The Pasture Pilot’s Log

Back in September, I was doing my multi-engine commercial pilot training in Winter Haven, FL. The flight school paired me up with a particularly thorough examiner, and after a long oral, we walked out to find the florida weather pattern held true - the thunderstorms were rolling in rapidly.

“I think we can get the flight in,” she said, and we fired up to taxi out. The whole time I was sort of worried about the weather. We completed our run-up and I asked what schedule looked like for the next morning. Wide open. Good. Options. I went ahead and did the crew briefing for takeoff.

“What about the passenger briefing?”

“What about them?” I asked.

“You gotta tell them something!” she said. She was right. We’d missed that altogether.

“Tell you what. I don’t like this weather a bit,” I said. “Let’s go on back and get the airplane tied down before the weather hits. We’ll pick up in the morning and I’ll have a passenger brief that will water your eyes.”

Fair enough, she said.

That night, I scoured the Internet. I dug up vanilla passenger briefs that followed the rules, I dug up ones that would have passengers rolling in the aisles. I added some of my own material. When she showed up Sunday morning, I was ready.

Here goes:

•While walking around the airfield, be careful of spinning propellers and jet intakes. If somebody yells “Clear!” it means an engine will be starting very soon. Make sure you’re not near their engine. Jet intakes are similar to the Tasmanian Devil – they’re known to ingest aardvarks, antelopes, ants…. And people. Jet exhausts are dangerous for the opposite reason – their blast is powerful and hot – an easy way to get roasted, or go flying without wings. Propellers are like guillotines, and their blast is strong as well. As a general rule, stay close to me while walking out to the airplane, and you’ll be safe.

•You must have your seatbelt on during taxiing, takeoff, and landing. Ask me if you don’t know how to attach, tighten, loosen, or detach the seatbelt. I also recommend you wear the seatbelt throughout the flight in case we encounter unexpected turbulence.

•No smoking in the airplane. If you absolutely must smoke in flight, please step outside first.

•No alcohol consumption. I cannot allow you to board the aircraft if you’re already intoxicated, either.

•Keep the doors closed until I tell you it’s OK to open them.

•Note the location and operation of the normal and emergency exits. This airplane has no designated emergency exits but there are other exit options too, such as the baggage door and windows, all of which can be kicked open in a pinch.

•Don’t touch the controls without asking first, including the knobs, buttons, yoke,
pedals, and the push-to-talk button.

•In the unlikely event your seat should slip back as we take off, avoid grabbing
the yoke to drag it back.

•The airsickness bags are in the seat backs if you need them. Don’t hesitate. If you start to feel queasy tell me right away, look outside the plane, and open the nearest vent to blow air toward your face.

•Tell me if you spill a soft drink in the airplane. It happens, and I won’t be angry, but I need to know. The acids in soft drinks can attack the aluminum structure and I’ll need to do some cleaning when we land.

•If you see any other airplanes once we are off the ground please let me know. An extra pair of eyes always helps.

•For this flight, thee are restroom facilities installed at either end of the flight – at the airport. There are no toilets installed in this aircraft, so please use the facilities before departing.

•In the extremely unlikely event that we are forced to land anywhere other than an airport (and it will be obvious), I will tell you to open the door just a crack when we are 50 feet from the ground. The reason is that the forced landing may bend the aircraft and make opening the door impossible. So, you will open the door before we touch down.

•We have an intercom so that we can talk to each other through our headsets. When I push the button on the control yoke, and I’m talking to the tower or to other airplanes, anything you say will be broadcast, too. I have the ability to isolate myself from your conversation if Air Traffic Control demands my full attention – or if I’m sick of hearing who’s sleeping with whom on your favorite soap opera. If you need to talk to me and it appears obvious I’m not hearing you, a simple tap on my shoulder will get my attention.

•If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask now or during the flight. The only time I can’t talk with you is during takeoff and landing.

She pitched a fit - and told the flight school to keep my brief in the plane as an example to other students. I passed.

I’m glad I didn’t let my grandad down.

Doyle Agan, a retired engine sheet metal inspector from Delta Air Lines, used to keep the shops at Delta rolling in laughter. Pranks ranged from compressed-air contraptions that sounded like a bomb exploding to a box with holes in the top and a fake furry creature that pounced out when you leaned down and cracked the top to see what everyone was whispering about. He’s the reason I didn’t end up in the railroad business.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been in Basic Indoctrination at Atlantic Southeast Airlines, one of the Delta Connection Carriers. I’m gonna be an airline pilot.

As I found out, the airline industry is still chock-full of lively characters who make the industry an enjoyable place to eke out a living.

Our indoc class was 22 students strong. We had some great characters.

“Spares,” a graduate from the FlightSafety Academy in Florida, sat in the front-left corner of the room. He held up the wall when he lapsed into a nap, which was often. He’s an great, easygoing type. On the first day of class, though, he had an extra drug test consent form in his packet. “What do I do with this?” he asked. “Take an extra test,” we all hollered. From then on, drug test forms showed up on his desk from time to time when he wasn’t paying attention, and whenever an extra handout was passed out, he ended up with it. Go figure.

“Passport,” a wiseass almost earned the nickname “mouth” for
his remarks, but on the last day of class before the test, he didn’t have his passport - the one and only time we really needed it after the first day of class. He’s from Salt Lake City, and when the new president of the company showed up to talk to us, Holt squared off on Passport. “Why did you come all the way down here? You could have just gone to work for the mormons in SLC!?” Nothing like being a new hire and having the president of the company jump your case.

Jamie doesn’t have a nifty nickname yet, but give him time. He’s a character, but he hasn’t commited any really stupid errors yet.. He had the nerve to ask the president some pointed questions about his goals at the company - whether he wanted to streamline the operation for peak independent efficiency or to better meld it into fitting SkyWest’s managment philosophy. The answer, by the way, was, “Yes.”

Spotlight earned her nickname, because all attention came back on her in any conversation.

Bagger Vance came down from Tri-Cities, VA where he threw bags for the company - he had a couple years with the company and simply transferred departments. Good kid. The President put him on the spot during his “125 percent” speech, asking Bagger if his bag-throwing days were over. Bagger waffled around and finally admitted that he sure hoped so. Holt didn’t much appreciate that - and the ALPA rep nearly choked to death while trying to keep from screaming, “Thats not his job now! He’s a professional PILOT!” When Bagger returned from his next break, everyone’s flight kits were piled on the desk where bagger sat. He wasn’t thrilled.

Bam Bam’s nickname is simply a play on his last name, a good polish name I never figured out how to pronounce.

Freight Dawg flew night freight, for a while.. probably got the most time out of all of us.

Super Eight got stuck out in the cold when he showed up for training - the La Quinta was full, and he was the “special one” stuck next door at the .. yep.. Super Eight. He said the smoking rooms here smelled a hell of a lot better than the nonsmoking ones at the ‘eight. Really, that’s a great name in this business though.. I always liked the super DC-8…

let’s see, who else.. Roosterville, he’s named for his home airstrip, ’nuff said.

Last night was our last night in town as a complete class, before we left and split up for different systems class dates. I hosted the first known ASA Indoc Christmas Potluck Leftover Dinner. See, on the elevator I was talking to one of the guys about having one last night of the same old leftovers. The idea clicked that if we pooled our resources, we could share and each come up with something new for our last dinner in town.

I pulled out the phone list and started ringing rooms. Sure enough, most of the class took to the idea. At 6:30, they all rallied at my room. We threw our leftovers and perishibles on the coffee table.

Freight Dawg stopped by and contributed nearly an entire grocery sack full of frozen dinners and veggies before she split to join friends for dinner elsewhere. Bagger, Super Eight, Quagmire (named after the character on Family Guy, they look just alike…) Bam-Bam, myself, Jamie, and a couple others rallied around the table. Cumulatively, we had five kinds of peanut butter, three kinds of jelly, several brands of bread, lots of ramen noodles, peanut butter crackers, a couple frozen entrees, some veggies, cheese, and beer. Plenty of beer. Bagger had run low on beer and stopped at a nearby convenience store. They had no six-packs - only a twelve pack cut in half and wrapped in packing tape to hold the bottles in the left side of the box.

It was one hell of a Christmas Dinner. A mess of us 20-something kids happy knowing we’re on our way to flying the big iron.. and really enjoying being around other, similar, folks.

Mainly we’re glad to know we’re not the only ones who are so crazy..

Speaking of Crazy, Bagger Vance decided to show us a trick. He could break the bottom out of a beer bottle, using the palm of the hand. We all smelled BS, so he showed us.

He took an empty bottle Bam Bam had been playing with, filled it 3/4 full with water, and holding it over the sink, struck the opening flat with the palm of his hand while holding the neck with his other hand.

The bottle shattered, instead of blowing the bottom out. It seems Bam Bam had gotten bored with his empty bottles and had been bouncing this one off the carpeted floor. Apparently, such things can cause small stress cracks that can smash any possibility of performing bar tricks.

Ahh, the things we learned in the last couple weeks.

Oh, by the way. I passed the indoc test this morning. 50 questions. I missed one.

Look out Systems, here I come.

Someone forgot to tell O.V. Gray to slow down. Or maybe he just didn’t listen. As his peers dialed back their activities and stopped leaving their homes, Gray soldiered on – even taking his children to the Social Security office to begin their benefits as each of them passed age 65.

Gray, the 101-year-old namesake of the Carrollton-West Georgia Regional Airport, makes the commute from his East Point home to Gray Field every Saturday. His home, in the shadows of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, was once located in a neighborhood convenient to his workplace, Delta Air Lines’ Technical Operations Center. The neighborhood isn’t as pleasant as it once was; recently Gray was mowing his lawn and a thug approached him with less than honorable motives. He reached for his rear pocket not to hand over his wallet, but to pull out a revolver.

The visitor departed in all possible haste.

Gray didn’t learn to fly until he neared age 40, well after he began working on airplanes. He delivered new airplanes for Piper and Cessna in his spare time, and ended up in more than one tight situation – such as being weathered in at some deserted rural airport that was fenced in all around… and he was unable to cancel his flight plan. Somehow in the rain and the mud he scaled a fence, knocked on someone’s door and got in touch with flight service, just in time.

O.V. was old when I met him. A yellowed clipping of the Wright Brothers and their flyer hung from the airport bulletin board; someone had circled a nondescript bystander and written in Gray’s name. He was about to turn 88, and he came out to fly every Wednesday and Saturday. Worried with his failing vision, he usually took a pilot flying with him. When none were handy, he took me. (Note, he later had surgery and his vision surpasses mine now.)

He taught me to land that Cessna 152 before we ever left sight of the airport. I didn’t think about it at the time, but he was very cognizant of his mortality, checking his pulse before the run-up, and making sure I could get us on the ground before he left the traffic pattern.

O.V. had his own rules of thumb. Level off before turning downwind because of the brothers who stalled and spun to the ground making a climbing turn to crosswind in a Cessna 170. Double the gust factor to tack onto approach speed because we had a long runway. Tack on 10 knots to that because it was a really long runway. If it was really gusty, don’t get below 90 until you’re over the numbers.

I don’t advocate using his numbers. I was scared the first time I landed a 150 more or less at cruise speed, but I’m living proof it can be done. There are safer ways to land an airplane, though.

When he turned 90, we tacked his name onto the airport. When he turned 100, we had a big party for him. Reporters from the Atlanta TV stations came out to see him, and he flew some of them around in a Skyhawk.

If you land at CTJ on a Saturday morning, keep an eye out for the old guy. He’ll be the smallish one who never complains about getting older.

If someone had stopped me on the parking ramp at the airport and told me how everything would play out, I’d have said they were crazy. The thought crossed my mind as I gazed out the co-pilot’s window and watched clouds race past, just above the King-Air. I looked over to the left seat, and took a moment to try and figure it out. How long had I known Richard?

Well, he flew the jet that approached the airport, almost daily, right over our house. Mom said the jet belonged to Southwire, a company in nearby Carrollton. I don’t know how she came to know, but she did. So, I could say I’d been watching him fly over for years.

“Eight Delta Whiskey, climb and maintain five thousand.”

My finger triggers the microphone button on the control yoke. “Five thousand, Eight Delta Whiskey.”

Richard grumbles loud enough for the crew intercom to pick up his voice. “I’d sure hope they could have gotten us direct to Carrollton by now. Why don’t you see if they can work that out,” he said.

I pretended to be busy looking up a frequency – the stall was an obvious one, though. I knew all the ones that mattered from here. Final approach controller 119.8, UNICOM 122.7, AWOS 118.175, ILS 111.7, NDB 278… but I was on my first flight as a corporate pilot, of sorts, and I didn’t want to make the controller angry. As I reached up to set the radio, Atlanta read Richard’s mind.

“Eight Delta Whiskey, proceed direct Carrollton.” Relief.

So how long ago was it?

I might have been 12. Maybe less. I’d just started hanging around the airport, and each day my mom would drop me off on her way to work. It was like the most awesome childcare a kid could dream up.

I worked on airplanes with Cecil, I rode to lunch with Chuck, Hal and Hess, and Rob and Jonathan. Within a few months, a transformation began. The kid who had a tough time socializing with his classmates suddenly had a crop of new friends.

And each day, the jet, that jet I’d seen flying over my house almost daily, it landed. The suits climbed out and headed home. The pilots milled around before easing the Learjet 35A back into its hangar, and they laughed. Boy, did they ever laugh. They’d be telling a joke as I rode up on my green bike with the crooked rear tire, and I didn’t know if they were laughing at me or at the joke, but they tolerated my presence – a miracle for which I still thank God. They tolerated me, befriended me, and 14 years later they accepted me, with the ink still wet on my commercial multiengine pilot’s license, and I became one of them. Different airplane, yeah, and a different company, too. Same pilot, though, sitting over there watching every move, trying to ensure I didn’t mess anything important up.

I really wanted to tell Richard thanks for the help, but I figured he was too busy being his gruff self.

So I set the GPS direct for Carrollton instead.

This week, I loaded up and headed north. Alex Wolski had me cornered into checking out a Yak-55 for sale in Illinois. The ride to Chicago was uneventful, and from there, a 50 minute flight put me on the ground in Champaign. The rental car got me out to the airport at Urbana, Frasca Field.

David Frasca owns the Yak. He let me into the hangar, then had to step back to his office to finish some work, then he joined me while I finished looking his ship stem to stern. The yak was in excellent shape;; I told my friend Alex to buy it right off. The tailfeathers needed recovering, but other than that, the plane was in fine order. As I worked, we talked about airplanes. I’ve got some experience flying neat planes, but his favorites watered my eyes. His current pride and joy is a Wildcat, and it’s not an F4F like we all know and love. It’s an F2M, the wildcat with a big engine. We talked about flying warbirds, why mustangs are overrated, and other great mysteries of the universe. When we parted for the evening, David left me with an invitation for the next morning.

“Come on by the factory, and I’ll show you around,” he said. “Then, we can go through the hangars.”

Hangars, plural.

The tour of the factory was amazing. The technology going into today’s flight simulators is phenomenal.. and I got to see it all coming together in various stages of completion. But, my eye wandered as we walked through hallways covered in photographs of warbirds and exotic airplanes that I dreamed of. We left the factory and walked to the Frasca family’s hangars.

We walked into one hangar, and a 737 nose blocked the view – workers stored it there while they made room in the factory for it. “This came from a salvaged plane,” Frasca told me, “We’re going to turn it into a simulator.”

Behind the 737, I immediately recognized the nose-on view of a Foke-Wolfe 190. There are few such menacing shapes in aviation that can make ones blood run so cold – and this one is only a full-scale replica. Eyeballing the project, a homebuilt kit available from Europe, one almost could say it’s a scaled-down replica, until you take a gander at the wings. There’s no doubt that this is the real McCoy.

Behind the 190, a Pitts Model 12 project stood on its gear, fairings dangling from the legs, begging for a little work to get her flying.

“Come on, let’s look at some airplanes,” David said. Indeed, let’s do.

As he pulled a sliding door open, my eyes gazed on the folded wings of the Wildcat, a warbird the public long ago wrote off. Stubby and slow doesn’t equate to sexy when you field the Wildcat against the Mustang in the court of public opinion. I walked around her twice, asnd my jaw dragged hon the floor. The Wildcat was a remarkably simple airplane. The landing gear is mechanically driven by hand through a crank in the cockpit driving a bicycle chain in the gear well that sucks the wheels up into the gear wells. Oil dripped from the shiny skins, and there was no mistake – this warbird was in fine shape, but she flies and is treated as an airplane. No white glove treatment here. David opened up a panel in the aft fuselage and he flipped on a light – some guy had one and installed seats back here, he told me. That’d be some ride – cramped up in the tail of a fighter with a pilot who could shake things up just for fun.

The P-40 sat behind the Wildcat, another warrior pulled from grace by the sexier fighters of the late war years. I’d seen this Warhawk plenty of times before at airshows, but never knew that the Frascas owned it. David opened the canopy up and let me peek in, and I had to restrain myself from drooling. The smell was unmistakably warbird, and this was the one I’d always longed to fly. Powerful enough to go pretty fast, light enough to still be fun, the P-40 embodied all I wanted in a warbird. As I stepped from the wing, though, an odd shape caught my eye. There aren’t many ellipses in aviation, A set of Spitfire wings hung from a wall, and I had to ask. Yep. We’re working on it. A bunch of instructors from an A&P school come out to work on the sheet metal from time to time, David said.

Wow.

I was already in shock, absolutely awed by the collection. I though about asking for oxygen when he unlocked another door and led me into another hangar. An SE5A replica of the famous World War 1 fighter sat by the door, and as my eyes adjusted to the darker hangar, I gasped. Out loud. I swear.

An old beleriot-ish flying machine sat behind the SE5A, and beyond them, a silver PT-22 begged to fly. It was restored by Paul Poberezny, Mister Sport Aviaiton. A dusty chipmunk sat behind the PT-22, and beyond that, the airplanes continued. The rear wall was lined by engines of all shapes and sizes: Round, flat, Vee and inline. A couple of small homebuilts dangled from the rafters.

Beyond all I saw initially sat a T-6 in yellow, and I had to laugh as I fairly trotted around the Texan. “ I may be an airplane snob, and I hate to slight your T-6, but I know what I’m looking at on the other side,” I said. More ellipses. A couple of them stuck up over the top of the T-6, and one stuck out the side – a Spitfire Mk. 18, the Mack Daddy of all Spits. This one was actually the postwar version, with a Griffon Engine, a five-bladed prop and lines that truly made me want to climb in and start flipping switches.

“She’s a year and a half out of annual,” David told me. “We lost our mechanic, and haven’t been able to find a replacement since he left. These aren’t Cessnas and Pipers, but they’re not hard to work on – they’re still airplanes.”

I told him I could probably dig a resume out of the car. He didn’t laugh, a sign I took positively. “If the airlines don’t turn out to be all I dreamed of, I’ll give you a call,” I said.

But wait. There’s more. He made mention of another hangar with a Stearman and others. I never saw that hangar. But, he did show me a hangar with a J-3 Cub, a polished Luscombe, another Chipmunk and a Great Lakes biplane with a Ranger engine, and as in the other hangar, homebuilts hanged form the rafters. “They’re given to us by guys who’ve built them and flown them, but didn’t want the liability of selling them.

I hated to leave. I really wanted to leave my bags there, dash home for tools and logbooks, and set up shop in Frasca’s hangar. For there in the heartland of America. A family continues doing what made them famous – building simulators – and their love of flying is apparent, undiluted by money and all the other troubles of running a big business.

There in Urbana, couched on either side by corn fields, is a field of dreams for aviators.

The first four circuit breaker switches are on – generator, landing gear, instruments, and starter all energized. Two pumps of throttle then leave it cracked. Thumb resting over the start button, my other hand switches the ignition to both magnetos. I look at my watch. The game already started. If we’re airborne in five minutes, the flight is only 20 minutes. I could land, jump in my car, then make it to the second half.

Occasional words drift through my headset. Lead’s talking to someone. No, he’s talking to himself.

No, lead is talking on his cell phone.

I’m livid.

This whole time, he’s known that I’m in a time crunch. After going to the wrong fuel pumps, we topped off on fuel, then he made a run for the little boy’s room. Then he drank a Diet Coke and nibbled a pack of crackers. “Tell her I made you late,” he said.

Right. You tell that 5’2” redhead who’s spring loaded to the explode position, tell her, that. This is her home opener. I give up, break protocol, and hit the start switch. The engine rumbles to life on the second blade.

Oil pressure good, fuel pressure good. Temps in the green. Idle at 800 RPM. I look over and Lead is off the phone, scrambling to catch up, confused that Two is ready to go. His prop ticks over. I turn on my radio, and watch as his prop stops. Then starts. Then stops. Then starts. Then stops.

His radio crackles to life. “What should I do?”
“Did you prime it?”
“No.”
“Good. Did you pump the throttle?”
“Yes.”
“Do it again.”

His prop kicks over. Then stops. I give up. Switches off, the engine chugs to a stop. I un-strap and climb out.

“Pump your throttle, then leave it cracked.”
I reach in and hit his start switch. His starter slips; I carefully time pulses on the starter switch and the engine springs to life. “I’m impressed,” He says as I walk away. I’ve got places to be.

We taxi out, zigzagging back and for the across the taxiway, swerving to see around our aircraft’s long noses. We reach the end of the runway, and his index finger points up, then spins around. We run up for ignition checks. Power down, then his hand reaches back for the canopy, and we roll out on the runway. We power up, and he starts rolling. Five seconds later, I’m rolling too. I float up into position on the inside of his left turn, and his airplane steadies just about 20 feet off my wingtip. It feels like we’re flying 60-year-old fighter planes, not aerobatic competitors from 40 years ago. The snarl. The swirl of wind, the bubble canopy. We skid across the countryside at 600 feet. Kelly used to instruct in A-10 attack planes, and I swear he must get hypoxia above 1,000 feet.

He waggles his rudder, skidding his plane left and right. I drift left, out to a comfortable distance to watch for targets – I mean, traffic. Falcon field is just ahead off to the right, five miles away in the haze. I can see the soft outline of the hangars on the fuzzy horizon. I’m worried – the students at rhis airport drift out so far in their traffic pattern, we could easily be lined up for a head-on collision with someone on downwind.

Airline pilots. Couldn’t imagine being one when I was a kid, couldn’t stand ‘em as an A&P, can’t wait to be one…

I’m still in Wisconsin, but not at Oshkosh. I still have the green armband on - and so do a lot of other people nearby- but the camaraderie is already fading. Chance encounters with strangers now fade from a flowing conversation to glances from armband to face, a simple nod to acknowledge each other’s presence and brotherhood, and life goes on. We’re on an airport, and while airplanes abound, they all serve purposeful lives. They make money, not memories.

Kudos to Debbie Gary, who flew her final air show at Oshkosh. She’s retiring from the industry, a move I used to mourn, but I now celebrate such things. Debbie is a great lady, a talented writer and a wonderful pilot. She’s retired before and this time may hold no more permenance than the rest - but as I often tell people, do what you want to do, or else you’re flying (or working) for someone other than yourself.

This week, I met aviation icons John and Martha King (no relation,) Cessna’s big man, Jack Pelton, and other movers and shakers from names like Eclipse Aviation, Dornier, and Cirrus. Bob Hoover told me (and a gathering of fans) some of his fabled flying stories.

Freedom rang, loud and clear.

Raptors roared, a legend once trapped in ice flew free of the surly bonds with a a fable on one wing and a fairytale on the other. Pyrotechnics rattled windows and thumped chests for miles around.

I heard Mustangs gallop, but I saw them crumpled in flame and smoke in the aftermath of a moment’s mistake. I wrote the bio of a friend in the past tense, realizing that moments shared in the past will forever stay with me, but the future holds no more for us as our futures, for the time, drive off into different dimensions. Jim, thanks for the memories. You leave huge shoes for someone to fill.

I met men who craved an extra knot here and there, a lad my age who already built, flew and kitted his own plane. He’s the man.

Even before I lost a friend, I made new ones. There are some promising young faces in aviation who will make a big splash soon. Old friends said hi as they saw me, and offered embraces from handshakes to hugs.

Adrienne came to see me, and I’m grateful the timing walked out. Our couple hours together helped immensely.

It’s an atmosphere that could only be AirVenture, our annual reunion in Oshkosh, and one I’ll cherish and keep for years.

Rated PG-13 for adult language

It absolutely sucks to cry in a crowd of hundreds of thousands. I did this week, a lot. I welled up a mostly supressed tear when I looked into the performers area and saw a mess of friends who were completely unaccessible to me. Nothing like a security worker telling ya that you can’t get to your friends. It really hit me then, that the day I’d feared for a long time, had come. I was no longer a performer.. I was a press weasel. Damn. I missed Chris, i missed a lot of my friends. The airshow business is a tough one, with towering peaks and gullies in between that reach into the depths of hades.

Next day, two Mustangs ball up on the runway. One pilot dies; I’m tasked to take photos. I was sick to my stomach. Two news helicopters tangle in a midair in Airzona while filming a high speed chase. No sleep that night.

Today, I was halfway through a story when the phone rings. Plane down. Dayton.

Crap. Look up news. Mention of a two plane act. One down.

Crap. Look up the show schedule. Who flew a two ship act?

Not him.. not him.. not him..

Crap. Jim Leroy and skip stewart.

Jim.. jim.. Jim.. Oh, shit!

yeah. Damn. Babysat his boy, tommy, at a few airshow airshows, for a few minutes at a time so he could sign autographs or eat a bite. Helped round up volunteers to hold poles. He invited me to his motorhome, showed me his comedy film for the [then] upcoming ICAS convention, a skit where the FAA guy mistakes Jim’s pee bottle for a new gatorade flavor. He invited me to come to Jacksonville last year and help crew with him.

We began getting confirmations. I called Savannah, she was in tears . I wasn’t calling her as a source, I was calling her as a friend - and she was much closer to the Leroys than I was. I couldn’t stomach the thought of telling Adrienne. I called Lori and told her to tell Adrienne.

A great human, a proud patriot, great showman. God bless him and his family. My words are no consolation, I’m sure, if you’re reading this. What a hard loss; what a blow.

Damn.

I had to dig up his bio and massage it into the story. Damn. Tears.. liked to have shorted out my keyboard.

F-22 rattles the windows; got to go photograph that.

Heritage flight. Sad song.. just miserable. I’m standing in a field of thousands of friends I never met, I know they’d feel my pain, but they just dont know.

Back in the trailer, people didn’t know how to deal with me. I volunteered to take a story on the People’s choice award; Rob seemed hesitant to hand me the release.

Finally someone clued him into my situation. Rob sat by me, offerered the idea that I take the rest of the day off. No, no good. I choked, whispered the words out when he asked what He could do… just… just get it right.. please.

What an absolutely miserable week.

Times like these I wonder why we do it.. until the next time I start tearing up the sky, then I’ll remember exactly why. This stuff is worse than drugs. Addictive. Expensive.