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Ferry Flight Pic of The Day

Deviation left approved

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.

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Lost

So there we were, seven skydivers hanging around behind the counter at Skydive Twin Cities , which my office manager hates BTW, watching Flightaware track the Twin Otter that was flying up from Texas.  Everyone was excited because the Twin Otter is the best aircraft in the world to jump out of and our toy for the summer was almost here.  As we watched the aircraft symbol on the screen approach Red Wing Airport in Minnesota, the closest “real” airport to ours,  we could see it swing west then back east and start to descend indicating that the pilot was shooting an instrument approach.  This made perfect sense as the cloud base in the area at the time was seventeen hundred feet AGL and our private airport with it’s grass runway didn’t have an instrument approach.  I expected the pilot to fly the approach until he got under the clouds then cancel his instrument flight plan and continue north under the clouds to our drop zone which was only ten minutes away.  Imagine our surprise when we saw the plane turn away from Red Wing and head west.

  “What the hell? Where’s he going?”  we all shouted at the computer screen. “We’re over here!”

I grabbed the radio and tried to call the pilot but got no response.  In frustration we even tried to text him but had no luck, the little aircraft symbol continued to head west away from us toward Minneapolis.  A few minutes of frustration later the plane made a turn to the south and began to wander.  There was no question now the pilot was lost.  How could he be lost? Did nobody tell him how to find our airport?  He’d managed to fly all the way from Texas to within twenty miles of his destination and I knew for a fact the plane was equipped with a GPS.  I was really starting to get worried about the fuel situation in the Otter.  He’d been in the air for over three hours and all his flying around at low altitude really burns up the jet A.  Suddenly the aircraft stopped moving.  Did he find an airport to land at or was the Otter a crumpled mess in some farmers field?   The phone rang a few minutes later to answer our question.  It was the pilot of the Otter and he was at a small airport south of St. Paul and was ok.  Apparently he hadn’t really been on the approach into Red Wing when he had some sort of problem with the aircraft’s instruments and being unfamiliar with the area and not knowing if there were any mountains around he broke off the approach at two thousand feet and yelled for help.  That was Minneapolis Center started giving him the  vectors that finally got him on the ground.  When I asked him why he didn’t just look at his map which would have told him that Wisconsin is practically mountain free I informed me that he didn’t have a map!  I couldn’t believe it, he flew all the way from Texas without bringing a map along.  Well long story short we finally got the Otter to our drop zone, along with it’s case of Shiner Bock beer one of our skydiving buddies put in for us, and the pilot is on the way back home for a Texas size ass chewing.

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Ferry Flight Pic of The Day

Say “Cheese!”  As some of you know I’m starring in a new reality show on the Discovery Channel called “Dangerous Flights.”  The show is about ferry pilots and follows six of us as we deliver real planes to real customers around the world.  I did four trips last year with a human anchor cameraman/director along filming almost every minute, although he did manage to have the camera rolling whenever I made some boneheaded mistake.  At the beginning or end of each flight we would spend a day doing air to airs with a helicopter that had a gyro stabilized camera mounted on it.  I love formation flying, doing aerobatics and having my picture taken so doing all three is like a dream date for me.  The first two times we did it a director in the helicopter would tell the helicopter pilot what he wanted me to do and the pilot would call me on the radio and pass that information to me.  It was a time consuming and sometimes frustrating process that usually sounded like this.

    Helicopter: “Scary, come left thirty and give us a hard left bank as you pass as close to the big cloud off my nose    as you can.”

    Me:  “Roger… you mean the one with the big gap on the right side?”

    Helicopter:  “No, the one with the tall knob that looks like a chicken.”

    Me:  ………….”I don’t see a chicken…….I see one that looks like a horse.”

    Helicopter:  “Never mind, we passed it.”

By the third time I got to know what kind of shots the director wanted so all I had to do was play around in front of the camera and have a good time.  It’s a blast, especially when I got to do it in the Phenom 100.