Little Deuce Coupe
By Lane Wallace
September 2006
 "Hey, Lane, what RPM are you running now?"
Jeff's question cuts through my headset, muting my in-flight music entertainment for a moment. I glance at the Cheetah's tachometer.
"Twenty-six-hundred," I answer. "What are you running?"
"Little over eighteen."
There's a pause. I glance over in the sky to where Jeff, in his shiny new RV-6A, is patiently throttled back to try to keep me company. His voice comes through my headset again. "So … would you mind if I went to go play for a little bit, and joined back up with you in a while, here?"
A tinge of jealousy bubbles up for a brief second. But I can't blame him. "Sure," I answer. "Go ahead. I'll be right here." I laugh a little wryly as I hear my unthinking words. That's not literally true, of course. I am moving. But we've got some significant headwinds, so the truth is that I won't really be all that far down the road if he's not gone long.
I watch Jeff's bright yellow and white RV arc up and away from me, dropping down low to follow a river bed beneath us, then zooming up high for the fun of it, zigzagging at various altitudes and angles, all without losing ground to the Cheetah. I sigh. For three years, I'd been the one with the zippy—okay, the only—plane between the two of us. But a few months ago, Jeff bought a really beautiful, two-seat, RV-6A. And while we're not really competitive friends, even though we like many of the same sporting activities, it soon became clear which of us had the top dog airplane.
Don't get me wrong. A Grumman Cheetah has many fine qualities. It does carry four people (from a good runway on a cool day), and it's even a sporty airplane compared to some. But not compared to an almost-new RV-6A that is, at the moment, flying circles around me. I suddenly feel a little like I'm driving a battered family pickup truck next to a Porsche 911. I pat the Cheetah's glareshield to comfort her surely-bruised ego. Poor thing. It's just not fair competition.
 But while I am, overall, very loyal to my trusty Cheetah, when Jeff and I made plans to go to Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks for a few days of hiking a few weeks later, and he asked which airplane I wanted to take, it took me about three nanoseconds to choose his. There are times when the sedan is the way to go. But there's also something to be said for leaving the family car at home and hopping in a two-seat sportster for a quick weekend getaway … even if it means packing a little lighter.
There were also some good, rational reasons for taking the RV-6, of course. For one thing, it's a fair distance to southern Utah from San Francisco, and the RV is almost 50 percent faster than the Cheetah. In addition, Bryce Canyon Airport has a field elevation of almost 7,600 feet, and we were planning the trip for Memorial Day Weekend. Which, in the southwest desert, can be pretty darn hot. And from past experience, I know that on a hot day, with two people, bags and fuel, my particular Cheetah can be hard-pressed to maintain 8,000 feet msl. Besides. Aside from a couple of quick demo flights at the Van's Aircraft facility in Aurora, Oregon, I'd never flown an RV-6.
In some ways, the RV-6A and the Cheetah bear a kind of resemblance to one another. They're both sliding canopy, low-wing, fixed-gear, nosewheel sport designs. If my Cheetah had a new paint job, they might even appear to be distant cousins, sitting side-by-side on the ramp. But the resemblance pretty much stops as soon as the wheels leave the ground.
Jeff and I get a downwind departure out of Livermore, and I look down on the runway beneath us as we turn downwind after take off and head east. "You know, I just can't make the runway get that small, that fast," I comment to Jeff. He just smiles. Once we're over the San Joaquin Valley, Jeff hands me the controls to let me get a better feel for the plane. The RV-6 has sticks, not yokes, in keeping with its sporty design. But while I've flown a number of old tailwheel airplanes that were equipped with stick controls … the RV-6 makes it clear in short order that not all sticks are created equal. Or require equal inputs. I quickly figure out that this is a plane you fly primarily with small movements of your hand and wrist, unless you want to be all over the sky. Not that I'm complaining. It's pretty impressive, in fact. It just takes a little adjusting.
The trip to St. George, Utah, which is the nearest airport to Zion National Park, is ridiculously quick and easy. We decide to make one fuel stop, but we're on the ground at St. George in just over three and a half hours' flying time. That matters on a trip like this one, because there's actually a whole lot of nothing between San Francisco and St. George. Miles upon miles of brown desert flats that can make it seem as if you're crawling along an interminable and torturous dirt road, even in the sky. I do some quick math and figure that I would have spent almost two more hours looking down on all that brown if we'd taken the Cheetah, and my affection for Jeff's new baby goes up another notch.
We unload our gear and make our way to the terminal, where we collect a rental car to drive to Zion. "It's about a 57 minute drive," the lady at the rental car counter tells us. Jeff and I look at each other. "You sure it's not about a 56 minute or 58 minute drive?" Jeff asks as I work to suppress a giggle.
"No, it's about a 57 minute drive," the lady replies with perfect deadpan seriousness.
Welcome to St. George, Utah.
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