Pretty Fly

Small planes tend to get a bad rep from the media. The last time a small plane made the news for something other than crashing, Charles Lindbergh was the pilot. Celebrities don’t help matters. Some people no doubt shun small planes ever since JFK Jr. flew his to the great Camelot in the sky, an accident as tragic as that metaphor. But come on, people. Did you stop riding in chauffered Mercedes limos after Lady Di’s crash? I certainly didn’t. My bodyguard, my lover and I are fleeing the paparazzi in one right now. Life must go on.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of flying, fold your umbrella, climb down off that barn roof and head to your local airport, where the Be a Pilot program (www.beapilot. com) will hook you up with a lesson for $49.

I took a lesson at Hanscom Field, where stunt planes and $40 million Gulfstream private jets litter the runway. However, the most exotic, potentially lethal piece of machinery at Hanscom sits in the hallway outside the Executive Flyers flight school. It is—get ready—a hot-sandwich vending machine. Its technology raises all sorts of questions: How does it make the sandwiches? Is there a little robotic sandwich artist in there who will ask which vegetables I want? How often are new sandwich components loaded into this thing? And how long will it be before some unfortunate contestants are eating the Sandwich-O-Matic hot pastrami on Fear Factor?

Even if he doesn’t eat those sandwiches, my flight instructor, Sean Ehret, is a brave man. Ehret’s job is to regularly climb into planes piloted by people who have no idea how to fly planes. There’s no triangular yellow sign on the roof of our trainer plane, although perhaps there ought to be.

The Be a Pilot literature implies that if you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can fly a plane, but I’d argue it’s a skill more like chewing crackers and whistling; instrument flying and multiengine planes are more like eating cotton candy and skipping rope. Your basic controls are a knob for engine power, a knob to adjust the fuel mixture, the trim wheel, the flaps lever, the yoke (pull to go up, push to go down, etc.), the pedals, (which control the direction you bank) and the right and left brakes, which also help steer on the ground. Only once you’ve mastered all those should you even think about using the cupholders.

We taxi out of our parking space and Ehret attempts to familiarize me with the controls, but I’m no better at following a straight line than an America West pilot. Still, I make it to the runway, we get clearance, and after a brief amble down the strip we’re airborne. It’s actually pretty easy.

Ehret shows me how to plot a course on the GPS, we practice turns, and then I try a couple of extremely wobbly landings. It’s hard to tell how much Ehret is helping me with his own controls because I’m preoccupied with the pedals and yoke, trying to ensure that we land wheels-side-down. But for all I know he’s disconnected my controls in the interest of his safety, my own, and that of all homeowners in the Hanscom Field area.

When we land there’s a commotion in the hangar area. While I was lurching around the local airspace in our Cessna, another pilot had critically damaged an aerobatic training plane without leaving his parking space. Have you ever got into your car and attempted to drive away with the parking brake on? When you do that in a plane, you can make the propeller slam into the pavement. Since the propeller is directly connected to the motor, that guy just bought a $25,000 plane engine.

After my flight I spoke with Drew Steketee, CEO of Be a Pilot, about flying in general. Since prop-driven planes aren’t that fast (our groundspeed on my flight was about 100mph), I saw no huge practical advantage over driving. Steketee replied that when you’re flying to any New England vacation spot on a weekend and you’re looking down on miles of traffic jams, 100mph seems speedy indeed. And you can rent a plane quite cheaply. And if you’re going to an island, you don’t have to get on a ferry. And chicks think pilots are yummier than Godiva chocolate truffle ice cream.

OK, I said that last one. Clearly,the media needs to get busy perpetuating some positive stereotypes right away, because I think I’m going to flight school. Did you know that pilots have big propellers? ∂