prison camp from the Great Raid.

And the footbridges and weirs on the Pampanga river, the lake near Cuyapo that swallowed an entire town, where the dwende  lives, where the sweetest aratilis are.

  

  

  

Last week I flew for the first time in weeks.  Straight up Central Luzon to the San Roque dam. 

In the aftermath of super typhoons Ondoy and Pepang, nothing was recognizable.  If not for the GPS, I would have been lost.

  

     

This used to be a sitio of Concepcion, Tarlac.  North of the Sacobia River, west of the Rio Chico.

      

A little further north, a soggy chicken farm collapses into the muck.

   

On our cross-country training flights, we flew legs from Concepcion, Tarlac, to Zaragosa, Nueva Ecija.  Careless compass work would take us to La Paz, instead.  We soon learned to recognize and use La Paz to check our course.

  

My GPS now said this was La Paz.  I couldn’t tell.                                                             

 

 

 

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

           

  

  

  

  

    

See the flood current, streaming across the Zaragosa highway?  Imagine your house shuddering in that current.  For a week.

  

      

     

There is a long grass airstrip at Paniqui, Tarlac.  Good drainage all around.  

We flew over it just 6 weeks ago, on Carlo’s birthday, and took this picture.  A place to land if our engine decides to take a break.

   

 

   

   

  

  

You would need amphibious floats to land at Paniqui now.  

    

At Ramos, the next town east, the rice fields were gone.  The forked road in the town center looked like twin tributaries.  No help could come up that submerged highway from Paniqui.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

 

    

   

  

Rolf’s grass airstrip at Nampicuan was also flooded.  Rolf, who moved here from Europe because he loves the Philippines, plans to introduce sailplane soaring in the country. 

I don’t know if his sailplanes, and the D4 Fascination, were in the hangar.

  

At Rosales, site of an old airfield dating to WWII, the Agno River breached the dike and flooded the town to the second floor of that new SM mall nearby.

  

  

  

  

  

The flood had drained back into the river, but the airstrip was muddied and still flooded at the western end.

  

  

I followed the Agno river east and then north.  Flirting with the Cordilleras now, I switched the GPS to terrain mode.  I strained through the heavy haze to see the mountains which I knew were close by.

I knew what I was about to see, but the sight was still riveting.

The San Roque dam was releasing water through two open flood gates. 

 

 

     

I’m an engineer.  In 1978, during Martial Law, I wrote an article in the UP Collegian about Angat dam releasing water during a typhoon, wreaking havoc on Bulacan and Manila.  The government threatened me for that, even if I just quoted reports from the crony press.

Suing a dam operator is the most non-constructive step now.  When we run out of hydroelectric power and irrigation water next summer, the engineers with the solutions will be in jail.  Or in Qatar.

No, the sordid origins of this mad-made catastrophe lie far upstream of Carlo’s generation.

  

  

I flew home, rain clouds drawing dark drapes across our beloved backyard. 

  

     

       

Posted from Bangkok, October 17, 2009

  

  

 

  

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2009 Philippine Blog Awards

Our blog is a Finalist in the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards!  Carlo and I are immensely PROUD!

  

  

We would have celebrated this with a dozen stories by now.

Except that Carlo’s home was devastated by typhoon Ondoy, which flooded great swathes of Manila last September 26. 

The whole house was completely submerged in floodwater and mud, above the roof line.  In four days we cleared nearly 120 cubic meters of mud and debris from the house. 

Nearly everything is gone — laptops, passports, school records, favorite books, old treasured pictures, childhood mementos, school medals and diplomas, and the dog, who either drowned or was lost in the flood.

  

Carlo, David and Julio have not lost as much as others.  Over 270 people died.  The typhoon dumped an entire month’s worth of rain in a single day.

Over 250,000 of our countrymen, 48,000 households, are homeless tonight.  Carlo and his brothers are wearing borrowed clothes and shoes, and have no permanent address for now.

And they are the lucky ones. 

   

  

So we will be back, with funny stories of swimming the floodwaters and hitching a ride on a boat, cleaning up the mess, and learning to treasure what is left.   

  

  

Please scroll down and read our past flying stories.  There are over a hundred of them!

As we wait with bated breath for the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards!! 

  

  

Posted from Manila, October 1, 2009.

  

  

  

  

  

  

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The Cup Runneth Over

I’ve often wondered how magical it would have been to take my Dad flying.  Pay him back for all the airplane stories he told me when I was a boy.  Sons secretly crave their fathers’ pride.  He is long gone, so I will never find out.

Or so I thought.

  

  

  

  

I’m am only son, third in a line of eldest sons.  I have three sisters.  Brothers were a  big mystery.  I envied my Ateneo classmates who had brothers.  When my third sister was born, I ran upstairs so no one would see me.

  

My Dad had one brother, Carlos.  When I was young, Uncle Carlos, affable and easygoing, would come to our house and raid the refrigerator.  He paid for his meals with stories about James Bond and hand grenades.  I listened wide-eyed. 

Uncle Carlos left the Philippines on a passenger ship.  My family stood on the pier, and he tossed us paper ribbons from the deck of the ship.  He held his ends of the ribbons, and we held our ends.  As the ship left the pier, the ribbons parted.  I watched the ship sail past the breakwater at Manila Bay.

  

  

My grandfather was an accountant — obsessive and disciplined.  Worked for decades at Tabacalera and never learned to smoke.  In retirement, he raised chickens and turkeys.  Once I watched him ink onto his ledger, in painstakingly precise script,

Two chickens killed by rat.

  

In the same precise writing, on stark white cards, he wrote stories.  He once wrote me a jewel about how my Dad used to recite the Our Father backwards at the Ateneo.  “Amen.  Evil from us deliver and, temptation into not us lead, … .”

“Hoy, Rivera!  What are you doing?”

  

       

My Dad told me lots of stories.  During World War II, he saw airplanes diving down from the sky to attack ships on Manila Bay.

He told me of a fighter plane that flashed past, just 20 feet above the rice fields, looking for enemy soldiers.  The pilot — a real pilot! — looked at my Dad.

  

My Dad died suddenly when I was 19.  He was 50.

Heartbroken, my grandfather lived but a few more years.  He never wrote me another story again, on those stark white cards. 

 

     

In America, Uncle Carlos’ daughter, Karla, overheard him tell a visitor about some risky surgery.  He didn’t think she understood their Filipino language.

Later that week, that same visitor came to see Karla at school.   Her father, my affable, easygoing Uncle Carlos, had died on an operating table.  Carlos did not tell anyone in our family about the open heart surgery.

  

The last storyteller was gone. 

  

  

I was the only paternal grandson.  If I had no sons, the family name would die with me.

But I have three sons! 

  

I tell them that if my Dad had lived long enough to retire, he would have waited for them at school everyday, to buy them ice cream and tell them stories.

Flight instructor Ina pins on my wings, Feb 1, 2003

Thirty years after my Dad died, I earned my pilot’s license.  My biggest regret was that I could never take my Dad flying.  I wondered how magical that would have been.

I also wondered if I would live longer than my Dad.  I had similar ailments.  If I lived past 50, I would take every day as a gift. 

  

   

   

Instructor Dey pins on Carlo's wings, Father's Day, 2006

The year I turned 50, my son Carlo also got his pilot’s license.

Carlo flew me as his first passenger! 

I knew then exactly what my Dad would have felt, flying with me.  I no longer wondered.  The magic overflowed in my heart. 

    

    

   

   

 

When Carlo flew me as his first passenger, a son flew with his Dad.  The circle closed.

Carlo's first passenger, Father's Day, 2007

  

  

Stories do count.  After our years run out, the stories are all that are left.  Without an oral history, everything that was us is but a flash in the universe.

As I watch three sons grow up as tightly-knit brothers, my cup runneth over with stories.

  

Imagine the stories the grandsons would have!  I can’t wait. 

Or maybe I can.

  

    

Posted from Manila, September 10, 2009.

Fifty-two years!  Every day is a gift.

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

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Secret Advanced Formula for Landing in Killer Crosswinds

 

 

My Mom wasn’t enamored with flying sideways, crab-like.  I didn’t like that last-second kick on the downwind rudder pedal to align the airplane with the runway before the tires hit the pavement sideways.

There is another method.  Advanced technique — like scratching your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.

Here is the Holy Grail for Googling pilots.  Finally, the SECRET ADVANCED SUPER-DUPER SURE-SHOT PAINLESS STAINLESS FORMULA FOR LANDING IN CROSSWINDS    When the windsock is pointed at Pinatubo, across the runway.

  

  

  

  

Landing the airplane is tough enough – you line up with the runway and juggle power and pitch attitude to maintain glide slope and a slow approach speed to landing. 

  

As the airplane slows, you rearrange your brain. 

That’s because you flirt with the backside of the power curve in slow flight.  The controls are illogically reversed – pulling the nose up merely slows the airplane down, making it sink, not climb.  Reducing power drops your nose, which increases your speed in a steeper descent. 

If you think that’s baffling, uh-huh.

  

You push this and pull that, half a phase out of step with the yo-yo airplane, acutely aware that if you do something too much or too little, the airplane will get either too slow or too low to fly. 

  

  

  

  

Then there’s the crosswind.

  

  

On top of everything you’re already doing, you lower one wing  into the wind. 

And in yet another counter-intuitive move, you step on opposite rudder to keep the airplane from turning toward the lowered wing.

    

  

  

The books call this the “wing low” or “sideslip” technique. 

You slip sideways into the crosswind as you fly forward to the runway.

The slip negates the crosswind and keeps the airplane aligned with the runway.

    

    

  

You keep this up all the way to the ground, canted into the wind, opposite rudder to yaw against the bank.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

    

    

    

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

    

   

    

   

You touch down on one wheel, like an Evel Knievel or French Helldriver (I’m showing my age) wheelie stunt, leaning precariously into the wind, until life slows down and the airplane is rolling benignly on the runway.

  

  

   

  

  

  

    

   

   

Then you push the throttle forward and thrust your airplane once more in to the air, until sunset if you have to, siezing on the chance to practice while the crosswind keeps up. 

  

  

  

 

  

 

    

   

   

Now you know why student pilots hate crosswinds.

  

  

  

  

Pilot books, flying magazines and airplane videos have explained this to death.  So what is the REAL secret here? 

  

It’s this –  

The control inputs are tiny.  A touch of yoke into the wind, a nudge of opposite rudder, and you’re there.  This is not maneuvering flight.

Almost not worth writing about.  Nobody writes about how to ride a bike, right?  You just, Do It.  If you have to think about it, you’re overdoing it.

Fly on a crosswindy day.  Stop thinking about technique.  Think of … Angelina Jolie.

  

Even I have written about this too much now.  Did you know I never learned to ride a bike?

  

  

      

  

  

Posted from Manila, September 2, 2009

My Dad’s birthday.  He would have been 83 years old.

  

 

  

  

 

  

  

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Besieged at Baler

Even today, Baler remains besieged … by weather, mountains, the biggest ocean in the world.  But with weather wisdom, terrain awareness and the patience to turn back and try again another day, you can break the siege.

And remember, the Crispy Buntot is delicious.

 

  

  

  

   

There are three routes across the Sierra Madre mountains to Baler.

 

Short and Fast

Through the Bongabon-Baler pass.  Short and fast.  Squeeze through the gap between solid cloud above and even more solid mountains below.

[Captions available, mouse over each image.]

  

    

  

  

   

   

    

   

   

   

   

  

  

  

  

   

    

If the gap closes, you are suddenly flying blind below mountain peaks.  The flight might get really short and fast.

 

 

    

  

  

  

   

   

   

  

  

    

  

  

  

   

  

  

  

    

    

  

  

  

  

 

Commit if you can see the coast on the far side.  Then think…

…  of future comments on Facebook about your pathetic genetic material, if you splatter on the mountain.

  

Once committed, you can’t abort.  Turning or climbing blind into a lowering ceiling is Russian Roulette — high terrain all around.

  

You could also climb over the clouds and cross at 7,500 or 9,500 feet.  But unless you’re flying a MiG, towering Cu can build faster than your airplane can climb.  

  

The Scenic Route

Through the Pantabangan river valley, to Baler’s coastal plain.  Lower mountains, higher ceilings … and more traffic.  I once zipped by a Cessna 172 here, opposite heading.  No radio contact.  Hard to spot, see below:

  

You can do something here that you can’t do in the mountain passes.  You can turn around. 

 

The End-Around 

Southeast through Laur valley to Dingalan Bay on the Pacific Ocean, then up the Aurora coastline north to Baler.  Big detour. 

  

You’ll burn a lot of fuel.

  

   

   

   

Past the mountains, a magnificent coastal plain opens up.  The airport is invisible until you are close in.

  

  

   

   

  

         

  

  

  

 

  

  

   

    

   

   

   

   

     

   

On the ground, you keep one eye on the sky, one eye on the clouds, and one eye on the mountains, lest they move towards each other and ruin your day.

  

 

    

  

  

  

  

   

  

   

   

  

  

  

 

Sierra Madre weather factory. Gap between cloud and mountain at left where we flew through.

  

  

  

  

Last February 28, Carlo climbed us to 9,200 feet, trying to beat the clouds.  We just couldn’t out-climb the weather, and suddenly we were boxed in, cumulus towers all around us.

Energy similar to a thermonuclear detonation had lifted millions of tons of moisture into white cotton skyscrapers.  They could flip upside down in unplanned aerobatics over forested mountains.  Without wings.

We anxiously turned in a big circle, besieged by silent, lethal white monsters reaching thousands of feet above us.  I banked steeply through a gap, seeing green fields of central Luzon far ahead.  We fled, just 11 nautical miles from Baler airport.

  

I put the airplane in a dive, northwest to the Pantabangan reservoir, to try again.  Traced the river east.  Down low now.  Dark.  Rain.  Darker.  Clouds. 

Hopeless. 

Carlo turned us around under a ceiling barely 1,000 feet AGL.  Mist, drizzle, low visibility.  We were only 15 nautical miles from Baler.

 

(Five weeks later, we retraced the old GPS track and took pictures of where we turned back.  You can even practice your flight on Google Earth.)

 

 

 

  

  

  

  

    

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

    

  

  

We were way down deep in that valley, that day we turned back.  Except that the visibility was 20 times less.

    

    

Going home, picturesque Pantabangan sprawled below us, that damn eagle at our 8 o’clock high making sure we were bugging out.

  

  

On the rice paddies, the wind rippled silver sheets of water under the rice crop.  Impossible to photograph, and only a pilot, and God, can see that.

Even when you can’t break the weather siege, Baler is beautiful, coming or going.  I am torn between raving about Baler, and keeping it secret.

  

  

        

Posted from Bangkok, August 28, 2009.  

Carlo’s Birthday.  Happy Birthday, Carl!!

     

  

     

  

  

  

  

   

    

  

  

     

   

   

 

  

  

     

    

    

    

     

     

     

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Isabela

The mountains, weather and routes at Baler were learning opportunities for us.  They stretched our wings, our decision-making and our experience base. 

More important, the Crispy Buntot is great!

 

  

  

  

Fast-forward seven months.  December, just after Christmas.  Carlo and I vegetated on the beach at Vigan, wondering where to fly next on our Yuletide flying holiday.

 

As a rippled sunset glowed over the South China Sea, we got a text message from Ruth:

Merry Christmas!  She and her family were in Baler for the holidays.

  

  

     

      

Carlo and I sat up.  Baler!  Of course! 

It was the amihan season.  Drizzly northeast trade winds on the Pacific coast, lots of surf action.  Baler was way across Luzon.  It would be a coast-to-coast flight.  But that’s what airplanes are for.

We left at sunrise, refueled at La Union.  Climbed to 8,500 feet across Baguio, then doglegged across the Puncan, Caraballo and Sierra Madre mountains to Pantabangan and Baler.

  

  

  

    

    

   

  

  

   

  

     

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

    

      

    

    

     

We were fetched at the airport by an irrepressible lady with the utterly charming name of Isabela.

Isabela!  Carlo and I loved her instantly, even if she was a bit haughty at first, as a proper lady should be.  After she got to know us  more she became outgoing and more, er, demonstrative.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

 

   

   

      

  

  

  

  

    

    

    

    

 

Since Carlo and I left Vigan at sunrise, we attacked the home cooked lunch at Baler like pilots home from the wars.

  

The movie Baler! was sweeping awards at the Manila Film Festival.

We visited the church where the Spanish soldiers were besieged for nearly a year, unconvinced that Spain had surrendered the entire country to the Americans  months before.

 

  

We toured the two-storey Baler Museum.  Beside centuries-old tribal artifacts were costumes and props from the movie.  There is a rich photo collection that spans more than a century of photography at Baler.

 

 

    

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

Dinner at Bays Inn, right on the beach, featured Crispy Buntot, like crispy pata except it was not, well, the pata. 

The next morning a Pacific Ocean sunrise, barely showing through rainclouds, spotlighted the horizon and capped a great 24-hour journey.

  

  

In the past 24 hours we had flown coast-to-coast right across Luzon, seen the sun rise and set at both Vigan on the South China Sea and at Baler on the Pacific Ocean.  Not bad for a small Cessna.

  

It was raining when Ruth and her family took us to the airport.  Isabela called Clearance Delivery while we pre-flighted the airplane. 

 

Except that the master switch was off.    

  

  

Carlo spiralled us up in an instrument climb to VFR on top.  Later he studied the track with interest — the wind had drifted us closer to the mountains throughout his spiral climb.

 

 

     

Ruth and her family drove off for Manila.  The airport caretaker told them to wait, since our airplane would surely return because of bad weather.  Ruth firmly told the driver to go.  She knew the pilots well, she said.

  

When Carlo and I landed at Omni, Isabela and her parents were driving down the Sierra Madre into the Central Luzon plain.  We haven’t seen her since.  She sent us pictures of her birthday party last month.

  

  

Posted from Bangkok, August 21, 2009.

Ninoy Aquino’s 26th anniversary.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Baler!

The pilot who crosses the Sierra Madre range into the coastal plain at Baler Bay is well-rewarded with a stunning vista.  Baler is a beautiful place.  Sheltered by mountains, it is competitive and contemporary without losing its refreshingly rural identity.

  

   

   

  

  

  

  

    

    

                                

                       

      

  

  

  

  

 

 

  

        

    

   

     

   

   

  

    

  

Carlo and I made it to Baler for the first time in May, 2008.  I can’t recall how we crossed the mountains, but it must have been hairy, because this awesome cellphone photo is from that flight.

   

      

  

      

On the coastal plain we found the perfectly serviceable but nearly abandoned Juan C. Angara airport.  Located inland at the town of San Luis, the airport used to be serviced by scheduled SEAir flights.

  

 

 

 

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

     

    

   

  

   

Baler is the hometown of a dear old friend who I had not seen for years.  

Ruth is a former work colleague with a terrific work ethic — 14-hour days, a persistent passion for excellence, zero tolerance for mediocrity.  The type of person who, when upset, might conquer a small country. 

I loved it, since she reported to me.  If it were the other way around I would probably have assassinated her.

Living in Manila now, Ruth hails from Baler.  I texted her that Carlo and I were flying to her hometown, and she urged us to visit her parents’ house. 

  

We flew into the airport, eight kilometers inland from the Pacific coast. 

The 1,100 meter concrete runway is long enough for turboprops, but, sadly, scheduled airline flights have been shot down by the economy.

   

  

 

We took a tricycle to Sabang beach.  This is the site of the annual Aurora Surfing Cup, perhaps the most prestigious surfing competition in the Philippines.

Captain Kilgore (Robert Duvall) “Loved the smell of napalm in the morning” while surfing this beach under enemy fire, in the iconic 1979 movie, Apocalypse Now, shot on location here.

    

 

Carlo and I just had to sample that surf for the record.  But we didn’t have time nor equipment for the real stuff, so. . .  .

 

  

We had quite a hunt for Ruth’s parents’ house, since there are no street numbers.  Instead, you ask for people by name.  After circling the town for half an hour by tricycle, I finally realized I had to ask around for Ruth’s maiden name.

The tricycle driver slapped his head and exclaimed that he was related to her!

 

      

It was uncanny.  Her mom Ilovita looks and sounds just like Ruth, gone back to the future in a more senior iteration of Ruth herself.  Ilovita is a school teacher and administrator, an historian, and curator of Museo de Baler.

Clearly, the work ethic is inherited too.

  

We chatted for a few minutes.  I listened, mildly incredulous, to mostly tall tales that Ruth had obviously told them about me as a boss.

It was Mothers Day, 2008.

  

  

I would finally meet Ruth herself in Baler seven months later.  The reunion would be overshadowed by another entrancing woman, though.

  

  

Posted from Bangkok, August 19, 2009

Feast Day of San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, patron saint of the Baler church, site of the infamous siege of Baler.

Birth date of Manuel L. Quezon in Baler, later President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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The Continuing Perils of Flying with Mom

I first learned of Baler from the former General Manager at Omni Aviation, Aljess, now a big jet pilot for Philippine Airlines.

He had pictures of a rugged coastline and a small inland airport.  And stories of crab, seafood and surfers.

   

   

     

     

You would think that my Mom, in her 80s, would be fearful of flying.  But she has never turned down an offer to go up in our Cessna. 

Flying with Mang (as we call her) is never boring.  

Mothers Day in 2004 had a solid cumulonimbus ceiling brooding malevolently across the entire airport, like one of Gore’s scary movies on global warming.  We stayed on the ground and went home.

A day later we flew over Taal volcano and peered into the bowels of the earth.  There is something Freudian about flying my Mom over an active volcano.

 

    

During the landing, she told her pilot in command that he needed a haircut.  The jousting for authority is subtle, you see.

On a crystal day in 2006 we flew to Mt. Pinatubo (also an active volcano, Sigmund!), and then on to Vigan.  The Vice-Mayor greeted us at the airport.  Welcome ribbons were hung around our necks.  There were no brass bands or provincial virgins, but they did enthrone us on a horse-drawn kalesa for a regal (if bouncy) transfer into town.

 

  

Every woman deserves to be the sweetheart of the parade.  I tried to look like Prince Charles.

    

  

  

       

In 2008 my Mom and I flew to Baler.  We never got there. 

Remember how geography bored you to tears in school?  Geography rears up in real life when you get lost.  And you haven’t been lost until you get lost in an airplane!

  

Well, we didn’t really get lost.  I had planned a local flight, touring Central Luzon.  I flew us over Cabanatuan and showed Mang the actual prison camp from The Great Raid.

It’s only a stone’s throw from Cabanatuan to Laur, Nueva Ecija.  So I flew there and showed Mang where Ninoy was imprisoned for years.  Laur lies at the foothills of the Sierra Madre, the mountain range between Luzon’s central plain and the Pacific coast.

 

    

The Sierra Madres are MASSIVE mountains.  Peaks at 6,200 feet, higher than Baguio and as rugged as the Cordilleras in Northern Luzon.  Even in the mountain pass between Bongabon and Baler, 5,000-foot summits glare down on tiny Cessna airplanes.

    

The Sierra Madre is also a weather factory.  Winds laden with ocean moisture roar inshore from the Pacific (now you know why Philippine typhoons are reported “East South East of Baler… “) and belly up to the Sierra Madres.  Great surfing.

All that moisture then climbs rapidly up and over the mountain range.  Towers of cumulus clouds build quickly, pregnant with rain.

 

       

The wind funnels through the mountain pass between Bongabon and Baler, overflows over the canyon walls and tumble turbulently over and around the peaks.

  

Doña Aurora Quezon was ambushed by a Hukbalahap horde here.

   

  

  

  

Mang and I flew into the mountain pass.  Towering cumulus surrounded us, billowing up beyond 15,000 feet, higher than our airplane could climb.  We flew around forested ridges, that loomed uncomfortably near our wings.  My intrepid passenger stiffened with anxiety.

  

It was stupid.  I had no flight plan for Baler, no weather forecast, no route briefing.   The gap between the clouds, the mountains and the airplane was narrowing.  Even if we broke through, we could get stuck at Baler overnight.

     

I turned around in a tight 180, the mountains hemming us in.  Ahead, at two o’clock high, an eagle glanced back, reefed around in a vertical bank and dove at us in a head-on attack.  I half-ducked from the machine gun fire that never came, and he flashed above the cockpit window and zoomed away.

Eagles are territorial, and on later trips to Baler, Carlo and I would be intercepted again.

  

I climbed into sunlight, headed for home.  Mang took her afternoon nap.

  

  

Posted from Singapore, August 15, 2009

  

  

   

   

  

  

   

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La-la-anding in C-cr-crosswinds

Finally, we write something worthy of our blog’s name.

Pilots stumble on our blog when Googling “Secret Formula for Landing Safely in Killer Crosswinds.”

Instead, they find piddling procedures like flying into volcanoes, rolling airplanes upside down or jousting with Level 3 thunderstorms.  Boring.

  

 

  

     

Crosswinds terrified me to high heavens in my student pilot days.  Home bound on my cross-country training flights, I would send text messages (yes, I use cell phones in airplanes, don’t get me started on that airline b.s.) asking Gino or Carlo what the winds were like at Omni.

“Dad, the windsock is pointed at Mt. Pinatubo and standing straight out.”

  

  

I couldn’t stay airborne waiting for the winds over the runway to calm down.   On minimum fuel  (I got pathetically lost on some cross-country training flights), I had to land.

“Dad, the wind just uprooted trees, the hangar was blown away, locusts are consuming the land and Mt. Pinatubo is erupting.”

All the text messages did was to make me squirm with anxiety in the cockpit.

  

   

Omni’s runway is oriented northeast-southwest. 

October to February, the cold, dry, steady amihan — northeast trade winds – align perfectly with runway 02.  April to August, the tempestuous habagat hauls moisture in from the southwest, aligned with runway 20. 

In the confused months of March and September, between monsoons, the fitful wind wanders irritably across the runway. 

Crosswind.

  

Pilots love winds aligned with the runway – the airplane doesn’t drift away sideways, and the headwind helps it float slowly and softly down to the runway.

Crosswinds are pesky.  They push the airplane sideways off the runway, lifting one wing, trying to overturn the impudent pilot and his clumsy machine.

  

  

The first technique, rookie but simple, is to point the airplane a bit into the wind to offset drift, and fly at an angle to the runway.  Since landing sideways blows tires, the pilot aligns the airplane with the runway just  moments before touching down.

  

When I first flew with my Mom in the right seat, we approached runway 13 at Manila in a vicious crosswind from the left.  I angled the airplane to the left, the runway bobbing truantly out my right window. 

Sighting on the runway out the right side window, I could see my Mom out of the corner of my eye.  She curiously glanced at me, then at the runway, then at me.

  

It’s okay, I told her.  Approaching sideways is standard procedure for crosswind landing.  I tried to sound experienced.

Mom pointed at a DC-9 rolling out on the runway ahead.  “That didn’t go sideways,” she pointed out.

Sigh.  A jet weighing over 20 times my Cessna doesn’t get pushed around by crosswinds.  I concentrated on straightening out at the last moment to align with the runway.  We touched down gently.

Triumphant, I asked my Mom what she thought of that landing!

She told me I needed a haircut.  My hair was too long.

Mothers!

  

  

Posted from Kuala Lumpur, August 11, 2009.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Kung Hindi Tayo, Sino Pa?

Two million people joined the funeral march behind Ninoy’s casket in August, 1983.

The Times Journal headline the next day was “One Killed By Lightning At Luneta”.  There was not one single mention in the Marcos-controlled media that half the population of Manila teetered between grief and bitter anger.

  

  

             

     

    

Photos by Jaime Unson, used with permission

Confetti poured down on Ayala today, and the old songs are heard again.  Handog ng Pilipino sa Mundo, Magkaisa, Bayan Ko.

An Aquino’s passing is finally getting media coverage

I remember Louis Beltran’s anecdote.  When Marcos let Ninoy home under a fleeting period of house arrest during Ninoy’s seven years and seven months in jail, all the opposition  luminaries came to visit.  Diokno, Tanada, Roces, Kalaw, etc.

Who, they asked each other, would be the next President after Marcos.  They debated long into the night, agreeing only that any successor would be doomed to fail, because resurrecting the fractured, polarized and plundered country was an impossible dream.

Then Cory would come out to serve them coffee and snacks.  And they would greet her, and go on with their intense debate on who the next President should be.  Little did they know.

  

Cory, Ninoy and Sin (the Cardinal, who was also mortal :-)  ) must be laughing their hearts out in that big miting de avance in the sky.

  

  

 

 

Ninoy came home from exile after nearly 8 years in jail.  He knew that he would either be assassinated on arrival, as Imelda warned him repeatedly, or executed for subversion, sedition, and poking fun of Imelda (he was already convicted by a military tribunal). 

Yet he still came home.

Before he did, in a 1981 speech in the US, Ninoy said, “I shall dedicate the last drop of my blood to the restoration of freedom and the dismantling of your martial law.”

And he did.  Literally.

 

Watch the rest of that jewel.  You will laugh, and you will cry.

   

  
  

  

And after Cory ran as the next President after Marcos, millions of people shielded ballot boxes with their bodies and stood in front of Marine tanks at EDSA.

No other Filipino leader ever got the mainstream Filipino to repeat that kind of selfless commitment again.

As a commentator said on TV last week, the bullshit meter of the Filipino people is pretty sensitive.  They will cynically let you get away with lies to save face, but they will not stake their lives and their families for anyone but the purest leader.

  

    

Look again at Mike de Leon’s video, that Jim Paredes of the Apo Hiking Society posted on YouTube some years ago.  

   

   

The song says it all:  “Ang sarap palang maging Pilipino”.

Look for the knot of Mendiola protesters huddling under blasts from water cannons.  And yet standing fast.

Look for the RAM soldier in tears, coming out of the MND building, welcomed by millions of people on EDSA, who shielded his ass after Marcos discovered their  bungled coup (RAM was later to stage seven bungled coups against Cory, with intent to kill).

Look for the yellow-shirted Filipino bawling like a baby because he is standing in front of a tank revving its engines — and yet he is standing fast.

   

     

Ang laki ng utang na loob nating sa mag-asawang Aquino.  Ibinigay nila lahat ng maaring nilang ibigay.  Kung nagkakagulo pa rin ang bayan natin ngayon, wala na tayong mapagbibintangan kung ‘di ang sarili natin.

Nagtataka ang kabataan sa Ayala kung bakit naluluha ang mga magulang nila, kanina.  Nawala sa kanila ang pag-asang natikman nating mga nakakaintindi noong 1986.

  

  

Iisa ang bayan natin– wala tayong ibang tatakbuhan.  Kung hindi tayo, sino pa ang magmamahal dito?  Kung hindi tayo kikilos para ayusin ito ngayon, kailan pa natin aayusin? 

   

     

Posted from Manila, August 3, 2009

    

  

  

  

  

  

  

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The Smartest Pilot in the World

Stranded in Vigan, one of the prettiest towns in the Philippines.  It was too rainy for the beach, but I could have puttered around the pottery kiln, explored the Crisologo museum, or hopped on a bus to Laoag or Abra province.  Instead . . .  .

  

  

  

  

I hunkered down in the Salcedo Hotel, moping over the weather.  Thunder woke me up the next morning.  It was still raining. 

Day two.

I prowled accuweather.com, PAGASA and METAR reports via wireless internet.  I had to get home.

DOST IR image, 16 Apr. Cold front north Luzon, ITCZ central Visayas

  

  

Finally I did go outdoors.  To the airport by tricycle.

  

A pilot stricken with ”get-home-itis” works himself into a curious mental paradox — convinced that he can see some blue sky, and confident that his instrument training lets him fly in solid clouds.  So he neither reconciles himself to fly IFR in weather nor commits to stay visual.

  

He is setting himself up for a blind date with aviation’s serial killer.  Literally.

  

  

That was blue sky, wasn’t it, out west?

  

But west was the South China Sea.  The next landfall was Vietnam.

No, I needed to go south, to La Union for fuel and then home to Omni. 

  

South didn’t look good.  But I was trained to fly through that, right?

Then I got an SMS from Ralph, the tower controller at the La Union airport, my refueling point.  He had to close his airport!  The tower was flooded.

  

The tower flooded?  How bad was this weather?  Do I need to build an Ark?

  

The tower’s roof had leaked rain all night.  Radios wet, water on the floor, power outlets fried, they were probably collecting animals two-by-two.

La Union was 57 nautical miles — 106 kilometers — south of me.  This was not a small weather system.

  

  

Did I really need to refuel at La Union? 

How about flying direct to Omni, my home base, 145 miles away?       

Two-hour climb, cruise and descent.  The airplane burns 7 gallons of fuel per hour.  My tanks had 15 usable gallons.  There was no fuel for sale here in Vigan.

 

“Tight” isn’t tight enough to describe it.  They invented the word “Infinitesimal” for this kind of fuel margin.  With any headwind, I’d run out of fuel short of Omni’s runway.  A mile short, 20 miles short — it didn’t matter.  I’d be looking for an emergency landing spot in rain and poor visibility, with a dry and dead engine.

  

  

The airport guys — FSS, security, CAAP — scrounged up concrete-filled pails.  But we had no tie-down ropes.

A security guard ran to the flagpole.  The flag wasn’t flying in the rain anyway.  So we had our rope!

 

   

After a few minutes with a WWII bayonet and some knotty work, the airplane was secured.

    

I didn’t really make a decision about not flying in this weather.  The airport guys made it for me.

  

  

Another rainy night then, in waterlogged Vigan.  I now knew why the walls have moss.  

      

   

  

  

  

  

  

The next morning, my hotel room was bathed in brilliant sunshine!  The cold front was gone!  Yup, that’s the moon in daylight!

  

 

 

  

  

  

   

  

  

  

  

  

       

  

DOST IR image, 18 Apr. Cold front dissipated, ICTZ across Visayas-Mindanao

  

  

One last problem — La Union airport, where my fuel was stashed, was still closed.  Ralph and his crew had worked all night, but I hadn’t heard from him yet.

I worked my GPS, RPUQ-Omni direct, recomputing fuel burn at maximum lean.  I knew I could get it down to 6 gallons per hour.

  

  

Then, in a moment of sanity, I texted Kevin.  Asked him what he thought.

Sounds tight.  What are the winds like?

Forecast calm.  I need to get back to Bangkok

[Expletive deleted] Bangkok.  You’ll get there eventually

  

  

Because Kevin is normally subtle and polite, I snapped out of my hypnotic trance.  Kevin has a trizillion hours flying his Cessna 182 and 206 on over-water flights out of Cebu.  Such a tiny space between right and wrong, but Kevin filled that gap to bursting.    

Then a new SMS message came in. 

It was from Ralph.  He was opening La Union.  My refueling stop was assured.

  

  

With my new-found lucidity, I held the airplane tail down during pre-flight inspection.  Liters of rainwater poured out.  Would have been an interesting takeoff with a fluid center of gravity sloshing around.

  

  

  

  

  

      

   

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

  

I leaned to peak EGT at 2,500 feet to La Union.  Just to see if my flight plan was grounded in reality.

Then I leaned to 25 degrees rich of peak at 7,500 feet on the leg to Omni.

  

The interesting result?  The airplane sipped 4.5 gallons per hour.  I could have flown direct from Vigan to Omni, and back, without refueling! 

With a new data point for my range and endurance charts, I’m now slightly smarter.

But I didn’t know that before takeoff.

  

    

  

     

So who’s the smartest pilot in this tale? 

The dear friend who gave me a wake up call with a [expletive deleted].

Other smart guys:  the dedicated controllers who worked all night to open my fuel stop. 

  

And rural airport workers who tied down my airplane before I could make a stupid decision to fly in what was really god-awful bad weather.

They sure made better ’pilot’ decisions than I did.

  

The smartest pilot in the world is the one who stays in this world.

  

  

  

  

Posted from Guangzhou, July 27, 2009.

  

About this post:

Kevin is in Beijing as I type this in Guangzhou.  WordPress blogs are still blocked in the People’s Republic, along with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.  But we did find a VPN work-around on the internet!  The worldwide web rules! 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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Promises, Promises

The internet hosts bizarre speculations about Flight 447.  Alleged killer design defects in the six hundred A330s that fly worldwide.  Conspiratorial cover ups by Airbus, Air France, the Elysee Palace and the Brazilian navy.  Geez, why not indict the Vatican too?

Macabre debates – did they crash nose first or belly first?  Did things slam into the floor or the nose… well, you get the picture.  These forums are populated by otherwise normal people.

Yet nobody asks:  Why did an airline crew fly into a 300-mile wide area of super cell thunderstorms in the inter-tropical convergence zone??

  

 

 

 

     

  

  

   

  

     

Aviation’s most prolific serial killer is “continued visual flight into instrument meteorological conditions”  –  flying into bad weather.  Remember the thunderstorm lurking treacherously behind haze on that flight to La Union? 

There was no widespread weather system that day.  Just the usual “Scattered rain showers and thunderstorms.”

  

Afterwards, I winced at the thought of blundering into the only thunderstorm in Central Luzon.

Penitent at having betrayed an earlier vow, I again promised myself that I would stop making like Mr. Magoo around bad weather.  Yet in just 24 hours I would betray myself again.

     

   

At 9am the next day I departed La Union for Vigan.  There was a bit of haze when I watched from the control tower as a helicopter landed near my Cessna, which was being refueled.

      

Less than an hour later I was approaching Vigan.  The colors of the Abra river were vivid. 

     

    

I arrived before the Flight Service Station opened.  Normally the FSS – call sign “Vigan Radio” – clears the runway with a siren when an airplane reports on final.  When I arrived, there was no one to clear the runway.

The runway was clear when I was on high final, and still clear on short final. 

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

    

  

   

But just before touchdown, a demon jeep popped out of the side road, streaking across the runway like the devil’s hearse itself !

 

    

Next time I land on runway 20 at Vigan, I’ll make a high approach and plan to touch down after the damn road!

Later, walking on the airport road to catch a tricycle into town, I took this picture of the ramp.

  

Remember the sky here.  The story centers around it.

  

This was my third and last trip to Vigan during the Easter break.  Final photo opportunities at Crisologo street. 

 

  

  

  

  

 

     

    

    

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

      

  

  

 

Then a strange change came over the light.  The sky began to glow funny, the sun warping through gazibillions of tiny prisms in the air. 

  

Moisture.

 

Rain began to sprinkle the street.

  

You know that persistent, undulating, bathing rain that comes from a cold front?  Lasts for days.

Days!

I had to get back to Manila to catch a flight to Bangkok!

  

  

  

It was pouring now.  I took a kalesa to a cafe, where I had pipian and sapsapuriket.  Spicy, hot, soupy.

It rained and rained.  I was stuck in Vigan, 340 kilometers from Manila.

 

  

  

  

Posted from Bangkok, July 20, 2009.

Next:  The Smartest Pilot in the World!

   

  

  

  

  

    

  

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Hermana Mayor, Zambales

Carlo has written affectionately about the Sisters of Zambales.  I myself first learned about them from fellow Omni pilots Mark from Tennessee and Mike from Hong Kong.  They had spied on the beauties from the air.  Then they were invited to do a touch and go on the elder sister, and they let me peek at the cellphone pictures they took.

    

    

  

  

  

I am, of course, talking about the Hermana islands.  Carlo and I have overflown the islands, and have posted several aerial photos of the Hermanas here.

Both are privately owned.  Hermana Mayor is owned by a very private family long associated with aviation.  Then a member of the family, a fellow pilot and a real gentleman, invited me to fly to the island for a brief visit in October 2008.

 

We flew through cloudy skies near Mt. Pinatubo, then along the Bucao river valley west of Pinatubo’s crater. 

The Bucao river drains its lahar-choked waters into the South China sea at Botolan, Zambales. 

  

Busy Subic Bay, formerly a major US naval base in the Pacific, lies south of Botolan.  We followed the coastline north to Iba, a historical World War II fighter airstrip, now an important training airfield in western Luzon. 

  

When World War II started in the Philippines on December 8, 1941, Iba had the only radar station in the Philippines.  The US 3rd Pursuit Squadron was based here, tasked with protecting Clark Field from aerial assault.  Iba lasted all of one day, wiped out by the first Japanese bombing raid on December 8.

North of Iba stretches one of the most beautiful coastlines in the Philippines, rivaling that of the Ilocos Sur and Ilocos Norte provinces.  

  

Palauig and Masinloc bays are like surreal art where watercolor has stained the painting in incredible shades of azure and blue, with underwater coral formations clearly visible from the air.

  

  

Finally we approached the Hermana Islands.  Hermana Menor, also with its own airstrip, is 2.5 nautical miles directly west of the headland at Santa Cruz, Zambales.

  

  

Nearly four nautical miles northwest lies Hermana Mayor.  My first impression was, Wow, that’s a pretty airfield!  Manicured like a golf fairway, with a well-marked 1,000-meter x 60-meter grass runway. 

  

Coming in from over water, I had to focus on the runway edge and ignore the optical illusion that I was about to land on the sea short of the runway.

  

I began to notice details — the main house, the breakwater protecting the runway end, stretches of dazzling white beaches.  Self-confident as they are, pilots can’t walk on water, so I kept the power on during the approach. 

     

The airplane ramp is protected by a stand of trees.  The main house is relaxed, indigenous and comfortably appointed.  You take a 4-wheel drive around the island, and it’s like driving around an aviary.

  

  

  

The island was everything I imagined.  There is a boat house, guest cabanas and unspoiled interior wilderness, including jungle, a savanna, a fresh water lake, and spectacular beaches. 

  

Like Madagascar or the Comoros or the Seychelles.  Beautiful and dusky mysterious.

You could have a beautiful island wedding here.  Limit the guest list if everyone has to find their own airplane ride.  Mostly pilot friends.  You can imagine the torches on the beach at dusk.  Beige linen slacks and bare feet.

  

  

Too soon, it was time to leave.  It was my host’s turn to fly, so I tossed him my keys to the airplane.

We circled the island, overflying the beaches, and then flew a low approach over the grass runway.

  

  

A wild deer ran across the grass runway. 

  

  

  

  

Posted from Singapore, July 18, 2009

  

 

   

  

  

  

  

 

  

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Because It Wanted to Learn to Fly

A flight instructor sat recently in a King Air Equipment Qual Course.  He was tasked to do a flight plan, an exercise that would take a student pilot 30 minutes or so to finish.

After an hour, the ex-instructor was still toiling.  The poor fellow, once a factory of future pilots, couldn’t convert gallons per hour to gallons per minute, and compute for fuel burn in his flight plan.

That’s a conceptual gap.  He never got the concept.  Memorizing formulas substituted for learning.

  

  

Another student in a big city flying school was taught to compute wind correction angles with an E6B computer, for VFR cross-country flights in Luzon.

  

  

But the way to navigate visually cross-country is by pilotage — flying from landmark to landmark — towns, bridges, rivers, airfields.

You have visual contact with your route.  If the wind pushes you sideways, you crab into the wind so that your course takes you to your next landmark.  E6B computer?

  

Even in instrument flight, you still hop from waypoint to waypoint, guided by the CDI or flight director.  Keep the needles centered, and you’re already on course.  No need to compute for wind correction.

Wind angles are best used in dead reckoning – flying by stopwatch with no landmarks in sight or navaids in range, eg. over water.  You plot a heading and now you need to carefully compute a wind correction factor to correct for forecast winds.  Else you hit the Spratleys instead of Palawan.  If you don’t run out of fuel.

But when you can see the ground, home on a VOR, or see your GPS ground track, you already have course guidance:  your eyes.

Aerodynamics, also, is best learned visually — watching where the nose goes when you roll with adverse yaw, seeing where the airplane skids as p-factor messes with your climb.

  

The problem is that too many pilots still in flying school already have gold stripes on the brain.  They’re already practicing that button-pushing cool dude hunk look that sends flight attendants swooning and passengers in awe.

Then they find out about manuevering flight, exams, checkrides.  Good heavens!  Mental arithmetic.  Navigation.  Weather.

Turns out flying school is like college!  It takes years to earn those gold stripes, sir.

So they try to memorize formulas, AOs, CARs, and cheat sheets.  Then they get lost a mile from the longest runways in the country.

Zero visual skills.

 

  

Don’t miss the journey, Captains.  Learn to fly.  Know Gapan from Mexico by their rooftops, and the thunderstorms above Zambales, and  the windshear over the grass runway at Corregidor.

 

Know the complete confidence of knowing the airplane, and the humility of working with the wind, not against it.

 

 

A student pilot at Clark asked me about crosswind landings.  I used the word “flare” during my explanation, and he asked me what that meant.

He genuinely didn’t know.  I had to define it for him.  Flare?  What’s that??

Oh yeah, Sherlock.  Flying is easy.  It’s landing that’s hard.  Ask the gold stripes who fly to Caticlan, prang an airplane full of people, ”then whine about the hill and the wind”.

  

  

So why did the Cessna cross the road?  

Because it wanted to learn how to fly.  Properly. 

  

  

Posted July 12, 2009 from Manila

  

  

  

  

  

  

   

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Why Did The Cessna Cross The Road?

When Carlo was two years old, I drew two circles and an egg on a piece of paper.  “Circle” and “egg”.  When kids are two years old, it’s important that you stick to two-syllable words.

 I asked him to point out which one was different.  He pointed to the egg.

“Good,” I said.  “ The others are circles, and this one is an …?”

“Po-ta-to,” he said.

Oh well, he was always ahead of his time.

  

  

  

  

S-turns across the road are barely touched on, if not skipped, in primary flight training.  A pity, since ground reference maneuvers are more fun than golf or sex.

Actually, I don’t do golf, so I could be wrong.  About golf.

  

  

Ground reference maneuvers punch home an advanced, esoteric skill – flying by looking out the window.

  

Fledgling pilots think flying is punching buttons on the autopilot (now gender-neutered as “Flight Management Computer”), staring with glazed eyes at glass screens inside the cockpit.

  

The truth is brutal:  Nearly all general aviation flying, from primary training to ascension to heaven, is visual.

  

And unless you are an airline pilot rated for full-coupled Cat III instrument approaches in zero-zero weather at London Heathrow, you can only land by looking out the window.

Pilots who don’t look out the window will never learn to fly even just straight and level.  Nor will they ever spot the Red Baron coming out of the sun, Spandaus spitting fire.  Heck, the Red Baron didn’t even have cockpit windows!                                                                         

    

   

Day before Fathers Day.  On the ground, mechanics and pilots leaned against a 19-knot surface wind.  

To their credit, Clark Aviation and Omni Aviation students were challenging the wind with touch and gos. 

PAL Aviation School pilots, grounded when the wind exceeds 12 knots, were probably doing touch and gos with FHM magazines in their barracks.

  

  

Airborne over Charlie Four, Carlo lined up on the arrow-straight road from Magalang to Mexico (the town in Central Luzon, not el pais de Speedy Gonzalez).  The wind came “from somewhere on the right”.   His brief was to fly a perfect circle.

Left 360-degree turn desired track

   

    

You can’t ignore wind in a light airplane.  If you go into a shallow bank to the left, the wind pushes you out.

 

Failure to adjust bank angle for southwest wind

    

      

You belatedly tighten the turn by banking steeper, and maybe resort to the age-old tactic of cheating with a little more left rudder . . .  .

. . . But that’s the worst thing to do, because you should shallow your bank instead as you fight back into the wind.  Otherwise, you end up with a “9” instead of a “O”.

 

Failure to shallow out bank when turning upwind

   

   

Carlo kicked off a 45-degree steep turn (this is where neophytes and airline pilots start feeling their stomachs, and coffee cups slop over in airline cabins), quickly bringing the airplane around in a half circle, before the wind could screw him up. 

Then he shallowed his bank as the airplane’s nose swept from north to west to south.

This is his GPS track. 

       

Perfect.

   

He rolled to the right for an opposing turn, and chuckling turned to dismay as he drew a potato!

 

   

He was not tight enough at the start, and too tight at the end.  He never got back to the road.

The key is is look at the ground, imagine the desired track, and fly the airplane over that visualized track, constantly adjusting bank angle to tack and flow with the wind.

  

  

Now thoroughly intrigued, Carlo went into a more challenging series of S-turns, stitching the road with identical radii intestines . . .  .

  

. . . Then zipping the stitches shut with a straight run to the southeast, crabbing into the wind just enough to track exactly on the road.

  

  

You can’t do this with navigational instruments.  Even if there were navaids in the area, VORs and beacons are simply too imprecise to keep your track within a few feet of your desired course.

Only the human eyeball, and a brain, can do this.

  

I had my own shot at it.  Like Father, like Son – I screwed up my own second 360-degree turn.

 

    

I was happier with my S-turns, tight and symmetrical.  I reviewed these GPS tracks at home, and when I saw my track over the road I really felt good.

 

       

My inbound (blue) and outbound (yellow) tracks were nearly identical.  All I had done in flight was to crank in a wind correction angle that kept the road at the same place on my windshield.

 

     

A student of maneuvering flight need only spend 30 minutes on this on a windy day to understand the key concepts of what heading to take to true up a course line, and how to track that course in wind.

  

  

What’s the point, you ask?

Well, any visual pattern is a ground reference maneuver.  Think about the mess we make flying downwind and turns to base and final as we ignore the wind.

  

       

You’d be surprised by how many pilot candidates go into panel interviews for airline job openings, then get bushwacked by the very first question:

“Tell me the difference between Heading, Course and Track.”

Game over.

  

  

Posted from Manila, July 7, 2009

 

 

 

  

  

  

 

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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/

 

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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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

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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

  

  

 

  

  

  

   

   

    

   

.

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

PBA09o242n11

        

  

  

  

  

  

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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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