The world may cover almost 200 million square miles and support upwards of six billion people, over 700,000 of whom are active pilots, but it is still, in my experience, a very small place. I once literally bumped into Patty Wagstaff in a doorway of Grand Central Station, even though neither of us lives in New York. I ran into another pilot I knew from California-and whom I hadn’t seen in at least five years-in a small café on a little side street in Paris. And I gave up trying to date more than one man at a time after two men I was seeing concurrently…who lived in cities _2,500 miles_apart …both ended up at the same intimate cocktail party I was attending up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I mean, really. What are the chances of any of that?
Quite large, actually, in the small-town global village that is aviation.
So perhaps it’s not such a wild coincidence that when I mentioned I was going to French Polynesia to my one and only French friend in San Francisco, it would turn out that two of her best friends-both of whom are pilots-live there. Or that the dive shop that happened to be affiliated with the hotel where I was staying would be co-owned by a pilot-whose father, also a pilot, owns one of the very few private general aviation airplanes in the country.
The rest of the world may be connected through six degrees of separation. But I’ve become firmly convinced that the flying world is connected by no more than two. And because aviation is not only a small world, but a small family, as well, all of those pilots immediately invited me to go flying. Which is how I can now proudly claim to have flown more than 10 percent of all the private, general aviation aircraft in the 118 islands of French Polynesia. Or, to do the math another way, a grand total of two.
Jacques Bernier, my friend Jacqueline’s friend in Tahiti, is a pilot and air traffic controller from Toulouse, France. His wife is a physician and pilot who wanted to get away from her hectic life in France for a while, so Jacques arranged to be posted to Tahiti for a few years. A full century after the artist Paul Gauguin abandoned France for the South Seas, the idea of escaping to a more idyllic life in the Polynesian islands apparently still holds a strong allure.
Jacques doesn’t own a plane in Tahiti, but he’s a member of the UTA Aero Club at the Faa’a International Airport, where he can fly one of four airplanes the club owns. Surprisingly, the cost of flying in Tahiti isn’t much more than flying in France. A Cessna 172, I was told, costs about 18,000 Pacific Francs an hour, which sounds like a lot, but equated to about $190 US when I was in Tahiti. Which is still a lot, of course, but flying in places outside the United States just costs more. Period.
Flying in Tahiti does have a few extra complications and considerations, however.
“In some ways, it’s like flying in a third world country,” Jacques joked as he wrestled a 55-gallon drum of fuel onto a hand dolly. Indeed. I will never again complain about having to drag around those heavy, grimy hoses from airport self-serve fuel stations. In Tahiti, self-serve means dragging the barrel of fuel itself over to the airplane, wrenching open the seal with a large pair of pliers, testing the contents for water, then hooking up a hand-cranked pump to move the fuel up from the barrel into, in our case, the elevated wing tanks of a Cessna 172. I gave up trying to figure out how many cranks it took to move a liter of fuel. Suffice it to say “a lot.” And in the torpid, humid heat of a tropical island, the effort quickly left me drenched in more sweat than any workout at the gym.
Flying in Paradise is not for wimps, that’s for sure. And not only because of the work involved. There’s also the small issue of a decidedly limited number of landing sites, with a whole lot of water in between. In the clear blue waters of the lagoon next to Tahiti’s international airport lies a bent and broken Cessna 172 that landed short a few years ago, after the pilot apparently forgot what plane he was in and switched fuel tanks on approach … from “both” to “off.” The pilot survived the landing, but the wreckage of the Cessna, while a great dive site, is a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks ditching is a low-risk landing option.
And yet, within two minutes of takeoff, it becomes breathtakingly clear why pilots in French Polynesia fly here anyway. For whatever the islands lack in FBO refinements and landing sites, they more than make up for in scenery. We quickly leave behind the crowded port of Papeete, with its odd, combined chatter of French and English on the frequency, and head out over the blue expanse of the South Pacific to Tetiaroa-a coral atoll bought some time back by Marlon Brando.
Before too long, a collection of small, flat, sand-and-palm-tree islands, or “motus” come into view-the only remnants of an ancient volcano that once towered over the sea here. They look almost haphazardly arranged, flat, thin, irregular pancakes of deep green foliage floating on a shallow area of light blue water and coral, 50 miles away from anywhere. But there’s a house buried among the trees of one motu, and a short landing strip that runs the width of another. By comparison, the island of Tahiti seems like a very crowded and busy place.
We head next to Moorea, an island much closer to Tahiti, whose towering peaks and ridgelines contrast sharply with the flat landscape of the far older Tetiaroa atoll. The author James Michener once rated the nearby island of Bora Bora as the most beautiful place he’d ever seen, but I’d be inclined to rate Moorea pretty high up in the competition, as well. It’s a relatively unpopulated island of lush, volcanic splendor, where sharp peaks and ridgelines give way to deep valleys carpeted in soft green foliage and where windswept palm trees beckon toward the teal-blue waters of hidden bays and lagoons that rival anything Pan American ever put on a travel poster.
As we fly over Moorea’s protected, coral reef lagoon, Jacques points out some thatched-roof, over-water bungalows-the only kind of hotel accommodations on the island-and tourists feeding sting rays in the shallow waters below us. The water is so clear that not only can I see the rays swimming around the tourists in their kayaks and pontoon boat, I can also see the sharks swimming toward them in the hopes of crashing the lunch buffet. I make a note to pass on any ray feeding activities in the islands here. But I’m seeing sharks swimming underwater. From the air. No wonder pilots like flying here.
A few days later, my dive master-buddy Joshua Rouger hooks me up with his father, Jean Francois Rouger, to go flying in Rouger’s 1944 Piper L-4 Cub. Rouger and his friend Alain Lafille comprise almost half of the homebuilding aircraft community here, having built a LRL 01 “Sanglier,” or “Wild Pig” sport biplane together before buying and assembling the Cub with two other pilots.
Rouger and Lafille speak no more English than I speak French. But when I arrive at the airport to go flying in the Cub, the Sanglier is pulled out next to it, and Rouger and Lafille are talking and laughing heartily together. I watch them gesture to the golden evening light and clear blue sky, and I don’t need to speak French to understand that Lafille has heard that Rouger’s going flying and has decided to fly along with us for the fun of it.
We leave the Cub’s split-door open, and as we take off into the warm tropical evening, I know what Paradise truly is. It’s the smell of fragrant air wafting in the open door of a Cub as you fly low over a turquoise-blue lagoon so clear that individual coral clusters stand out against the sandy bottom and the clouds are mirrored in its surface, with the towering peaks of Moorea silhouetted against the setting sun to the west and the folded, verdant ridgelines and gushing waterfalls of Tahiti passing close beside you to the east.
“Please let me remember this moment, and this feeling, forever,” I silently ask whoever it is you ask such things, as we bank over and around the lush, unspoiled valley slopes. The southern island peaks are draped in tenacles of mountain clouds, and the moisture generates a perfect, translucent rainbow arch against the darker, leeward side of the island. Beautiful. Beyond beautiful. How did we get so lucky as to live on a planet so full of stunning and breathtaking wonder?
Alain turns and plays in the Sanglier off our wingtip as we head back toward the Faa’a airport. We touch down and taxi back to the hangars, where Alain and Jean Francois immediately engage in happy recounts of the flight through lightning-speed French and international hangar-flying hand signals. Jean Francois walks over to me, a wide grin across his face.
“C’est bon?” he asks. This much French I know.
“TRES bon!!” I manage with an equally large smile. “Merci, Jean Francois … merci BEAUCOUP!!” Even if we spoke the same language, I still couldn’t really convey in words what I felt about the flight. Somehow, I think my grin and laughter say more, anyway.
We push the planes back in the hangar and head over to the UTA Aero Club, where a few other pilots are wrapping up their flying for the day. Alain gestures to a white plastic patio table and chairs outside the club’s office, and I take a seat while Jean Francois retrieves a round of beer from the club’s refrigerator. Several other pilots join us as we sit in the muggy heat of a tropical evening, laughing, gesturing and telling tales I know I’ve heard before, recounted now in French.
I sip my beer, listening to the rapid-fire French and laughter as I watch the tops of the cumulus clouds over Aorai Peak turning pink in the reflected light of the setting sun. The blue taxiway lights begin to glow in the deepening dusk, and the white lights illuminating the edges of Runway 22-04 come to life. Take away the faint scent of frangipani and add a little translation to the animated talk surrounding me, and I could be at any airport I’ve ever frequented, from Kentucky to Kenya and a whole lot of places in between.
The world is, indeed, a very small place. And the multicolored people of planet Earth aren’t so very different, at the core. We may inhabit different continents, speak different languages, and follow different customs. But our hearts all hush at a beautiful sunset, and our eyes all water at the tale of a pilot brought safely home. Our laughter is understood in every language and dialect, and those of us who’ve known the freedom of the skies don’t need a translator to explain what that means to someone who has felt the same exhilaration, no matter what country we each call home.
I may be sitting on the lower slopes of an extinct, tropical volcano, thousands of miles and a hemisphere away from the San Francisco skyline. But I am with family. And I am at home.
