Unusual Attitudes: Living Right

Martha Lunken

Friday, November 20, 2009 at 08:43 PM ET

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Key Takeaways:

The author embarked on a new "Cub quest," acquiring a Piper Cub after a previous partnership dissolved, reflecting a lifelong passion for these aircraft and a distinct flying philosophy.
During the ferry flight of the newly purchased Cub, the author experienced a minor landing mishap, colliding with a parked truck on a private airstrip in challenging low-light conditions.
This seemingly unfortunate accident proved to be a stroke of luck, as it led to the discovery of severe, hidden corrosion on the Cub's aileron hinges, which were on the verge of catastrophic failure and would have been impossible to detect otherwise, thus preventing a potentially fatal incident.

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While I scribble this on a grocery sack from the back seat of a 172 and gaze at the lush, green ridges and valleys south of London, Kentucky, I’m thinking these hills and “hollers” probably look the same as when Daniel Boone and the settlers came through the Cumberland Gap just east of here. Even now it’s mostly unspoiled if you can ignore the strip mines and the huge, ugly wounds where machines have lopped off entire mountaintops to claw at the coal. I lean socially and politically pretty far right of Genghis Khan, but I still believe every American should see the Appalachians from an airplane at 5,500 feet before being eligible to vote.

We’re on a Cub quest, and I’m musing that it’s the latest in a lifetime of Cub quests. This chapter opened when I met the pilot, David Cain, whose family farm, Cain-Tuckee Acres, has a nice grass strip with two hangars just 10 minutes south of Cincinatti’s Lunken Airport, in my 180.