mmelugin48
Junior Member
- Joined
- Jun 19, 2011
- Messages
- 26
- Reaction score
- 5
Maybe it was the photo of my dad in a Stearman circa 1943...
Maybe it was when out of boredom at Ft Rucker another UH-1 IP soloed me in a CE-150 in one weekend.
Maybe it was Osh Kosh 1974 when my dad, who had always said "Professional pilots don't have to own airplanes, other people pay us to fly theirs...", stopped and walked around and climbed in a shiny new biplane...and announced after about 30 minutes "That's the first airplane I've seen in nearly 30 years I'd like to own..." (He had owned a Stearman immediately after the war...and before kids...)
By a long and circuitous path that includes several thousand rotorcraft hours and a coupla thousand airplane hours from J-3s to CE-500s...I now own the airplane that stopped dad in his tracks...a Great Lakes 2T-1A-2.
A trip to Van Sant airport in Pennsylvania gave me the 3 hours I needed for insurance to bring my biplane home from Virginia (and a Stearman checkout to boot).
A trip out to Chandler, AZ and 10 hours of training gave me some rudimentary idea how to escape from some of the maneuvers I unintentionally "invent" while doing what I call aerobatics.
...and I'm having a blast...
Maybe it was when out of boredom at Ft Rucker another UH-1 IP soloed me in a CE-150 in one weekend.
Maybe it was Osh Kosh 1974 when my dad, who had always said "Professional pilots don't have to own airplanes, other people pay us to fly theirs...", stopped and walked around and climbed in a shiny new biplane...and announced after about 30 minutes "That's the first airplane I've seen in nearly 30 years I'd like to own..." (He had owned a Stearman immediately after the war...and before kids...)
By a long and circuitous path that includes several thousand rotorcraft hours and a coupla thousand airplane hours from J-3s to CE-500s...I now own the airplane that stopped dad in his tracks...a Great Lakes 2T-1A-2.
A trip to Van Sant airport in Pennsylvania gave me the 3 hours I needed for insurance to bring my biplane home from Virginia (and a Stearman checkout to boot).
A trip out to Chandler, AZ and 10 hours of training gave me some rudimentary idea how to escape from some of the maneuvers I unintentionally "invent" while doing what I call aerobatics.
...and I'm having a blast...