A Different Point of View
Lane flies in her Cheetah to check an old Piper taildragger and gets a little nostalgic for the good ol' planes.
By Lane Wallace
March 2005
 “You need to keep 80 miles an hour,” Kimberly admonishes me as we climb away from Rancho Murietta’s runway.
I lean way over to the left and strain to raise myself in the seat a bit to try and peer over her shoulder at the airspeed indicator. It’s no good. I’m just not tall enough.
“What’s my airspeed now?” I ask, settling back down into the back seat.
“90,” she answers.
Right. I raise the nose a bit and look out the side windows of the tandem-seat Super Cruiser we’re flying in an effort to get a peripheral fix on the horizon angle that equates to 80 mph.
This is bizarre. I’ve flown tailwheels where you couldn’t really see much beyond the nose before. But sitting in the back seat of the tandem Super Cruiser, I can’t see much of anything beyond Kimberly’s back. Including the instrument panel.
“Now pull the power back to 2100,” Kimberly instructs as we level out. Once again, I try to look over her shoulder at the rpm gauge, but it’s no use. How on earth does Kimberly see what her students are up to when she’s instructing in this thing?
“Well, you make a better door than a window,” I hint.
Kimberly laughs as she leans over to one side. “Yeah, and most of the students I fly with are guys with big shoulders and big heads,” she says with a laugh. “Now do you see what I was talking about?”
One flight, as they say, is worth a thousand words.
Not too long ago, my friend Kimberly started giving tailwheel instruction at an airport just southeast of Sacramento, and she kept telling me what a big change it was from the other instruction she’d done. Well, yes, I told her. Of course. Tailwheels were more of a challenge.
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