Ten-Finger Exercises

Flying high

Now that my cat just ruined my blog for the day by disappearing it--that makes a good transitive verb, don't you think?--I guess I'll write about something else. Take up where I left off yesterday.

We bought Carrie Nation about 5 years ago. My husband Bill had been a Civil Air Patrol pilot for lots of years and flew the CAP plane. His 'friend' and senior pilot Dick decided Bill was too fat for the job, despite his fine medical eval by the flight doctor, and refused to let him fly.

Maybe Dick thought it would be the incentive Bill needed to shed a lot of pounds. It was not. All it did was make him depressed and angry. He wanted to fly and so did I.

THere aren't many rentals available around here, and so nothing happened. I started looking for planes on eBay and even bid on one before Bill realized I was serious. Then we began looking in earnest for a plane we could fit in and enjoy for not too much money. Bill found Carrie on a Beechcraft site. Her owner was the dad of a young man in the Army who wanted to move on to big and better things.

It was a great first plane for us. We could fly over to Newberg in a couple of hours instead of five on the highway. That meant we could see my son and his wife and daughters more often. Daughter-in-law loved that we could fly over and see them and fly back the same day, although I preferred to spend the night at a motel some times.

If Bill and I were both built more like sparrows than buffalos, there wouldn't have been any problem. Carrie didn't climb fast, but we always managed. Still, I wanted to take the grandchildren up for a flight, and even with a little back seat in the Sport, there was no extra weight allowance.

Anyway, last fall before I lost my job I started shopping for a little bigger plane, one that would hold 4 comfortably. Six would even be better. The bigger Beechcrafts mostly had retractable gear, and we'd heard too many stories of nose gear failures.

We found a great Cessna 182 and bought it. Had a good time all winter planning the trips we'd take, even weekend ones, when the winter ice and fog around here lifted. All the time I was waiting for Bill to start trying to sell Carrie. It wasn't easy. He'd become the Northwestern hoopdedoo for the Beechcraft Air Club, with lots of articles and pictures and mail to answer, etc.

So his identity crisis came about the same time mine did. He's dealing with his slowly, having not dropped out of the BAC yet. We call him Commodore. With two aircraft, he can say he has a fleet.

It will be good to get her sold despite our nostalgia. It will fill the gap in my salary for a year. I hope we'll get out of her what we put into her. Should be able to, but then we're not in an active market for aircraft. We will see.