Ruined For Straight and Level

“Been inverted yet?” the pilot asked casually, as though he weren’t trying to impress me.

“Nyet,” I tossed back more casually than he, if that were possible.

“I’ll take you flying some time, if you want to go.”  The offer was there.  One of the best things about ramp rat life was the airplane rides.  One of? Right, THE best.  The lime green Super Decathlon shimmered invitingly in the afternoon sun.  My eyes glittered.  Pretty little fabric covered flippy toy, that super D.  As if I weren’t dying to, lusting after the machine, desperately curious about what it could do, I negotiated a day and a time.

My coworkers assured me that they’d all been flying with the guy in question.  “Good pilot, so go have fun, kid.  Go nuts.  Don’t barf.”

Wait, “Don’t barf?!?”

On the appointed day, I rolled up to the hanger in my rattletrap jalopy.  I wasn’t sneaking up on anybody in that thing.  And simple as that, we buzzed off into the wild blue yonder.  Up, up, and away.  And around.  And back.  And upside down, right side up, and around andaroundandaround!  I hung from the harness and watched the ground and the sky switch places.  He showed me how to push when I wanted to pull so I could fly straight and level while  inverted.  I was intrigued.  He helped me through a couple of rolls.  I was fascinated.  He showed me a loop and I was hooked for life.  In the middle of some maneuver or other, I committed myself to the desire, the need to learn aerobatics sooner or later.

I’d like to say I came to my senses when my feet came back to earth, but it just isn’t so.  I took some lessons, but it was a serious stretch to afford them.  I’m still waiting for the part of my life where I can start back in on this long delayed love affair with all things aerobatic.  It seems that I’m a hopeless romantic and have chosen, against all reasonable counsel, to take the long slow road that involves hours, weeks, months, and years of hanging around at airports in one capacity or another and trying to get paid for it.  Part of me wishes I’d been a touch more mercenary when I was young and chosen a career that would have gotten me the money to buy that dream long before now.  The rest of me is glad to the core that even if takes forever, I’m earning it.  One. Hour. At a time.

The Thunderstorm and the 182

I was working the line on one of those sultry summer days that’s just begging to be broken wide open by a thunderstorm.  It was the kind of day where we all kept one eye on the radar; the cold front was coming and everyone knew it was just a matter of time.  Our little airport was a hoppin’ place, and we had to be sure we saw it coming early enough to hide all our little airplanes away.  Sure enough, the western sky grew menacing.    Swiftly, the entire sky went dark, went grey, went black in a wall of roiling rain terrifying to behold.  More airplanes than we’d expected made swift landings and pilots raced for the terminal building as the storms blew in upon us.  The last one to land was a transient pilot with a Cessna 182.  “Tie it down!” he shouted over his shoulder, literally running for cover.  I rushed to get the ropes on.  The first was tied when the gust front hit.

It was like watching the Matrix.  I saw a wall of water coming at me sideways.  I’ve never seen it so well defined before or since.  As silly as it feels to admit to nearly being knocked off my feet by the wind, I have to say I was grateful to have had a hold of the strut when the deluge came because my feet nearly left the ground.  The radio at my hip crackled.  It was the air traffic controller.  “Wow, you guys, gusts to 55 knots already!  At 60 knots I abandon the tower!  I think we’re gonna get it, too,”  was when I stopped listening.  BECAUSE THE AIRPLANE WAS MOVING!

It was starting to pivot around the tied down wing.  In a frantic, rain drenched, wind beaten panic, I hurled my whole body against it.  That plane didn’t even slow down in it’s arc around the taut rope.  I stepped back and launched everything I had at it again, blinded by the sideways rain.  It’s a terrible feeling to realize that you might as well not have tried.  “I’m leaving the tower!’  My radio barked, “And oh, my God, somebody get out there and help Dani, that airplane is gonna take off with her!”  That was the last thing I heard from him (or anyone else) for a while.  It was kind of amazing the radio lasted as long as it did considering the amount of water that must have rushed through it.  The thing never did work right again.

The gust front had passed.  Srong and gusty winds and rain persisted until the squall line passed us by, but nothing to match that initial blast.  With the normal laws of physics back in my corner, I shoved that airplane back into place, quickly tied the last two ropes and trotted in my squishy, sodden shoes back to the building.  The guys were irked at the loss of the radio and pretty uninterested in my little adventure as the accidental denizen of a wind tunnel.  Our friend in the tower, though, remembers this one vividly, and tells it with more flair than I do every time he introduces me to someone new.  “I knew Dani back when she worked the line,” he’ll start, “and this one day…”

A Line Guy With a Fire Extinguisher at the Side of the Runway Will Be Just Fine

It’s exciting and a little weird to watch the banner tow pilot pick up his sign.  He and his helper set up a goal post looking contraption in the grass beside the runway with the banner line strung between.  He takes off and turns back, swooping down to catch the banner on the hook attached to the old Cessna taildragger.  I remember asking if I could come along some time.  The old pilot’s face lit up and he immediately started seeing me as the prospect he’d been looking for, someone to pass the business on to.  I remember thinking about it just a little bit harder and changing my mind about that ride.  Somehow he didn’t seem even a little bit surprised.

As fate would have it, I was glad to have passed that one up.  The gentleman in question called in on the unicom frequency one lovely fall afternoon, as polite as could be.  It seemed that after his banner tow flight, he’d come back around to drop the banner and he’d had a bit of a surprise.  The banner had tangled in the tailwheel and somehow he’d lost that, too.  He wasn’t terribly concerned, he was careful to point out.  No, he did not want “the equipment”.  He didn’t see that landing without a tailwheel was a serious enough problem to call out the firetrucks.  He really didn’t want to be a bother.

“A line guy with a fire extinguisher at the side of the runway will be just fine,”  was all he really wanted.

Um, no.  I was glad the other guys were unanimous in their rejection of the request.  The pilot was perfectly polite about, that, too.  And so we watched him make a picture perfect landing, holding the tail off as long as he could.  He landed near the end of the runway and kept the tail high until there wasn’t enough airflow left over the control surfaces to keep it in the air any longer.  It came down slowly.  With a light shower of sparks where the metal dragged the pavement, he finished the short taxi back to his hanger without incident.  And I breathed a sigh of relief.

And the Door Popped Open 10 Feet Off the Ground

The day I got my private pilot certificate was downright anticlimactic.  All that work, all that struggle, all that time.  As an airport employee, people assumed I could fly all day and all night for free and that the wisdom of decades worth of aviators was seeping into my bones osmoticlly with every refueling, with the parking of every airplane, with the sweat expended in the pushing and pulling of every trainer to and from the hanger.    The truth of it was that the guys weren’t making me feel terribly welcome and even with the discount provided for employees, the cost of flight training made it a slow going proposition on a ramp rat’s salary.  I persisted and kept myself from being rude to the pilots who asked daily, “What, you STILL haven’t taken your checkride?  You must not want it enough.  If you really wanted it, we can’t see how you don’t have it by now…”  ‘Easy for you to say, Mr. Doctor, Mr. Lawyer, Successful Mr. Businessman,’ I’d refrain from muttering under my breath as I slogged away at the heavy work that kept their airplanes flying.  When the day finally came, the overachievers around me with the horsepower to so easily achieve their dreams had me convinced that I was already behind schedule.

Well, first things first.  I took that piece of paper home and waved it like a victory banner at the people I was sure would be impressed.  “Who’s first?”  I cried.  My mother sighed heavily.  “I suppose I should be,” she conceded.  She made a very patient and respectful passenger indeed.  I was ever so grateful to find afterwards that because she didn’t want to detract from the experience for me, she didn’t admit to the airsickness she felt until after we were safely back on terra firma.  It kept her from being too excited about going up again for a while, but it was a nice departure from my next several passengers, all of whom were a little high maintenance, to say the least.

“Who’s next?” I triumphantly declaimed in the kitchen.

“You’re not really a pilot,” my sister opined, “You can’t really fly a plane.”

“Can so.  Let’s go.”

“Whatever,” she hissed, and off to the airport we went.

At the front desk, she was sarcastic.  “They only handed you the airplane keys ’cause you work here.  You set this up, they’re messing with me.  You’re not really a pilot.”

“Let’s go,” I repeated.  I went through a rigorous preflight of that beloved Cessna 152.  She was not impressed.  “Get in.”

“Yeah, right.”  Looking a little nervous, the kid (all of 15 snarky years old) complied.  Diligently, religiously, I followed the familiar checklist and the engine puttered predictably to life.

“Turn it off!” She demanded, eyes darting, “Before you get us both in trouble!  You can’t be doing this!  You’re not a..,”

I cut her off with a laugh and called ground for my taxi clearance.

We taxied across the runway and right on past the tower.  A look of abject horror grew on Nicole’s face.  Approaching the tower, the controller gave an instruction reserved only for friends.  “Hey Dani, heads up”.  The kid followed my gaze  to see white cheeks against the windows.  She began to panic.  Not only was her sibling, who couldn’t possibly be a pilot,  about to take her flying, but the world had gone mad: the air traffic controllers were mooning us.

She never really regained her composure from there.  On the ride out to the airport, I’d systematically gone through every possibility I could think of that might have scared her.  If you hear this, if you see this, if I do this, this is why.  All normal.  No surprises.  I was proud of having covered every possibility.  She was glazed with deep concern bordering nearly on panic as we looked down that runway.  Somehow, Nicole had never believed that I was actually going to take her flying.   Murphy intervened.  The one thing I hadn’t thought to warn her about (it was rare anyway, and had kind of skipped my mind, I admit), was that in those little bitty Cessnas, every once in a while a door might pop open.  only an inch or so, but that was enough for her.  We were, 5, 10 feet off the ground when it registered.  “Oh my God, we’re gonna die I’m gonna be sucked out this is horrible oh shit oh shit oh shit!” she screamed, flailing and grabbing things.  Trying to reason with her, get her to believe that nobody gets sucked out of an airplane if it’s only tavelling 60 knots, was utterly hopelesss.   You try and pacify a panicking teenager.  That kid didn’t fly with me again for years.

I Don’t Have Any Tattoos

Off I went to fuel another high wing airplane on a hot, summer day.  By now, this was all pretty routine.  I single handedly swung the ladder out from under the truck and in one fluid motion, it landed just where it should.  I slung the hose expertly over my shoulder and scrambled efficiently up the ladder before it had even stopped teetering.

“Top it?”

“Yeah.”

There I stood in my blue jean shorts, perched on the ladder in the hot summer sun.

“Say,” the pilot inquired, “What is that?”

“What is what?”

“There,” he gestured vaguely.

“Where?”

“Here,” he said, grabbing my leg.  “Is this a tattoo?”  He stood there.  With his hand.  On my leg.  Cool as a cucumber, I pulled the nozzle of the fuel hose from the tank and pointed it at his head, a mere foot and a half away.

“I don’t HAVE any tattoos,”  I growled.

Shoulda seen him run.   I laughed to myself about that one for a week straight.

That Was My Uncle Harry

After the first few hours of training, the guys determined that I was ready for my first solo refueling job.  An Aztec, a small twin engine airplane, requested the services of a lineman and so off they sent me, describing the location of the fuel tanks and reminding me not to forget to offer to clean the windscreen.  I requested clearance to cross the runway from the tower controller who found that little exchange far more boring than I did.  I felt thrilled, elated, mistress of a whole world that many people would never have thought to badger their way into.  I rolled up and carefully parked my truck in front of the airplane in question.  I attached the bonding cable with deliberate intention.  Carefully placing the fuel mat around the tank opening, I topped her off as instructed, and then asked offhandedly if I should clean the windscreen.

This being my first solo fuel run, nothing about the request to do all the windows while I was at it struck me as odd.  It was the only time in 3 years at that job I’d be asked to do it that way.  I pulled out a clean rag and the plexiglass cleaner and went to work.  I worried about scratching the windows as I cleaned them, but the pilot was nowhere to be found as that concern occurred to me.  He reemerged from the hanger just as I finished the job.

“So,” says I, “The windows are done, though I was a little worried about scratching ‘em.  They seemed to be covered in a weird gritty dust.  Where have you been flying?”

The guy scratched his head and laughed.  “That was my Uncle Harry.  We just took him out and sprinkled him over Lake Michigan.”

“D- do you want the rag back?” I offered with concern.

“Nah.  Never was too nuts about Uncle Harry.”

“Oh.  Well, enjoy the rest of your day,” I offered uncertainly, dirty rag in hand, as the man walked off.  And that was the end of that.

I’m Your New Line Girl. When Do I Start?

What had looked like the direct and easy avenue to my dream was clearly closed to me.  Time to find another way.  I was left with the time honored notion of working my way up from the bottom.  Fine.  I’m a hard worker when motivated and people less clever than me had pulled it off before.  I presented myself at the nearest airport, ready to make a pest of myself until someone took me in and pointed me in the right direction.  No go.  Alrighty then.  I drove off down the road to another small airport.  Nothing doing.  Good thing there are a lot of small airports out there and I wasn’t shy about being told no.  Airport managers pushed me off one after the other with the excuse that they couldn’t hire me for anything, not even grass mowing, until my 18th birthday.  Fine.  Two days before that noteworthy date, I carefully crafted a resume and cover letter.  I dressed up a bit but not TOO much-wouldn’t want ‘em to think I was the girly type, after all.  Funny how already I was attuned to how image plays so strongly, particularly when you’re young and female and rushing headlong into a very traditionally male endeavor.

I knew the fact of being female was a major liability when walking in unannounced in search of a physical job in a macho environment.  I decided that confidence, even overconfidence, would serve me well.  I took a deep breath, turned my spine to steel, and stomped into the office, hand outstretched to shake as firmly as I could.

“Hi.  I’m Dani.  I’m your new line girl.  When do I start?”,  I demanded of the startled airport manager.

“Oh, hi Dani, nice to meet you, ” Pete rebounded.  “but you’re in the wrong office.  Here, follow me.”  Figuring that as advertised, I must be the new line girl, Pete marched me over to the man who would typically hire and oversee the ramp rats.

“This is Dani, your new line girl, ” he repeated to Ray, “When does she start?”.  Ray scratched his head.  “Tomorrow?”, he offered.

And so I got the job.  It took them a while to work out that nobody had actually hired me.  By then I’d been around a while working happily and hard and so they seemed to be stuck with me.  10 years later I was talking to the man who owned the company and we had a good laugh about the situation.  “I always wondered how that happened,” says he, “I never thought he would have hired a girl.”

Don’t Tell Ma I’m a Pilot. She Thinks I’m a Piano Player In a Whorehouse

If I’d have had my way, I’d have gone to “the Harvard of the Skies” and from there, as quickly and as directly as possible to the right seat and then the left of the biggest jet anyone would let me near.  Embry Riddle Aviation University in Daytona Beach sounded dreamy to me.  Alas, my grandiose plans were thwarted by my ever loving parents.  They still weren’t having any of this aviation stuff, at least not voluntarily, and they sure as hell were not about to help me get the kind of loans I’d have needed to throw my hat into that particular ring.   My mother saw the whole enterprise as just plain old dangerous and for years, would call me whenever an airplane went down anywhere in the world.  “See?”,  She’d query breathlessly, “It’s not as perfectly safe as you think it is!  Please don’t do this.  I’ll worry about you every day.  If something ever happens to you I’ll never be O.K. again.  I know I can’t stop you, but please don’t do this.  Isn’t there anything else you’d rather do?”.    My dad and I argued about what I was capable of.  “You’re a musician,” he’d remind me, “and a writer.  These are things we know you’re good at.  We haven’t seen anything from you yet that would make us think you’d be good at flying.  I hate to break it to you but you probably won’t be.  Better that I tell you this than someone else.  I don’t want to see you waste your time and money just to find out it’s something you can’t do.  And I’m sure not going to let you waste my money to find out.”  The arguments would get heated.  None of us ever felt like we won them.

A couple years later I saw the bumper sticker that read, “Don’t tell ma I’m a pilot.  She thinks I’m a piano player in a whore house,” and I simply could not stop laughing.  Truly, I thought my mom would have felt I was safer in that particular cockpit than in the one I’ve chosen to occupy.

My dad still thinks I’m wasting my talents if I’m not a full time musician.  To be fair, they both say now that they’re proud of me, though neither would have chosen for me what I’ve chosen for myself.  And they’re each quick to assure me that they’d fully support me if  ever change my mind and decide to give something else a shot…

How I Fell Hopelessly, Helplessly, Wildy in Love With An Airplane

Frankly, the whole thing is a bit of a mystery.  If I hadn’t discovered airplanes, I’d have been a musician and a writer or died trying.  This I’d known for years.   It never occurred to me, until my last year and a half of high school, that this was even a possibility.  That I might like it, that I might want to, that it even existed as a possibility in the first place was far from my mind.  Where this started, nobody knows.  I had no friends or family members who were pilots.  My brother had had a ride in a small airplane years and years before but I hadn’t been interested.  Or even invited, come to think of it.  My dad, to this day, still thinks I just saw Top Gun too many times.  He may be right.  Iceman and Maverick and a bunch of F-14s can do that to a girl, I guess.  But once I’d thought of it, I never wanted anything else so much again.  I suppose the glamor, the adventure, the travel, the command of technical subjects and physical objects at once all appealed to me.  Not to mention the independence.  The adulation reserved for those so supremely competent.  The mystery attached to one who could travel so easily  and gracefully, prepared for anything.

And when I fell, I fell hard.  Many a high school boy was disappointed to find that “Let’s go watch airplanes,” was not, indeed, a euphemism for anything else.  I called around to local airports, discovering that the cost of flying lessons was prohibitive at a high schooler’s minimum wage job.   So I worked a little more and saved my pennies.  Mom and Dad saw this as a whim, rather a funny one.  The kind that it was good that I couldn’t indulge as they couldn’t imagine I’d have been good at it.  I persisted in saving my hard earned cash and picked up aviation book after aviation book from the library. I took an introductory flight in a Cessna 152 at age 17, without telling my parents just where I was going.  I was a good kid.  They didn’t usually think to grill me too aggressively about my intentions.  That $30 bought me certainty that I was headed in the right direction.  When my parents finally stopped laughing at me, they forbade me flying lessons.  I had to sneak out of the house to go to the airport, which, truthfully only added to the adventure, romance, and drama of the thing.   Telling a teenage girl that she can’t just adds fuel to the fire.  In the difficult years to come, I remember asking myself  a few times, just to be sure, if I wasn’t still just banging my head against that same old wall just to prove my old hormone addled point.  Luckily for me (unluckily?  It sure was costly in more ways than one), I was so deeply in love with the whole thing by then, it wouldn’t have mattered.