In 1932, Allen Carpé, a research engineer with Bell Laboratories in New York who was also an accomplished mountaineer, received a grant to collaborate with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Compton on investigating cosmic rays in Alaska. Compton was organizing expeditions to measure the rays in locations around the world, and Carpé was tasked with putting together a group that would test their measurements at 11,000 feet on Muldrow Glacier, which sits on the flanks of Alaska’s Mount McKinley. To give his climb a greater chance of success, Carpé decided to do something unheard of at the time and contacted aviation companies in Alaska to discuss the viability of landing on the glacier.

  For the last few months I’ve been sort of teaching one of my friends to fly.  I say “sort of” because technically I’m not a certified flight instructor, or officially, or legally.  But that doesn’t stop me from passing on my vast supply of aviation knowledge to the next generation of budding pilots.  Or in other words teaching my buddy bad habits that a real instructor will have to spend hours and hours trying to correct.  Anyway, we had a lesson planned for today but as luck would have it the weather was less than stellar, light rain, poor visibility and gusty winds.  The prelude to a winter storm that’s going to dump up to a foot of snow on Minnesota and Wisconsin, in April, thanks.  So I did what any good flight instructor would do, I think,  I called my pseudo student and asked if he still wanted to go flying.  He asked a few questions about what it would be like flying in those conditions but then asked me “is it safe?” I was taken aback for a moment.  Well of course it was going to be safe, “I” was going to be with him.  I mean of course I wouldn’t ever let him go up in those conditions by himself, but with me in the plane he’d be safe as……..well something really safe, I tell you what.  I was just concerned that he wouldn’t get the best training out of our flight.  Well he agreed to come out and we spent almost an hour bouncing up and down the runway while the conditions got worse and worse before finally calling it quits due to the visibility dropping below VFR minimums.  In retrospect flying in those conditions taught him a lot.  Maybe I have something to teach him after all.

  I was looking through a junk drawer in my man cave the other day and stumbled upon my first pilot’s log book that I’d misplaced years ago.  As I was looking through the thin black book filled with tails of daring and luck, OK mostly luck, I noticed the date of my first flight, April 8, 1983.  I did the math, that took a few minutes, and came to the startling conclusion that, as of today I’ve been flying for thirty years.

Now as I’ve previously stated my early flying were filled with luck, else I’d not be writing this post today.  Come to think about it my flying career has been filled with the most extraordinary luck, mostly due to my putting myself in situations where it’s needed.  Here are a few of my early mistakes and escapades that I learned from.

13 hours- Shortly after my first solo and against my instructors orders  I left the airport and went off on my own to try my hand a some light aerobatics.  I learned that in airplanes seat belts weren’t just for accidents.  They sometimes come in handy for to keep you in your seat when the gravity goes screwy.

31 hours- without even a private pilot’s license in my wallet I bought a Twin Comanche with two of my Army buddies.

42 hours- ON my last solo cross country I decided that it would be a good job to buzz my buddy who was ice fishing on a lake close to my flight path.  I circled the lake, located his truck and did a very nice dive bombing run on my friend as he sat on the ice.  As I pulled up I realized that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

The list goes on and on and includes crashing the Twin Comanche, who didn’t see that one coming?  I was in the back of the plane for that one but that’s a story for another day.