I don’t remember the moment I learned to float in a swimming pool, or to ride a bike without training wheels. The first time I tasted a fresh strawberry has been lost to antiquity. I do, however, remember like it was yesterday the first time I flew as pilot in command of an airplane.
We’d practiced landings that clear August morning, my flight instructor, Bert J. Colter, and I. After six touch-and-go’s, Bert directed me to taxi back to what passed for a terminal building at our small, uncontrolled airfield in northern Colorado. “OK,” he said, “give me three more touch-and-go’s.” Then out of the airplane he climbed. No, “Good luck.” No, “Try not to kill yourself.” Bert was “The Right Stuff” kind of instructor. Understated. Unflappable. Out he went, and there I sat, alone for the first time in the cockpit of an airplane, about to depart the earth with no guiding hand to ensure my safe return.
Pounding in my brain was a bit of advice Bert had offered early in my training, that a pilot must always “be ahead of the airplane”—meaning that a plane will kill you faster than anything if you’re not anticipating what it’s about to do next. Still, I don’t recall being nervous. More than anything, I was excited. I felt confident. After all, hadn’t I logged almost an entire 11 hours of instruction in the air? What could possibly go wrong?
Back out I taxied. I ran up the RPM’s in the run-up area to make sure the engine and instruments were functioning normally, as I’d been trained to do. After that, I radioed my intentions on the Unicom frequency to remain in the landing pattern and rolled my rented, little two-seat Cessna 150 out onto the runway to take off…only to smash down on the toe brakes.
About 150 feet down the runway, a coyote was sunning himself (or herself, but let’s forgo the issue pronouns for purposes of expediency). Casually, he looked over in my direction and yawned like he wasn’t planning to go anywhere anytime soon. I was flummoxed. My training hadn’t included how to deal with critters blocking the airstrip, but I knew enough not to force the issue. I could see the headlines the next day: “Student Pilot Wrecks Airplane, Coyote in Stable Condition.”
So I waited, with the engine idling and the Hobbs meter turning. Every second was costing me money I didn’t have. A couple of minutes that felt like an eternity ticked by before the furry interloper finally got up, off his haunches and sauntered nonchalantly into an adjacent farm field.
This was it. The moment of truth! The moment I would join the fraternity of aviators. Off we go into the Wild Blue Yonder and all that good stuff. I pushed the throttle to the firewall and the plane started rolling. I had just lifted off and was no more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground when I heard a loud, disconcerting, banging noise and the hellacious screaming of wind at high velocity. I glanced to my right and realized I’d forgotten to latch Bert’s door! With one hand on the control yoke and one eye on the attitude indicator, I leaned over and somehow managed to close it.
The rest of my solo flight was a piece of cake.
More than 1.200 flight hours later, I was recently reminded of that wonderful day as I filled out the last page of my most recent logbook and prepared to start a new one. Some people journal or keep diaries. Pilots make logbook entries, chronicling each of their adventures in the sky. Where they went. How many landings they made. What the weather conditions were like. I can’t recall what I ate for breakfast two days ago. But thumbing through my old logbooks, I can vividly remember the first time I took my wife-to-be flying, way back when Reagan was in the White House, and how she fell asleep soon after takeoff. I remember how the tower controller complimented my landing the first time I flew into Scottsdale, and that crosswind landing I muffed badly coming into Monterey. I remember the engine rapidly losing oil pressure one evening as I departed Santa Maria after enjoying a steak dinner with friends, and how it took me a couple of precious seconds before realizing I needed to execute a 180 and return immediately to the field—as close to declaring an emergency as I’ve ever come.
I’m a big believer in writing about what you know. It’s a whole lot easier that having to make it all up. And the thing of it is, every one of those hundreds of flights I’ve logged since that day I soloed have factored directly or otherwise into the adventures of Cordell Logan. The two of us have flown many of the same missions or, at a minimum, been inspired by them, like the flying you’ll find depicted in Deep Fury, the latest Logan mystery, which debuts December 17.
I looked up Bert the other day online. He went on to spend more that 25 years as a captain at Delta Air Lines. He no doubt taught hundreds of aspiring pilots like me to fly before that. I have no illusions that he would remember me in the slightest, let alone that special day in August. And that’s OK. It’s my memory after all, one that I will cherish forever.