|
|
I'm not in my airplane. I'm sitting in my office. The sun is shining and there's a gentle breeze caressing the leaves outside my window. Now.
It didn't start out to be a good day. The plan was to fly Judith to Ithaca, New York, to spend a weekend with a group of women who call themselves "Squat and Gobble" and then continue on to Geneseo for the "History of Flight" airshow. I would spend the day basking in the ambiance of an English countryside aerodrome, admiring the gathering of World War II fighters, bombers and trainers as they cavorted above the grass runway. As a special highlight, the sponsor of the airshow, the 1941 Historical Aircraft Group, had invited biplanes from every decade of the last century. I was looking forward to seeing those beauties representing 100 years of biplane aviation. That was the plan.
The forecast had been for really good VFR weather for the weekend, and the television weather maps confirmed it would be a fine day for a short jaunt in the airplane and a nearly perfect day for the airshow. My first hint that the day was not to turn out the way I planned was on the way to the airport when I noticed there were some clouds pushing down on the tops of the Catskill Mountains across the Hudson River. It was still pretty good VFR as I unloaded Judith's weekend provisions from the car on the ramp in front of the hangar. The scattered clouds had coalesced into a broken layer, but the ceiling appeared high enough that we could comfortably skirt the mountains to the north and fly down the wide flat valley that separates the Catskills from the Adirondacks.
As I opened the hangar door and began to tow the airplane out, I realized that Judith was busy consolidating her beer, wine and homemade hummus into one canvas bag. "Watch the wing," I called to her as I pulled the airplane around toward where she was bending over. She did. She bent even further forward so the wing would pass comfortably above her.
The wing passed over her and Judith stayed bent way over, shuffling her supplies. I felt a slight bump and thought I'd rolled over a stone on the ramp, but then there was a muffled cry from somewhere on the far side of the airplane. The stabilator had caught Judith's hip, and when I got to her she was sitting on the ground. Not happy. And I don't think my yelling at her for not watching for the tail earned me any points. "You told me to watch out for the wing. I watched out for the wing!"
After that the flight went fine. For about 15 minutes. As we swung north to slip around the edge of the mountains, it appeared that the clouds above them were being supported by the shoulders of the mountains. Over the foothills to the north the clouds were lower. At 2,500 feet there were towers on the moving map of the UPS-AT MX20 that were displayed in red, meaning they were at or above our altitude. The visibility was still good and I could see the towers. I knew that just around and west of the mountains the terrain dropped away and we'd probably have reasonable VFR weather. Suddenly, the terrain alert on the MX20 flashed. I keyed the button to bring up the terrain map and for a foolish moment could see a way to avoid the red and yellow contours and stay over the green as we worked our way west.
