Bill Warlick has had an interesting career. He began flying at 14, graduated from NC State in Aerospace Engineering, joined the Navy, instructed in T-28s, and flew several tours in the P-3 Orion – the Navy’s patrol version of the Lockheed Electra – before spending three winters flying ski-equipped C-130s in Antarctica. He did stints in Navy flight test, then four years with Northwest Airlines before being furloughed after 9/11 and going to work for the U.S. Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland – Pax River, for short. The list of types he’s flown reads like the index of an aeronautical history book: F-111, F-18, F-16, B-25, P-51, T-6, B-52, B-727, B-757, MiG-15 and so on, with various helicopters and a few Cessnas, Champs and RVs thrown in for good measure.
This clear fall morning, we’re in a De Havilland Beaver on the ramp at Pax River. I’ve never flown a Beaver before, and so I’m doing my babe-in-the-woods impersonation just in case the airplane turns out to be so tricky to taxi or fly that I would be doubly embarrassed if I had pretended in advance that I knew what I was doing. The Beaver’s panel is one of those quaintly cobbled-together things from yesteryear; you all but hear the designers exclaiming, “Eh by gum, we forgot the flap handle!” and a mechanic, his head beneath the panel and his feet on the seat, offering in muffled tones, “We could put it here.” Incongruously, a Garmin screen, a visitor from the future, peers out of the middle of it.
