Last spring I was hired to ferry a Piper Super Cub up from Florida to Minnesota where a float plane operation uses it to train in the summer. I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy flying a plane across the country with a top speed of ninety miles per hour, when a plane goes that slow I use miles instead of knots, it makes me feel like I’m going faster. I hadn’t flown a Cub in a while and thought it might be a fun adventure cruising down in the weeds with the door open and boy was it ever! The Super Cub was just what I needed to get me back to joy of basic flying. The plane only carried eighteen gallons of fuel meaning I had to stop every two hours, more stops means meeting more people. Another feature, and yes I thought of it as a feature, was it’s lack of an electrical system, so no lights, a battery powered radio and best of all no starter, meaning I would have to hand prop it every time, good fun.
The first day set the tone for the whole trip with showers all across Florida making my flight path look like a solemn course. The next day things got even more interesting with a powerful cold front producing wave after wave of thunderstorms blocking my way. But I was not to be stopped. I’d brought along my trusty Garmin 696 GPS that had XM satellite weather on it. I spent the next two days dodging storm cells at five hundred feet and loving every minute of it. At one point I ran across a farm that had just been hit by a tornado.
The trip took me three days and I loved every minute of it.
The trip took me three days and I loved every minute of it.