April 2005-
“Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.” This little philosophical phrase is something that I’ve had in my personal lexicon for quite a number of years now, and some recent events have reinforced this concept to me yet again.
Last month in this column I began the explanation of why we changed the title of this department to “Full Circle”—and I did it by hardly explaining the reasons. Instead, I told you about all the reasons why the things I used to do with my personal airplane—a totally tricked-out light twin—didn’t apply for me and my partner anymore. Now I’m going to tell you what does apply, aviation-wise, from this point on.
First, to backtrack just a touch to last month, both my partner and I had discovered that the mission statement for our marvelous twin no longer fit where our heads were at: for reasons to do with age, health considerations and general inclinations, neither of us wanted to do much traveling even though we owned a marvelous traveling machine.
For those reasons, we put that twin up for sale, sold it almost immediately, and turned our attentions back to our aviation roots—a plan which seemed to make more sense to both of us at this stage in our lives. I’m going to talk about this change from my perspective, although my partner and old friend Jim Corley has a similar background and similar inclinations—which is why he has indicated that he wants to sign on board to this new direction in which I’m headed.
In all reality, this new direction is actually an old one—the original one—for both of us, hence the new “Full Circle” title on my personal department here at the FLYER.
My personal flying began in the late 1950s (where does the time go? If someone out there has figured it out, please let me know) in just about the lightest of light airplanes of the era, the Piper J-3 Cub. I was too young to solo when I first started, and by the time my 16th birthday came around I had stepped up to a far more sophisticated airplane—the Piper Super Cub with a 90 hp engine replacing the 65 hpengine in the J-3.
Climbing into the front seat of that PA-18 was really the beginning of my developing sensibilities as a pilot. Soon after that first solo I found myself bouncing (literally and figuratively) between a tailwheel Piper Super Cub at the local FBO and a tailwheel Cessna 140 that was the entry-level airplane at a local flying club.
I could go back to my old logbooks for more details, but let’s just see what I can pull up from the memory bank without any external aids (please forgive any inaccuracies, it’s been almost half a century).
What I remember about the Cub was how well the airplane fit me and fell right to hand. With the throttle on the left sidewall and my right fingers wrapped around the control stick in front of me, the airplane from Lock Haven seemed like an expanded expression of my own body.
Those big, fat Cub wings seemed almost to come out of my shoulders, and my feet planted on the rudder pedals seemed like the most natural method of steering on the ground or yawing through the sky. Aileron and elevator, too, were hardly more than extensions of my thoughts and whims; it seemed so natural to push my arm left or right, forward or back, to get the airplane—to get me—to turn and swoop or climb and dive.
Over on the Cessna 140 side, the cabin seemed smaller and the visibility somewhat less—but the creature comforts, while tight, were more conducive to sharing the experience with my passengers once I got that heralded private pilot license on my 17th birthday.
Cross-country flights, too, were easier in the sense that I could lay charts, flight plans and lunch on the empty seat beside me when I was off on some solo sojourn. From a handling point of view, the Cessna was a little more of a squirrel on the ground and a little more of a challenge to wheel land on its spring steel gear legs than the Piper was on its bungee-shocked assemblies, but the differences were more vanilla-and-chocolate than good-and-bad.
My memory of those two small airplanes from my youth was that both of them were friendly enough, yet demanding in a way that I was sure at the time would help me in my goal to be a professional pilot and, eventually, an airline driver.
With either the Piper or the Cessna in my hands, I could imagine myself using exactly the same skills I was learning and honing to eventually steer a DC-3, a Convair, a DC-7, maybe even one of those new Boeing or Douglas jetliners someday.
On many a takeoff or landing, the Piper Cub would magically transform itself into a local service airliner plodding through the day’s milk run, the Cessna would transmogrify into a four-engine jet on its scheduled trip from East Coast to West.
Flashing forward to today, I’ve spent nearly 30,000 hours at the flight controls of everything from nearly the smallest to nearly the biggest and I’ve spent a lifetime figuring out what was the same about each of them, and what was different.
I can’t help feeling that so much of my skills came from those early days of learning to drive around those conventional gear General Aviation training airplanes—it was those skills that were eventually built into the array that was necessary to do whatever the next aeronautical task might call for.
Bottom line: putting a propeller airliner into a snow-covered airport or landing a widebody jet in nearly zero/zero conditions on some foreign runway is more like flying those old Piper/Cessna taildraggers than it isn’t.
So I decided to go “Full Circle”—I decided to go home again to where, aeronautically speaking, I was born and raised. Can I make this happen? Well, I figured that it can’t hurt to try, and besides, life’s a journey, not a destination.
I began the process so I could see for myself what would happen. I revisited the contenders from my personal aviation history to see what did and did not hold up to what my memory was seeing.
Over the past year-plus, I flew several Piper Super Cubs and a couple of Cessna 140s. On the positive side, the handling characteristics of each were precisely what I remembered them to be. What each of them called for was a pilot in the seat who understood the basic nature of general airmanship and conventional gear flying. If you treated these airplanes thus, they would respond positively at every juncture.
You could do lots with these airplanes if you knew how to do it, and the results were invariably sweet and satisfying—those were the sensations that I remembered from my first pass at these airplanes so many years before.
What I didn’t remember quite accurately were the creature comforts (or, more accurately, the lack thereof). Having spent lots of time inside lots of bigger airplanes, I discovered that here in my later years it was something of a struggle just getting into and out of these smaller early-era Piper/Cessna offspring.
I’m a big guy and, even though right now I’m about the same height and weight as I was back in my teenage years when I first started flying these taildraggers, my body specifications somehow seem to be distributed differently.To top it off, my arms and legs don’t seem to move like they used to.
For those reasons, I considered readjusting my aim toward something a fraction larger, such as a Piper Pacer or a Cessna 170. Trouble was, those airplanes—while fine airframes in themselves—would be more compromise than purity. They also had a hint of being too near to being “transportation” than what I actually had my heart set on.
I was wrestling with these dilemmas when, by chance, I ran into an intriguing airplane from that era that I had never even considered: the Cessna 305, which is otherwise known as the L-19 Bird Dog. Created for the U.S. Army in 1949, it is—if Piper and Cessna aficionados will forgive me this indulgence—a straight cross between a Piper Super Cub (with its tandem configuration, lots of cockpit visibility, and a control stick) and a high-wing Cessna (wings from a Cessna 170, a Cessna 195 tail, and all-metal construction).
From my perspective and history, the L-19 Bird Dog has all the aspects from my youth that I wanted in order to be able to go “Full Circle,” yet it comes with a suitably larger entry door and a bigger cabin (seemingly designed for younger men wearing parachutes or older men without them). I fit into the Bird Dog the way I remembered that I once fit into those old Pipers/Cessnas.
I intend to fly this two-seat taildragger just as I did the airplanes that made up the early moments of my aviation history. I intend to take it on the same sort of local flights and short trips, with an occasional longer cross-country sally thrown in. VFR, down low, seeing things through a cockpit window just as I once did so many years before.
Is all of this just a pipe dream, or can I successfully go back again? I’ll let you folks know — right here, every month.
Editor-at-large Thomas Block has flown nearly 30,000 hours since his first hour of dual in 1959. In addition to his 36-year career as a US Airways pilot, he has been an aviation magazine writer since 1969, a best-selling novelist. He owns an L-19 Birddog, which he contends is a straight cross between a Piper Super Cub and a high-wing Cessna taildragger.
