Several years ago I read Stephen Coonts book "The Cannibal Queen" , this weekend I plucked it out again and reread it. If you haven't read it , it should be #1 on your must read list. I will not try to describe it but have pasted Coonts promo on it below. This is what flying is all about or at least should be. Hopefully someday I will have enough vacation time to do something similar in 41 Charlie Dave
The Cannibal Queen
On a clear, sunny Saturday in June, Coonts and his fourteen-year-old
son David take off from Boulder, Colorado, in a 1942 Stearman open
cockpit biplane, "a noisy forty-nine-year-old wood and canvas crate
with a naked floozy painted on the side."
The Queen started life as a World War II primary trainer then spent
over thirty years as an agricultural spray plane before being lovingly
restored. For Coonts, who's logged thousands of hours in the Navy's
most sophisticated aircraft, the Queen is flying as he's never known it
before--flying close the earth, the wind teasing his helmet, equipped
with little more than a map and a compass.
First stop is a Stearman fly-in in St. Francis, Kansas. there amid the
barbecues and barber-shop quartets, the treelined streets with their
modest homes, Coonts feels nostalgia for small-town America, for a
way of life he felt was dying. Yet, by the end of the journey, having met
the friendly, richly individual people in towns large and small across
the
land, he knows our nation has weathered her first two hundred years
remarkably well, and he is filled with hope for the future of this vast
and
varied land....
Flying like the legendary barnstormers, Coonts swoops under storms
and over mountains, across swamps, deserts, forests, and the
monumental expanse of the Great Plains. At eighty-four knots he visits
Mark Twain's Missouri, the volcanic wasteland of Mt. St. Helens, San
Francisco's Golden Gate, Zion's red cliffs, the Painted Desert, the
Shiloh battlefield and Mt. Rushmore. And he records it all with a
novelist's keen eye. Whether taking friends and fans up for a
spin...chatting with old-timers at small-town airports...visiting
warbird
heaven in Chino, California, where former military aircraft are lovingly
restored and flown...soaring in cold air at 11,500 feet over the Sierra
Nevadas or sweating over a scorching desert, Coonts conveys the
incomparable thrill of flying...and brings our country to life in a
vivid,
unforgettable portrait.
This book has generated more than half the fan mail I have received in the
last
eleven years. Many of the folks who read this non-fiction account of a
flight of an old biplane all over America decide they know me pretty well,
so they take pen in hand and write long, chatty letters. The letters are
wonderful, a rich sampling of the stories of people all over our nation
who
have some connection with aviation, tenuous though it may be.
In addition to scads of letters from general aviation pilots and student
pilots, I have received letters from non-flying spouses, the sons and
daughters of pilots, military aviators past and current, airline
professionals, mechanics, engineers, test pilots, and people whose flying
days never even began. As one reader told me, "I always wanted to fly,
but
life just got in the way."
Flying still stirs something deep within me. Surprisingly, in this age of
packed
airports, flying cattle cars and idiot terrorists, many other people are
also attracted to the machines that lift us above the earth.
I worry that the personal freedom I find so precious--the freedom to own
a
little airplane, to sally forth into blue summer skies whenever the mood
is
on me,
wherever I want to go--will be lost in the years ahead, traded away for
some
politician's nebulous promise to make the skies safer for airline
passengers, the
living meat in the intestines of the Boeing birds. If it happens, when it
happens, I hope I am too old to care. It's hard to imagine I will ever
get
that old. Perhaps I should say, When the politicians kill aviation, I hope
I'm six feet under.
Flying is who I am. I am the guy down at the local general aviation
airport with an old Cessna parked on the ramp because there is not enough
hangar space. I'm the guy leaning over the fence on summer evenings
watching people do
touch-and-goes. I'm the guy with the middle-age spread sitting in the
FBO's office poring over the ads in Trade-A-Plane, ads for airplanes that
I will never be able to afford. And I'm the guy flying the little buzzer
that goes over your house on Saturday evenings as you grill hamburgers on
your barbecue.
I've flown all over the country in military jets, turbocharged Cessnas
and
antique biplanes, and I've never tired of it. I like the view from up
there. That is the right perspective for me.
I tried to capture this feeling in THE CANNIBAL QUEEN. I
talked
about flying, about money--for flying is indeed expensive--about the
perspective flying gives to my life, and about some of the rare,
interesting people I met along the way.
One of the reviewers of this book remarked that general aviation airports
are
something from a by-gone era, a little remnant of America the way it used
to be. I agree with that assessment. General aviation is indeed slightly
removed from the impersonal, rushed, ruthlessly hectic pace of modern
life,
and I hope the gap never closes. If it does, I'll probably buy a boat.
Occasionally someone remarks that I don't write much about the craft of
flying, and they are right. Other writers know a lot more about the
technical end of aviation and they explain it so much better than I could.
The feds lost me years ago with their revisions of the airspace
classifications. The recent changes to the weather reporting formats to
make the data fit in computers overseas baffles me: I doubt I will ever
understand how hot or cold it is when the air temperature is given in
Celsius. And why would someone in Paris, France, would want to know the
outside air temperature in Paris, Texas? Oh well.
The human aspects of flight are my beat. Science does indeed get us off
the
ground; what I try to do is take you with me in the cockpit. The wonder
of
it all is precisely what THE CANNIBAL QUEEN is about.
I am often asked if I still own the Queen, that marvelous 1942 Stearman
biplane that stars in the book. Indeed I do. She had an engine overhaul in
1994 and purrs along sweetly, better than new. These days she spends her
winters in a heated, insulated, air-conditioned executive hangar at
Clarksburg, West Virginia, under the supervision of royal mechanic Roger
Hartley. Summers she flies off a grass strip on my farm nestled in the
heart of the Alleghenies.
Whenever my wife, Deborah, and I go flying these days with a destination
in
mind, which is almost every chance we get, we go in our 1969 Cessna-182
Skylane. It puts along at 120 knots, is easy on gas and relatively cheap
to
maintain. Maybe next Christmas I'll give Deb a paint job for the Cessna.
She recently earned her commercial pilot's license, and I find I enjoy
watching her fly as much as, if not more than, I do. Her exploration of
the
world of flight makes it all new again for me.
Occasionally fans tell me that the structure of their lives won't allow
them to take a whole summer to fly in. Mine won't either, these days: life
gets in the way. I urge them to fly on beautiful Saturdays or Sundays. If
the weather looks promising, take a three-day flying weekend. Fly on your
summer vacation--you'll probably treasure the memory of flying over the
Rocky Mountains a lot longer than you will the memory of another week in
that condo at the beach.
The message of THE CANNIBAL QUEEN is just as true today as when I wrote
it: life is a grand adventure. Get out there in the middle of it and live
it to the hilt.
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