The Saturday Morning Post: Adventures in Flying: Sometimes there are tears of sadness

The V-tail Beechcraft Bonanza, was known around small airports in the 1970's as the V-tailed doctor killer.  Fast, sleek, and expensive most of the buyers were higher income professionals who sometimes were overconfident in their abilities in an airplane that could be unforgiving.  The only crash at the local airport in one of these was a friend of my fathers, who was in the gas and oil distribution business. He ran out of gas and ended up in a farm field a couple of miles from the airport trying to make it home without stopping for fuel.  Everyone walked away. His wife sold the wreckage. 

When my parents bought the house in Florida, I discovered that a high school friend of mine lived on the corner.  His mother worked locally, his father worked 150 miles away.  They had saved up and bought a 172 Cessna, so Bob could fly home on weekends, or even overnight if he wanted to, with traffic it was a three hour drive, but just a little over an hour by air.  Coming home one Friday evening, he flew around bad weather, and didn't stop for fuel, he landed in the trees about 500 feet short of the runway, walked away from the crash.  He had let the insurance on the airplane lapse the month before. The plane was not a total loss, but he lacked funds to repair it. His wife moved out on Monday. 

Where my parents were at in Florida there were two local airports.  One was less prosperous than the other.  The planes were older, the maintenance was not as precise.  One of the flight instructors picked up a contract videotaping natural gas pipelines from the air. This involved flying the pipeline routes at 500 feet or so, with a camera strapped to the wing. It was several hours a week and it paid really well - instructing was slow she needed the money.  She didn't see the stabilizing cable on the 1,000 foot television tower, that snapped the end off of a wing.  She died on impact.  

The same airport had a Piper J3 Cub on the rental line.  It was buzzing low and slow over a neighborhood late one afternoon when the crankshaft broke, and it crumpled into a swimming pool.  Dad and I had flown that plane a couple of hours before.    

When I was about ten years old, I watched a plane crash.  It was 4th of July and we were returning from uncle Dick's house on the lake.  A small plane was in the landing pattern at the local airport, and Dad stopped on top of the hill at the end of the runway so we could watch, except the plane didn't make the runway.  There was a mechanical issue, and the pilot misjudged the hill at the end of the runway and landed in a corn field across the road. No one was hurt. 

I had a lawyer friend in Kentucky, who had survived an airline crash. He and his teenage son were flying cross country, when an engine failed, destroying the hydraulic system on the plane.  His son was killed on impact, Bernie survived but spent two years recovering. Then went to law school, he was a ferocious advocate. 

And yes, I still fly. I still love airplanes.