Graduations are always a combination of happiness celebrating a job well done and sadness that a big part of the lives of everyone involved has come to an end. Over the four years our daughter Karen spent at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my Baron was involved in every phase. Karen had a wonderful college experience, but it wasn't any better than mine.
It began with a campus visit to Chapel Hill. Her final two choices were Michigan and Carolina. Both schools are about two and half hours away by Baron from my home base at Westchester County Airport, just northeast of New York City. Nobody asked me, but if they had, I would have picked Chapel Hill and spending the four years flying up and down the East Coast instead of jolting across the entire length of Pennsylvania, with its perennially rotten weather, another time.
We flew down to Chapel Hill in early March, and the sky was Carolina Blue, as advertised. It was my first look at the Horace Williams Airport that the university owns and operates in Chapel Hill, and I was impressed only by its nearness to the campus. Williams is a marginal airport in most respects, with no taxiway, virtually no ramp space, tall pine trees on all four sides of the runway, including trees on a small hill 500 feet from the Runway 27 threshold that, according to the Jepp chart, top out 75 feet above runway elevation. The runway is 4,005 feet long, but its usable length is a lot less because of the trees intruding into the approach and departure paths. And if there is any breeze, the trees guarantee there will be big sinking spells on both takeoff and landing.
Chapel Hill is a beautiful spot, and the UNC campus and town join seamlessly into a place full of tradition while still offering every amenity a college kid could want. After visiting bleak Ann Arbor, with its dirty late February snow, cold and low clouds, Carolina was an easy choice for Karen to make. I was very happy with her choice, and that Carolina had chosen her, but on that first takeoff at Williams I fervently hoped that both engines would keep running for at least a minute or two as I stared at those trees towering at the end of the runway. I knew that I would think the same thing many times over the next four years.
Freshman move-in day was an exercise in Baron packing. Weight was a consideration, but I needed only three and one half hours of fuel, so I had about 1,300 pounds of payload available. But the bulk of all the stuff a college kid takes along can't be compressed, so, as the FedEx people say, we were "cubing out" before we got to the weight limits. Despite my complaining that not everything would fit in the airplane, it somehow did, with just enough space for Karen, Stancie and me.
My memory of that day is of heat exhaustion and thunderstorms. Hundreds of kids were trying to move into the 10-story Hinton James freshman dorm at the same time with only three elevators. Karen drew a spot on the 10th floor. Temperatures were in the mid 90s with high humidity. It was either wait forever for an elevator or climb 10 flights of stairs. I didn't have a heart attack that day, but it sure seemed like a possibility.
