Looks like you guys will just have to put those type rating dreams on hold for a while. My “sure-thing” deal to buy the DC-3 from a museum imploding with internal conflicts, unpayable bills and looming bankruptcy kind of evaporated. Maybe they found an angel to pay off the loan or maybe somebody made a better offer. Yeah, I know, in this economy it’s a good thing. I’d be wearing cast-off shop rags and siphoning avgas to stay afloat … or aloft. But, oh, how I wanted that airplane. Worst case we would have spun into bankruptcy smiling. Maybe in a few …
Actually, last week I got a DC-3 “fix” … and then some. Spent a really long time in the Goon but this isn’t a pitch for sympathy. Too much time flying a DC-3 is like having too many men in your life or too many chocolate Tootsie Pops in your pocket. It was just a little intense … lots of ground schooling and aviating that culminated in a seven-hour check ride marathon. The intercom went south about halfway through so we shouted and gestured and, by the time I left the ‘drome, I was so tired I forgot not only the name of the motel but where I was. So I used the old drinker’s trick and checked a newspaper stand: The Knoxville News Sentinel. Some guy walking his dog (they’re usually not serial rapists) gave me directions to a Shoney’s restaurant next to a tattoo parlor I remembered near my motel. But I was so glad to be back in the airplane I loved every sweaty, oily, deafening and exhaustingly glorious minute.
